Elizabet | Confessions of a Regretful Mother

RegretParentingOverpopulation

Apr 8

Written By Population Balance

Elizabet, the daughter of Bulgarian immigrants in the Czech Republic, shares her experience of coming out as gay in her teens and subsequently raising a child alone. She now speaks openly about her parental regret, rooted in her worry for both her child's future and her deep love for the natural world and concern for its destruction.

Elizabet (00:00):
I find it a little hard to exist in parenting situations where you have to talk to other parents, and the only thing anybody will talk about is the children. It becomes just this echo chamber of small talk. Oh, and mine's in this class and mine's in that class, and we do this, and it just bores me to death. This is not how I want to live my life. I am terrified of the way the world is right now. I am experiencing tremendous environmental grief. I have to talk to her about the fact that I'm a regretful parent, which is extremely difficult for me. It is brutal for both of us. I don't want to lie to her. She wasn't unwanted and it's not about her. It is about her in the way that I love her so much. I don't want her to go through this.
Nandita (00:51):
That was today's guest, Elizabet. Hello everyone, and thank you for joining me on this journey. My name is Nandita 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 Elizabet. Welcome to the show. I am so pleased to have you here.
Elizabet (01:50):
Hi, Nandita. Thank you so much for having me.
Nandita (01:53):
And Elizabet, I was so heartened when I received your message in our voicemail with your interest to share your story with me and our listeners. And yours is one among these non-dominant stories that actually doesn't get much play in culture and that is of parental regret. So thank you once again for your courage, which is what it takes in our pronatalist culture to express such a story.
Elizabet (02:22):
Thank you for having me. It's really an honor, and the reason is in this age of like extreme social media exposure, and everybody's starting Instagrams and blogs about everything, I would feel self-conscious about sharing such personal things just online, just like throw away ideas about parental regret. But I really like your platform because it's a balanced, critical way of naming something that just I don't feel is getting named anywhere else. I feel there's an agenda behind everything, and it is fascinating for me how it's everywhere, and that's how I figured, oh my God, this is an ideology. This is really something that's everywhere.
Nandita (03:08):
I feel honored that you feel that way about this platform and that you felt comfortable sharing your story here, as you said. Yeah, it's definitely about challenging an ideology rather than judging any choice in a deeply pronatalist world. So Elizabet, to start things off, could you please provide a brief introduction about yourself?
Elizabet (03:33):
I live in Prague, Czech Republic, part of the European Union or Europe. I'm 32 years old. I was born in Bulgaria, which is not that far, but it's a bit different culturally, and I have a 7-year-old daughter. I think part of my worldview is also that I'm vegetarian slash vegan and that I'm queer and I work as a translator slash editor, work with texts and books.
Nandita (03:56):
Wonderful. Thank you for that. And since you've lived in two different worlds and you grew up in Bulgaria and now you've been living in the Czech Republic, can you discuss what the ideology of pronatalism looked like in your upbringing in Bulgaria and now that you're living in Czech Republic, how does it show up there?
Elizabet (04:18):
Okay, so I think the differences can only be seen by Czechs and Bulgarians because to anybody else, it's pretty much the same culture. It's Eastern Europe. I think to an American or maybe a Chinese person, the languages would sound very similar, although a speaker of Czech would not understand a Bulgarian and vice versa. So I didn't grow up in Bulgaria. I came here when I was four years old, but that was pretty much balanced out by my parents' very strong nationalism. They are lovely people, but they're of a certain generation. They're of a certain worldview that is very different to mine. There's still a victim mentality because Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire for so long. It's a very poor country. They cling to national symbols. They cling to the big heroes of the past where Bulgaria was a big nation.
(05:13):
And they're very religious. It is completely woven into the culture that you are religious and the religion is Eastern Orthodox, so same as Russia, same as Greece. And because Bulgaria I think has the lowest birth rate in Europe, extremely low, of course, the nationalist narrative takes over and guilt trips you into having children for the sake of the nation. I would say that in Czech Republic, which by contrast is one of the most atheist countries in the world, and the narrative here is I would say more racist. So my understanding, my feeling is that whenever anything about declining birth rates and women don't want to have children, when these things start popping up in newspapers and they do all the time, the response is, oh, but we need to have children because then Asia, which of course is one country here, will have all those babies and they will be outnumbered. The Muslims, they're extremely Islamophobic as well, so they'll have all the children and they will be out-numbered. That's how I feel it happens here. That's one thing. And then the other of course is who will take care of you when you're old, which is such a major comment. I don't think people think about it, it's just ingrained in them. That's how we respond. That's your number one concern. Let's not think of alternatives. If you don't produce a nurse for yourself, you're doomed.
Nandita (06:40):
Yeah. Well, that's so fascinating, and I especially am intrigued by the fact that you said it's one of the most atheist countries in the world and yet heavily pronatalist, not so much due to the religious element, which is there, but not as strong as the nationalist one. So that was the background within which you grew up and how was it within your own family? How did pronatalism or kind of rigid gender roles show up?
Elizabet (07:11):
So I never actually lived in Bulgaria, and I was never part of a Czech family, so I can only speak for my own family, which is, I don't think it's that unique. A lot of people just grow up in this setup where they're immigrants to a different country. I think in my family it was just tied to the nationalism of their beliefs were that Bulgaria is the greatest country in the world, the greatest nation, and the more babies they make, the better because they need to make more Bulgarians, because of this terrible, terrible history you know Bulgarians have been through, and that this nation genetically has to go on and has to carry on against the odds of everybody else who's trying always to attack it, assimilate it. There is this big trauma. I'm not completely making fun of it. I can understand where they're coming from.
(07:58):
It's just that I'm trying to take the pronatalism out of it and see it under a microscope before turning it to the shared identity that they truly believe and they truly live this, right. There's this big Bulgarian trauma. During the Ottoman Empire, they would take, allegedly, kids from Bulgarian families, young boys, and they would basically kidnap them and turn them into Ottoman soldiers that would then go back to those same villages and oppress their parents without remembering them. So that is an extreme and terrible thing that I wouldn't say would cover every village. It occurred at some point in history, but it's become part of the everyday language. The word for those people was "yeŋiçeri" and my mother would say, I'm an "yeŋiçeri" because I speak better Czech than Bulgarian because I want to live in Prague. And from that, of course, not having children and speaking Czech betraying your own nation like that was something extremely bad and extremely sinful. And I was confronted about ever having a Czech boyfriend because my parents didn't want me to marry a Czech person saying that would be a betrayal. Not to mention that my mother is a pediatrician, so she works with children and my father is a teacher. So their whole life is about raising the next generation of proper Bulgarians, even though they spent most of their productive life here.
Nandita (09:29):
Right. That historical background is very helpful in understanding not just your culture, but also just so many cultures have some kind of history that informs how they respond in the present moment, even like centuries or millennia after a certain terrible thing has happened to their culture. And I think in present day, especially the way it shows up within our culture in terms of pronatalism is for the women who are experiencing all these pressures such as us, it feels so outdated, especially as you say, you don't really identify with either of the two cultures from a nationalistic perspective. And so a lot of it just doesn't make sense to women and women are not producing children for the state, although the trope about creating babies to take care of you when you're older, I think remains unchallenged still for a lot of people. And now let's go a little into your personal history and personal choices. So you said that the pronatalism within your family was still fairly strong, where the idea that you are going to grow up and give them grandchildren was fairly present. You said you have a 7-year-old. Tell us a little bit about when you decided to become a parent and the circumstances leading up to that point.
Elizabet (10:56):
Thank you. Yeah, I definitely felt those pressures. I could name them pronatalist now. In hindsight, I didn't see them then because they're just part of life. I went to both Bulgarian and Czech school and you would see it in textbooks, right? It would be mommy does this and daddy does that, and how do you help your mommy in the kitchen and how do you help your daddy. And the nuclear family as the only norm is something I can still see in my daughter's textbooks because Czech education has not changed in any way in the past 30 years. We're still dealing with the same issues. It looks nothing like a Finnish or Danish school, so everything is just as it was. Vegetarians don't exist. It's a whole thing. For me growing up, let's maybe start with my teen years. I came out quite soon. I wasn't ready for it.
(11:44):
I was 14 and I told my mom that I was gay and she didn't take it well because of course that is very sinful in her religion and that is very sinful in Bulgaria. In general, it's extremely bad for queer people there. I would say even worse than in Czech Republic. They can be called the worst names. There is no protection against hate crime, crimes against women, not just queers. Let's take it like historically you know, if you're talking about like linear historical progress, first you stop beating children, then you stop beating women, then you stop beating like non-whites, and then maybe you stop beating queers and then you go back as we are now. And these are the two countries that are very conservative in terms of gender roles. Bulgaria's hate crime is worse. Czech Republic is, I still think quite a safe country as long as you play by the rules, but in the families, it is still not safe to come out as queer.
(12:38):
So growing up as a teenager coming out, I was not accepted by my family at all. My mother thought it was just like either a phase or an illness. And then when she finally came to terms with it, after we saw some doctors and I ran away from home and it was just all messy, she decided that it just didn't exist. So that was her way of dealing with it. She doesn't even think it's a sin, she just thinks it doesn't exist, and I'm deluded. And I would say that that really hurt me in the sense that I completely stopped trusting myself. I see now looking back that I started doubting my own feelings and my own experiences and I stopped being able to name them. So if I was angry at somebody, I would think, oh, but maybe it's my fault. I became like the perfect material for abuse and manipulation.
(13:25):
I was very lucky that I did not enter an abusive or violent relationship. I actually was in a very happy relationship for a couple of years, but as that relationship naturally came to a close when I went to university and we just drifted apart, I was not able to let go of the person at that time it seemed, but it was actually an inability to stand on my own because I felt like I had no family and now I was losing my relationship with my girlfriend. And as that happened, I had an affair with a man and I got pregnant, and that's how it all happened. So in hindsight, I have a feeling that I was not even ready to accept myself because I came out so soon to a person who was so unsupportive. I never doubted myself. I always knew. But when that breakup and crisis happened, I was not able to stay with my own feelings. I was looking for an escape.
Nandita (14:18):
Wow, that's a lot of heavy stuff. I want to go back a little bit in time when you were 14 and you came out to your mom and you told her you were a lesbian and that you were not supported in that, and then you said that you left home. Was that a temporary move?
Elizabet (14:35):
I just ran away for a few days because I was about 16 when we were dating, with my first girlfriend, and I just wanted to spend time with her, and my mother would just completely ignore that, like it didn't exist. I was not allowed. So I would skip school to meet her. I would lie to my parents in order to meet her. It forced me into a very dishonest kind of a double life because I knew it was okay to meet her, but I still was a child legally. So one time I didn't want to come home and I ended up going to social services or something because I just didn't want to come home because I was afraid of coming home after spending a weekend away without their consent. So they sent me to a kid's home for a couple days. I felt very guilty about it because there were kids there much younger than me. They were eight or 10, and neither of their parents wanted them, which we could circle back in terms of pronatalism. They were just stuck there during divorce proceedings. And I was just there almost like a grownup who just had a homophobic mother. After three days, I went home and we were assigned, like we were forced to go to therapy, which my mother didn't want to do. And then about three weeks after I turned 18, I moved away for good.
Nandita (15:48):
Wow. And then for how long did you date your former girlfriend?
Elizabet (15:54):
About eight to 10 years. There was a breakup or two in between there.
Nandita (15:58):
And then you said that the relationship kind of came to a natural end, and then you met a man and you became pregnant with him. And around what time did that happen?
Elizabet (16:09):
I had known him for a couple years. He was a much older friend. I was 24. I was finishing my master's. In hindsight, it's all just a blur because I was such a mess then. But I got pregnant and then I gave birth a week before my master's finals, which was pretty bad. So that's the timeline roughly.
Nandita (16:31):
And you said that it was just a brief affair with this man after things ended with your girlfriend.
Elizabet (16:38):
It was really just an affair. I think we were both in pretty sad places individually at that time. I never thought of it as any kind of emotional investment. It was just something that I did, and in hindsight, I would never, never have done if I had the proper help, if I had the proper support, if I had someone to go to talk to about it. I was very ashamed of myself. And I kept a lot of things away, even from my closest friends who by the way are my support network and are my absolute everything in life, but I just wasn't ready to tell anybody about what I was feeling. So it was never a relationship. It was barely an affair. And then I actually got back together with my ex-girlfriend because things were not completely sorted out between us, and we ended up raising my daughter together for the first two or three years of her life.
Nandita (17:31):
So that's very interesting. So she was supportive of the fact that you had a daughter and that you'd had this short-term affair with this man. And so she was understanding and forgiving.
Elizabet (17:42):
I think it really hurt her. She was not understanding. I think it was mainly due to the fact that we were both unable to set boundaries and to communicate openly, and we just, I think it was very a codependent relationship. I think it was genuine. I think it was beautiful in a way, but I really hurt her with this and maybe she felt sorry for me in a way, but we ended up really becoming girlfriends again after a few months. And of course, this is something that's very hard to take out of having a child. You do develop a bond with them. So when my daughter was born and I had a very complicated birth, my girlfriend was there at the time. She was the first one to hold her, and they developed a kind of bond that kind of erased all of that. So I think I really thought of her as the other parent for a long time.
(18:31):
Emotionally for me, this was the person that I had been living with that I wanted to continue living with. And this is why I think I'm a great voice for regretful parents, but it's very hard to go public with this because the ideal person to represent the parents would be someone in a conventional relationship. For me, I went through so much drama that I think it's understandable that I'm not very happy about my current life situation, but I'm just being honest. I don't want to say anything that I wouldn't feel okay saying, but that's the truth. And that's how messy it becomes when you don't have the space to think it through. And I think not just me, but a lot of people my age have not thought it through when they do become parents.
Nandita (19:18):
Totally. And I think even though it may seem like you're part of some minority group, having a child in such a non-traditional kind of a way, I think there are a lot of people who end up in situations like this, whether it's an affair or a one-night stand and raising children in ways that they didn't plan to. And I think, yeah, you do represent a lot more people than you might think. I do wonder, when you found out that you were pregnant and you knew this was not really a serious relationship, did you ever think about terminating the pregnancy?
Elizabet (19:55):
I never thought about it. For me, as a person who kept telling my parents I would never have children, I would not want to go through what they went through. I saw their struggle. I saw their financial difficulties. They were very sad. They couldn't afford a third child. I would tell them, oh, no way am I going to stress over somebody just for them to leave me. It makes absolutely no sense. And then I remember this ex-partner and me, we were talking about having kids. And to me at that time when I was 21, 22, that was the natural progress of a relationship that had gone on for a few years. I could not imagine anything else for myself than having children with her one way or another. So for me, this was like, okay, my relationship ended. I had this terrible affair that I feel very terrible about having, now I'm pregnant. I feel like someone else made this choice. It wasn't me who decided this is a great idea. I don't have any money. I'm still at university, but I'm going to go with this. So I did not think of that. I gave it everything. I completely switched gear to becoming a parent. I never ever considered abortion. Although I've been to rallies supporting abortions, and I've been very vocal about us being able to choose, I never considered it.
Nandita (21:16):
You were pretty much by yourself at this point when you found yourself pregnant. You were in university and you didn't really have a support system to lean on to help you make a decision one way or another. You kind of just decided that you were going to go ahead with this.
Elizabet (21:33):
Yeah, of course, my parents were delighted because for them, I had to tell them sometime this was something they didn't even hope they would ever have because they would have stressed that part because they did not accept that I was gay. But they kind of understood that would mean no children from me. Oh, great. We have a granddaughter. That's all they think about. Nothing else matters no matter how hard it is. So I would say I had a lot of support in my choice, and I applaud my friends for that. I don't blame anybody for not confronting me because I've read a lot about choice feminism. You're always expected to support everybody's choice, and that's what I would like for people to do with childfree people, right. But when someone's pregnant, nobody dares tell you, oh, but you know this is a really bad idea. So nobody did.
(22:22):
I don't know what they thought. I have no idea. I had the support of my friends and they supported me in my decision. But I had this one conversation with somebody and they told me, you know as soon as your child's born, feminism's gone. Your friends are not going to be there. You're going to be all on your own. And I often think about that because that's the truth of the matter. That's the only thing that's true. Even if you're madly in love, the person who's not giving birth can run away. It's very rare for the person who's giving birth to run away.
Nandita (22:52):
And that's what happened.
Elizabet (22:53):
I don't know what happened. It's all a bit blurry. I kind of shut out the father because I did not want to remember any of it. I didn't want to remember me at that time. And then slowly, we kind of worked towards him being more present in my child's life. I kind of worked towards some accountability. I worked towards accepting that this is what I did. This is the person that I have my child with, and this is the person that should be involved in her life. It was very hard for me to admit. It was very painful because I had to transition from being a child and making childish choices. As I had run away from my parents, I just learned to wing everything. I was just doing everything the way I wanted. It was very freeing and very scary. And suddenly there was this major problem that I just created that I had to take responsibility for. And that was hard. But he's in her life now, and my ex-girlfriend, even though we broke up years ago, they still have a relationship, which is pretty good.
Nandita (23:53):
Nice. Okay. You're saying that you are in your early twenties and that you make childish decisions. I think that's a very important word, childish, because I think in our early twenties we are still figuring ourselves out, finding out who we are, and we know so little about ourselves, let alone about a new human that we end up creating if we do. And it brings me to this point, especially the current rhetoric among the right, and especially the far right that is decrying this fertility decline alarmism and encouraging women to have children in their twenties because that ensures that you have a lot of children and that ensures that you really haven't figured too much of yourself out before you actually become a feminist or something terrible like that. Yeah, I thought that was an interesting choice of word to describe that decision, but I'd also like to hear more about if there were moments in time when you started recognizing that this had been a mistake and that you actually regretted this decision.
Elizabet (25:09):
I think of course, if, just to go back to what you said about the political pressures, what I'm very concerned about is I don't expect anything good from the far right, but this is actually happening across the spectrum, whether it is the left government trying to help people want to have children, like they do do good work. They try to provide housing and stuff. It's all in the name of you reproducing. It's not in the name of, we want everybody to live better. We want the elderly to live better. This is a huge part of the rhetoric around any politics, any policies that are implemented. And I think it is absolutely true. If you have children in your twenties, you just are robbed of the time to think about it. You just will never in your life have a moment to think about your decisions.
(26:04):
You will just be busy with the children for the rest of your life. I think parenting kind of forces you to be everywhere at all times, and it becomes a never-ending distraction from reality. You become so susceptible to any kind of blackmail. I'm not saying that every country is trying to control you and become a dictatorship, but in the extreme ways that we're seeing now, right? If you're single, if you're just the one adult, you can still kind of take care of yourself. You'll sleep on the street if it comes to the worst. You can't do that with a child. You will always do anything to protect your child. And if capitalism or consumer culture tells you, oh, this is not just about the roof over your head, it's also about having this helmet, doing this practice and going to this college. And then you become the perfect consumer who's created the next perfect consumer, and you're trapped in this forever.
(26:58):
A lot of parents do try to step out of it and be like, we're not going to be like this. We're going to be very eco-conscious and we're going to use this and that and we're going to, but it's all the same. It doesn't matter if you buy the more eco-version, you're still creating a new person, a new burden on the environment. And I absolutely understand the impulse to have children if there was a hundred of us left, but there's 8 billion of us. And it just seems so bizarre. And I suppose the time I kind of came to regret, it was when I started realizing and reading about it. If you happen to be educated, if you happen to read too much, you become aware of things. And I didn't know a lot of the things that I know now. And if I had known them, I never would've brought a child into this world.
(27:47):
I want to make it clear that it's not about personal comfort. It's also about the children that should not be forced to live in environments and in situations where it's not good for them. I will never say that my family situation is great for my child. I think it's pretty hard. I think single households are really tough on a kid. I don't think kids deserve that. And I think it's just cruel to make people create babies with their like high school boyfriend or girlfriend. They've barely become adults. They have no idea what life's going to throw at them. And taking all this responsibility is at best shortsighted. So I suppose I spent the first three years of my parenting role completely immersed in my child. It was extremely hard. I had to work several jobs to pay for everything, but I was nursing for several years. I was trying to keep her alive. That's basically the first three years. And only then did I have the time to think, oh, what have I done? I've created this human. She's now talking. She has opinions. She'll have to live in this world. I met my current girlfriend who is childfree, and I just kind of started reconsidering how selfish it was for me to have a child without being sure who I was, without having cleared up my relationships, without having had a career.
Nandita (29:17):
Yeah, everything you said is very thoughtful. I'd like to go into, just in terms of your experience of being a regretful parent, what has it been like for you personally to live within that space? To what degree are you able to express that publicly or even within your safety net of friends and family? And what kind of support, if any, do you receive when you share your situation with others?
Elizabet (29:49):
That's an excellent question. I think part of the reason I really wanted to talk about this was first off, if there are any people who are second guessing their choice to be or not to be parents, if you're not completely sure, you just shouldn't do it. If you're not completely sure, this is about another being you're creating, let alone, not everybody's that concerned about the environment. I don't know how, but there are people like that. Even if you're just thinking about yourself. And I have to say, I live in a bit of a bubble where people think just like me. I have several friends who have divorced over this question where their partners would want them to have children and they didn't want to have children and ultimately ended up breaking up the relationship. But let me tell you, people who have kids divorce just the same because the load is so heavy, it takes much more than kids or no kids to sustain a romantic relationship, I think. And the support I have is by talking to people who don't judge me. And I tend to not be judgmental of them. I tend to lean towards most of my friends, all childfree. I feel it's a bit of a second coming out. So I have experience with that. But apart from my family, nobody had any issues with this. As you already to say, I'm a regretful parent. And by that time you have accepted it to yourself. When you come out, the first coming out is telling yourself and accepting that. And then the second is when you tell people. So by that time, you should be almost like bulletproof because you know who you are.
(31:17):
I find it a little difficult to exist in this space. I know there are Facebook groups about regretting parenthood. I know there are Reddit grips and subreddits or whatever. But talking to real people who I know personally who are real for me, this is a big part of my life. I'm a huge technophobe. I try to do anything that I can do analog, I do analog. So talking to people face-to-face for me is irreplaceable. And I only have one person in my life who is a regretful parent who will say it, who will address it, who is not ashamed to say it. A lot of people in my life are very stressed and depressed and tired from their parenting, but they will not say they regret it. They will still say, no, but I wanted this. This is what I wanted. I love my child. I'll only have one. I'll only have these two. But it was my choice. And I think that's actually pretty good. If they don't regret it, that's like a load lifted off their shoulders.
(32:08):
But then I find myself not belonging to either group. So I find it a little hard to exist in parenting situations where you have to talk to other parents, and the only thing anybody will talk about is the children. It becomes just this echo chamber of small talk. Oh, and mine's in this class and mine's in that class and we do this. And she was sick again. Oh yeah, he was also sick. And it just bores me to death. This is not how I want to live my life. And this is not a judgment on those people. They're doing the same thing I do where it's the only thing we have in common. It's not that I think anything bad of them, it's the situation. It's the pronatalist environment where you're supposed to be obsessed with your children and sharing that with the world. So I completely ignore that area. And I only bond with people who are mean more to me than just the fact that we have the same situation going on. And the childfree people, they do judge people who have children. They're very extreme in that, and I kind of understand that. But I feel like there's a huge bridge between us. And there are actually really interesting ways that we can connect over this shared problem, which is pronatalist pressures which affect parents and affect childfree people, just the same, even in financial matters, government support, ostracizing, criticism. It's just heavy.
Nandita (33:24):
Yeah, and I appreciate what you're saying that number one, child-free people can be quite judgmental. It can come across as a very exclusive club that you belong to, that somehow you made a conscious decision and everyone else who decided to become a parent also made a conscious decision to become parents. And therefore, we are in two different streams. But it completely leaves out the fact that there are so many parents like yourself who it may have seemed like you are making a conscious decision, but given the circumstances you were in, it was hardly that. That kind of division and the binary thinking doesn't leave a lot of room for all of the different choices in between that people are not making that people end up being in. And I appreciate you saying that you find it difficult to be around parents who either genuinely love being parents or are having to put on a facade of loving their children, because that's what society expects of them to do. And anybody who expresses any kind of doubt around childbirth or parenting is vilified. You said something very important, the point that you first have to accept yourself. You have to acknowledge yourself that you regret something, and that's the first step. And then you have to be able to admit it publicly that you regret it. And what did it look like for yourself owning the fact that you regret it? How has the regret shown up for you personally? In what ways has parenthood limited your potential as a person?
Elizabet (35:06):
I am terrified of the way the world is right now. I really don't want to sound judgmental in any way. I just think if you have all the information out there, you do your research, you'll find that it is irresponsible. I'm not an antinatalist, but I think it's irresponsible at this point to bring children into the world. And the argument against this is, oh, but people had kids during the war and everything, but that was a hundred years ago. We did not have the choice. We did not have contraception. It is clear that if we're able to think our choice is true, we will not give birth to six children. It's the progression of human thought and human, the understanding that we're not alone in this ecosystem. We're not alone in the world. We've been talking about, well, my experience as a parent, but the fact is that I think deeply about my relation to nature and every tree and every flower, and how that's all a system that we're disrupting.
(36:03):
For me, that's a huge factor. I am experiencing tremendous environmental grief, reading the news, experiencing it personally with the weather, with the climate changes, with the situation, just getting more and more depressed. You're seeing your friends not having children even just for this reason. That's reason enough. And then I also, as a parent, have to talk to my child about it. I have to talk to her about the fact that I'm a regretful parent, which is extremely difficult for me. It is brutal for both of us. I don't want to lie to her. She wasn't unwanted. And it's not about her. It is about her in the way that I love her so much. I don't want her to go through this and that I would wish that she was born to a better family, better in terms of being able to give her what she needs, because I hate how it's played down.
(36:53):
It's not about being materialistic. It's not about being able to afford this and that. It's about the emotional stability. It's about a certain maturity that you need to even survive the first years of parenthood. And then being able to do this for 20 or 30 more years, I don't understand how someone can think this is easy or natural and play it all to nature and how we're meant to procreate. We're not meant to do anything. We just should be able to make choices for ourselves that are informed. Nobody should ever feel guilty about choosing not to do this. And it's definitely limited me in the sense that I was not aware of certain mental health issues until I got properly diagnosed. Having a newborn disrupts everything, and everything that I had learned to do to be able to function in the world kind of broke down.
(37:46):
So it has definitely pushed me into financial difficulties. It has limited my education. I was not able to finish my PhD. And I'm dealing, and I'm going to say this because I think this is important, I'm dealing with a decline of cognitive function. So my memory, my ability to process information, to learn the information has been affected. And I will definitely put it down to the lack of sleep, the extreme chronic stress over my finances and health issues. Kids get sick all the time. You have to stay home from work. It's an endless cycle, especially if you're a single parent. It doesn't have to be this terrible, but I think you never know. You don't know if you'll have triplets. You don't know if the child will have special needs. You never know. And this is why I will always be against anybody who says it's something great and natural. You should do it. It isn't, it doesn't have to be. It can be terrible. It's going to hurt the child that you so terribly want to birth. So to me, there is not a selfless reason to have a child, and I stand by that.
Nandita (38:54):
Those are powerful words. Elizabet. It's just so beautifully captured, so much complexity of thought in what you've just said. But I'd really love for us to get to a place in culture where talking about regretting parenthood is just as normal as talking about enjoying parenthood. There's a whole spectrum of feelings and emotions and experiences people go through. And the fact that our culture only allows us to platform one, a very limited experience on the spectrum of experiences, that parenthood is always joyful and that it's necessary and that it's natural. It is so harmful to so many people who go into it thinking one thing and then are left dealing with a completely different experience. Yeah, I just want to say how grateful I am that you have done such deep thinking on your own about this, but also that you're able to express it so eloquently for all of us. Is there anything else that you wanted to share before we wrap the conversation up today?
Elizabet (40:01):
I definitely think, as you said about always being joyful, I do think you're allowed to make fun of parenthood. I think there's a lot of Instagram accounts where people, oh, I'm so tired, the glass of wine mom at the end of the day. But it's all just a joke. It's all about, oh, I'm taking a little break here, ha ha ha, before I go into it again. And I would do it all over again for my kids. And this is the narrative that's replicated. Coming from my personal experience, I wouldn't put so much way on these social media worlds. It's kind of tailored to not change anything. You have to look for information, for people who are not just you know taking a trope and replicating it. Pronatalism has been challenged in literature and art. It's always been a point of debate. A lot of people have abstained from having children. We just tend to ignore that, and a lot of the content around parenthood is extremely profitable. It's a huge way of promoting products and getting more and more people, because most people are parents. It's always good to look away from that and look within and finding how you stand on the issue is extremely important.
Nandita (41:17):
Yes, I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for saying all of that, and thanks so much for covering so much deep ground on such an important topic. I think it just adds to the diversity and the richness of the experiences that we're trying to platform on our podcast, and I'm so glad that you added this incredible branch. It's often a very unwelcome topic in culture, but not here. So thank you so much for joining me today, Elizabet. It was a true joy speaking with you.
Elizabet (41:51):
Thank you so much, Nandita. It was extremely interesting talking to you. I love your insights and I've learned so much from you. I really appreciate it.
Nandita (42:00):
Thank you so much. That's all for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. What did you think of this episode? 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, Alan Ware, and Kirsten Stade.