Christine | More than Childless or Childfree

ChildlessDivorce

Nov 18

Written By Population Balance

Christine grew up in a rural community in midwestern U.S., fearing teen pregnancy and sensing early on that motherhood didn’t appeal to her - as she longed to broaden her horizons through education and travel. After an abusive marriage and a long, difficult divorce, she felt both relief that she hadn’t become a parent in that relationship and grief that the choice was no longer hers. Today, Christine feels gratitude that she didn’t bring a child into a devastated world and acceptance of her nonlinear lifepath.

Christine (00:00):
I think now when I look back and really look at different places in my life, it wasn't that I always wanted to have children and I didn't get to have a child. There were different chapters in my life. There are assumptions, whether it's religion, family, education, whatever the influences are, there are all these assumptions that we should all want to do the same thing.
Nandita (00:35):
That was today's guest, Christine. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandia Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism, Finding Fulfillment With or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with women and men from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. In each episode, I dive into personal stories with people who are forging unconventional pathways to fulfillment, including redefining what family means to them, whether that means being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. Hi, and welcome to Beyond Pronatalism, Christine. It is wonderful having you here.
Christine (01:33):
Thank you so much for inviting me. I'm very happy to be in conversation with you today, Nandita.
Nandita (01:38):
As am I, Christine, and I'm so grateful that you expressed interest in sharing your story. Your journey is one that many people experience, but not everybody gets to the other side of it. So Christine, to begin, could you start by introducing yourself for our listeners?
Christine (01:56):
Sure. My name is Christine and I am in my fifties, and I originally grew up in the midwest and I am currently living in California. And in between those two bookends I have had the opportunity to live and work in many different countries, which has afforded me the opportunity to learn from so many different people in different places that I feel have truly enriched my life and definitely influenced the conversation we're about to have today.
Nandita (02:34):
Thank you for that. And what was it like growing up within that particular area, and what was your family upbringing like in terms of gender roles, expectations around pronatalism, et cetera?
Christine (02:50):
Yeah, it's always interesting to look backward and forward again. I think as this is something that I continue to reflect on and unpack for myself from the perspective of pronatalism and beyond, literally. When I was growing up, it was an environment that was very rich in that there were many families from other countries that were newer generations. And so when I think about my childhood first and my grandmother, I think about all of the foods that people made that were from their own countries and families. And so I thought that was normal. I thought that's how it was and knew how to pronounce many difficult Eastern European words, et cetera from that. And so it was beautiful in that way and learning from people in my family and in the community who still lived in the culture that they brought with them, so to speak.
(03:52):
And I lived in a rural area; it’s a mining community so my school was like eight to 10 miles away from where I live. So it was quite homogenous in terms of the hard line separation between a very white community and Native American reservations. And from a very young age, I didn't understand that. I didn't understand why we didn't all go to school together and was never really offered good explanations. I was probably annoyingly curious as a young child. I was raised in the Lutheran church as a Protestant Christian, and the rules and conversations around pronatalism, I feel very much huddled there or were honed there. They were much more quiet within my family. The relationships that there were between my aunts and uncles and my parents, I just assumed that's what you do. You get married, you have kids, but then within the church it was much more literal, the obey your parents get married before you do anything.
(04:59):
I grew up in a time where the greatest fear was getting pregnant as a teenager, that I would definitely be disowned. I just remember that being such a fear. It was the ultimate sin or the ultimate wrong that I could do. So I felt like that took precedence over a lot of things in terms of relationships, how I thought about sexuality, how lives played out, watching peers who did have children in high school, and how their lives went, how they navigated that. So it's this same constant for me, contradiction or incongruency in that there are all these spoken and unspoken rules that everyone knows. And then there's below that there's this judgment that pushes people to make decisions that are based on external factors more so than personal factors. So I think for me, it was also confusing. I didn't actually want children from a young age because it did not look enjoyable.
(06:05):
I really didn't feel that my parents loved it in any way. My mother was quite young when she had me, and she was in her early twenties, which then wouldn't have been considered out of the norm. But I just saw how then that became her life. That was the choice then you make - you get pregnant, you get married, and maybe how that impacted what her options were or who she might've been. And she's a wonderful, beautiful, kind human being. It's not that. I just will always be curious what would her life have been and many other women. And then watching young women that I grew up with have children at early ages and then young marriages and young divorces or those kind of patterns. And I just thought, I'm not going to get pregnant. And I really wanted to go to college because that wasn't the norm where I was from or in my family.
(07:01):
And that was important to me. And I was always a reader. And I think that influence from great elementary school teachers on, I knew that there was a world out there and different choices. And it's not that there was one character that I remember like, oh, this woman chose this or this person chose this. But I just knew there were so many things that I didn't know that I really wanted to see the world and learn people differently than how I knew it. And so being in that sort of framework of this is what the people around me do. You get married, you have children, then they get married and have children. If I go back to where I grew up, I can still see the generations of people that I grew up with. I recognize children of the children of the children, and they've remained in that area. And that's so fascinating to me and so different, the directions that our lives went, and I just needed to see what else there was. And so I think that took having children out of my mind in terms of that being an immediacy for me. It was never an urgency.
Nandita (08:11):
And was it something that was encouraged within your family?
Christine (08:16):
First, it was never spoken about. And I remember the first time somebody actually said something was at the time I was married and we are at a family reunion and my grandfather who has since passed was sitting there and it was just one of those quiet moments, people are talking and then it becomes quiet. And he just out of the blue said, well, can't you have children or what? It was like, what is happening right now? Everything just rushed through my body. And then I felt defensive in shock at the same time. And at the moment, I can't even remember my response. I think I have it written somewhere. I'm sure I had to have some kind of journaling session after that, but I thought, oh my goodness. And watching the reactions, silent but quiet, the facial expressions that spoke for themselves on the rest of my relatives, I just thought, and they wanted the answer too.
Nandita (09:09):
Yes.
Christine (09:10):
But I was just like, whoa. And I think I escaped a lot of direct pronatalism by having a family that didn't have confrontation about certain things and also being away a lot. And I traveled and I didn't live in the immediate vicinity. So because I was doing these things that were different so to speak, I went to school and traveled and worked in other countries. It made it okay for a while. And then I remember when I first came to California and really ended up here longer than I intended and had peer groups of friends and dinners and things like that, comments from women really made me aware. And in conversation, it'd be like, well, Christine, you wouldn't understand. And they would proceed to discuss the situation about their child or whatever. And my breath was taken away or just assumptions about what I would know, what I wouldn't know, what I wanted, what I must not have wanted, how I feel about children.
(10:16):
And at first it was so surprising to me because it just wasn't my approach to people, let alone it's such a personal conversation that it really just threw me off. And so I always found it curious that as someone who had spent a lot of time with children, we had foster babies, a couple of them when I was growing up and I took care of my cousins, I babysat from a young age. I was around the world with different children in my life, which doesn't make me a parent. It makes me aware, and I noticed things and I learned things and I participated in their lives. And it's such a dismissive conversation. You can have a pediatrician who treats children or studied human development, child development, and if they don't have children, it's that same sort of dismissal that may come at somebody professionally. And I was taken back by those comments and assumptions. So that was already when I was just about entering my forties and I hadn't lived in the US permanently for a long time also. I actually think that that is what led me to some initial grief around not having a child and realizing, oh, that's not going to be something in my life, and I don't fit in these ways socially and also relieved at things that I wouldn't be doing.
Nandita (11:41):
So when you were younger and thinking about the prospect of finding a partner and getting married and potentially the decision about whether or not to have children, how did that decision end up manifesting in your own life?
Christine (11:59):
I think now when I look back and really look at different places in my life, it wasn't that I always wanted to have children and I didn't get to have a child. There were different chapters in my life. It's interesting because I'd never had this thought where I thought, oh, I need to have a child by this age, or I need to be married or I need to do this. I think what happened is when I did get married, a lot of that unconscious, traditional and family, church-influenced stuff really came up. It was in the direction of having children, but it wasn't something that was urgent for either of us. There were a lot of things like that that we connected on. It wasn't this plan that we do A plus B equal C, and that's what was lovely about it, and I left that marriage.
(12:47):
It was a very difficult marriage. I had a very abusive partner, so my focus was on getting out of that. And when I thought about having children, because I was in my thirties at that time, I couldn't even go there because I knew that I couldn't bring a child into that environment. It was a very abusive in many, many ways, verbally, emotionally, physically, and it was definitely part of that impetus to leave, ironically or not. So that legal process went on for many years, and I was older. By the time I was finally divorced, I was nearly 40 and I just wasn't thinking about it. I wasn't grieving the marriage so much as just my life and what I had allowed to happen and just the whole thing.
Nandita (13:42):
How long did that go on for, the marriage?
Christine (13:45):
We were married for seven years, but the divorce took almost as long or longer. It was a whole nightmarish process. But it was interesting because at that juncture, I also became aware of pronatalism and expectations and assumptions in different ways, but I wasn't registering it in the same way I did later. I can recall so many times going through the divorce process, people saying, well, thank God you didn't have children. And at that time, that wasn't a helpful comment because I felt like I was grieving all of what I may have seen or not seen or wanted or not wanted was done. And so it didn't make it better. It made me feel also grieving the reality that not so much that I didn't have a child, but that maybe that was permanently not a possibility.
Nandita (14:38):
Was it that the prospect of not bringing someone else into a difficult situation a stronger reason for you to leave than the prospect of you already being in a difficult situation and deserving to not be in that situation?
Christine (14:54):
Yeah, it's a great question. I think for me, probably growing up in a way where it was very important to focus on others, it was one of those things that I was so shocked by it, knowing what I knew, activism that I had done, organizations I had started around sexual violence and domestic violence while I was still at university. And I was so shocked and so shamed and didn't have people around me immediately. I didn't tell anyone. And so I knew that it was wrong and that I didn't deserve it. I just think toward that time when I did leave, it was just that added recognition of how much this doesn't make sense. We don't teach young girls about toxic behaviors in the ways that we may experience them later or how to see that, whether that's in the workplace or intimate relationship, and it really blindsided me. So I questioned my intelligence. I questioned my emotional intelligence, all the things that I utilized in my life and professions and that worked for me. I didn't understand how I got there. And I think that so many decisions or so many things that emerge from pronatalist influence and coercion, if we had the energy, the breath, the space to step back from it, whether you have children, whether you don't have children, to see where that decision came from, to feel it. And I really don't think we have that.
Nandita (16:31):
So well said, Christine. And to go back into a different part of your trajectory, which is post-divorce, you spoke quite a bit about the grief of the time and the identity that was lost and the way pronatalism showed up within that grief. Did you ever try to have a child after the divorce?
Christine (16:59):
I did not. I mean, I was in a place where I needed to heal. I had severe trauma and had gone through a rigorous and horrific legal process. And I knew that I wasn't in a place for that. Things that were possibilities were changing. Even just the other day, I said to a friend, I said, it's so interesting being at my age right now, for example, because it bewilders me still that there are things that, oh, I thought I might do or to do that I realized I probably won't do at this point in my life. And so it was akin to that and I wasn't expecting it and the things that people did say or didn't say sort of fueled that. And so I just thought that was so beyond my mindset at that point. So it was a choice in that way.
(17:52):
That's not what I'm looking toward. It feels at times not a choice also, like what I had taken from me and what I took from myself by that decision or being in that relationship, that felt like the narrative for a long time because it was the right decision to leave and to not have a child for me. And yet there was no, of course there's a reward. I left the situation. And again, we talked about toxicity or recognizing that behavior and how to disengage, and the things that we don't know until we know them or we recognize them or we experience them, it's very similar. We don't talk about this. There are assumptions, whether it's religion, family, education, whatever the influences are, there are all these assumptions that we should all want to do the same thing.
Nandita (18:47):
And it's not even how so many of the societies were arranged for millennia. This very linear pathway to fulfillment and success is so recent in our human history. There's a reason why so many of us feel like we are outcasts when all we are experiencing is just as natural as the other pathway. And so given the circumstances, as we kind of wrap up the conversation, I'd love to hear here, where have you arrived today?
Christine (19:24):
Yeah, I think it has given me the space, and it's still ongoing, but to look at those different experiences and phases of my life and to be really honest about what I was thinking, feeling, wanting, assuming, and to see that there was no linear line for me. It was all these different phases and influences and timing and healing and choices. And also it gave me the opportunity this time to look at what my values and beliefs are and the state of the world. And I'm not making some declaration about not having children because of that. I mean that there isn't hardly a day that goes by that I am just utterly heartbroken, devastated for the state of the world, for most children, and at the same time relieved that I don't have a child to be subjected to that. And it's different for everyone. There may be a very linear line for someone else.
(20:28):
They just know one way or the other. Everyone has their own story. But for me, I feel like I keep learning about myself from it. So where I am today is in an acceptance of that, and it's also anger and care and all the other things, looking at the lives of particularly women and girls, but humans, the human state of pronatalism. It is mind blowing that this is not in the forefront of education, policy, personal and pronatalism is in the air we breathe, all of us. However, the impact of it has yet to be really shown or trusted or believed in a way that is necessary for change in so many different domains, let alone ways of being.
Nandita (21:22):
Yes, really well captured. And this is the beginning of starting to dismantle that process, is these conversations that we're having, which go beyond the simple labels of parents, childfree, childless, circumstance, choice. It is so much bigger than that. Life is really a journey of circumstance and choice. And so I appreciate the way you've explained and navigated the combination of circumstance and choice within your own life and how you've arrived at such a thoughtful place. And I really appreciate your taking the time to go into so much depth to share your story with me and our listeners today. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Christine (22:14):
Thank you for creating this space, for this conversation, Nandita. I appreciate it. I appreciate you, and thank you for all of the brilliance and very, very necessary work that you do. I appreciate you.
Nandita (22:27):
Thank you so much, and likewise, I appreciate you. That's all for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. Do you have your own story you'd like to share? Check out the show notes to see how you can get in touch with me. Whether you'd like to share feedback about the show or a particular episode, or whether you'd like to join me on the show to share your own story, I'd love to hear from you. Thank you so much again for joining me today as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. Beyond Pronatalism is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing ecological and reproductive justice by confronting pronatalism. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team, Josh Wild and Alan Ware.