Without Children

Where we're coming up on Mother's Day I wanted to find a just right book to review. I don't mean one exalting the totally wonderfulness of mothering. You don't need me to find those at this time of year. Don't get me wrong. I love being a mother. What I don't love is society's pressure on seemingly everyone perceived as having a uterus to be fruitful and multiply. Even my younger sister who is profoundly brain damaged. I can't imagine her raising a hamster, let alone a human infant. So what I was looking for affirming the validity and honor of choosing not to be a mother. And I thought I'd found that in Peggy O'Donnell Heffington's Without Children…
…until I discovered that it's all that and a whole lot more. Just as Heffington started out to write "about the value and accomplishments of women without children in part because I wanted us to get more credit" and then dug more widely and deeper to unearth a wealth of tantalizing inconvenient truths such as:
*As much as America professes to deeply value motherhood this nation is rife with policies and practices that make it much more grueling and perilous than countries like France and Sweden. It starts at the very beginning. In the wider world the average for government mandated PAID maternity leave is twenty-nine weeks. Meanwhile in America nearly half of the women can't get twelve weeks of UNPAID maternity leave which is not an option for families barely getting by. Heffington reminds us that "dogs, mammals that reach adulthood in the span of a single year, are generally not taken from their mothers until they're eight weeks old." And those other nations have subsidized childcare, generous time off, universal health care…. Try to find them in the USA.
*There's also the way in the United States we're sold the myth that the nuclear family is the only normal healthy way to be a family. A glam version is pushed as much as sponsor's products on entertainment media both traditional and electronic. If we need help from anyone else we're somehow deficient. But hunkered down in our castle fortresses leaves us burnt out and lonely.
Heffington describes a communal model of child raising that sounds absolutely amazing.
*America has often urged only certain (read white, affluent) women to reproduce. Heffington dishes the unvarnished truth on stuff like eugenics and forced sterilization and not just in the distant past, right in the 21st century.
In place of a world where mothers and non mothers are pitted against one another she asks us to imagine a future "where the difference between having or not having children isn't so stark, where more than two adults are involved in raising any given child, where motherhood doesn't mean being crushed by work and life, and where non-motherhood doesn't mean you are irrelevant in raising the next generation."
I have only one thing to say about this kind of future: BRING IT!!!
On a purrrsonal note, I'm now at the stage where I have to explain why I'm not despondent that I'm not a grandmother. I'm just too happy with the life I have created. I urge people not to hinge their post child raising happiness and identity on their children's reproductive capacities.
A great big shout goes to my kids who have chosen not to parent and my fabulous grand cats: Archie, Beans, And Delilah.
Jules Hathaway