Luke and Stefanie | The Simple Joys of a Childfree Life

Luke and Stefanie reflect on how, free from strong family or religious pressure and true to their own desires, they were able to make an early, mutual decision to live childfree. They reflect on the enormous emotional weight they've seen parents carry and express a profound relief and gratitude that they can enjoy meaningful, well-lived, childfree lives in kinship with the natural world.

• TRANSCRIPT

  Stefanie (00:00):

  I feel incredibly relieved that I did not have children. I used to have these nightmares where I would just become conscious in my dream and I would have this baby on my hands, and all I felt was absolute panic and dread. And I thought, I dunno where it comes from. My life is over. And I always tried to give it to someone and no one wanted to take it and I had to take it home. And that's usually when I woke up.

  Luke (00:22):

  In our own situation, it seems like we've been able to show as a side effect of us doing what we wanted to do anyway, that there's a different way that opens up a lot of possibilities. And I'm a big reader of Henry David Thoreau, and it seems like just by accident we've kind of ended up doing what he suggested, which sometimes the best you can do for someone else is show them an example of a life well-lived.

  Nandita (00:57):

  Those were today's guests, Luke and Stephanie. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me. 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, Luke and hello Stephanie. Welcome to the podcast. I'm so happy to have you both here.

  Luke (01:55):

  Hi Nandita, thanks for having us.

  Stefanie (01:57):

  Thanks for having us.

  Nandita (01:58):

  It's my pleasure. And I'd love for you to begin the interview by sharing a little bit about yourselves.

  Luke (02:06):

  Well, my name's Luke. I'm 44 years old. I grew up in Pennsylvania, though I've spent the last couple of years in Europe with Stephanie. We were in Germany for about six years and in France for about a year. I'm the youngest of four children. And I did my PhD in political science and it was in grad school that I met Stephanie. And my primary areas are political theory and public law. So I've spent about the past 25 years of my life thinking, writing, and teaching about how political and legal institutions interact with individuals and groups and the larger culture. And I find it difficult to shut that mode off, but I mention it because that's kind of important to how I view the topic that we're talking about.

  Nandita (02:49):

  That's so helpful and I'm excited to unpack how pronatalism has appeared in your life, but also what your view is from this analytical point of view. Thanks, Luke.

  Stefanie (03:02):

  I'm Stephanie. I grew up in Germany and then moved to the US for grad school. That's where I met Luke. I got two completely useless degrees in French literature and I am now a freelance translator working mostly for French high fashion and high jewelry brands, which is not something that I really saw myself in. And it doesn't really align with my values either, but it's where the money comes from right now. So for now it'll have to do. And yeah, so same story. We've lived in Germany for a few years back to the village where I came from, and now we've been in France.

  Nandita (03:39):

  Right. So between the two of you, you've got experiences from many different cultures, so Germany, Pennsylvania, France. And so Luke, you grew up in Pennsylvania or did you just live there recently?

  Luke (03:55):

  I spent my whole childhood and up until I went off to college in Pennsylvania - Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. So also relatively rural, but not too far from some cities. I'm the youngest of four children and I grew up in a fairly liberal but practicing Catholic family. And part of that, at least for me, was that I was sent to Catholic grade school and high school, which was not traumatic. These are Post-Vatican II schools and curricula. But it was definitely a tacitly pronatalist environment, but not as fully as what someone like Ash or Laura described in their episodes. It wasn't something that was really imposed upon me in a very explicit way, but it was definitely there from the way that it was taught to me both really in school more than in my family. Sexuality exists for reproduction, but unlike some other, at least religious worldviews within Catholicism, at least as I experienced it, you could be a full person without children, most obviously clergy and members of religious orders. A lot of my teachers were nuns when I was in grade school, but these days a lot of laypersons as well are probably a practicing Catholic would say childless rather than childfree, but it's not something that is inherently looked down upon. So there were pronatallist pressures and expectations built into the system of education that I went through and sort of the family culture to a certain extent, but not in a very extreme way.

  Nandita (05:26):

  Right, that's very helpful. And Stephanie, what was it like for you growing up in Germany as far as this pronatalist expectation goes?

  Stefanie (05:34):

  I've been trying to think about that a little bit. And it might be because of the area that I grew up in, which is sort of in the middle of Germany, but it's a bit of a wishy-washy landscape when it comes to religion. So it's mostly Protestant, but it's Protestant in the most profane and not really religious way. It's more that when you're 14, of course you get confirmed because well, you want to have the big party and then your family comes and you get a lot of money and it has very little to do with religion. So I never really had that kind of religious influence that Luke, for example, had and the little bit that there was never tied to, well, your purpose as a person or as a woman more specifically is to have a family in procreate and blah, blah, blah.

  (06:18):

  So I've never really gotten that message. And the other thing is that at least my experience of current German culture, or at least the culture that I grew up in, there wasn't a lot of pressure towards that, at least not for me. That might be because I think I've always been a bit of the weird one in the family and in general. So they might've just thought, well, there's no hope for her. So they never approached me with that. That's quite possible. But even so, even my friends from Germany that I still have, there's a tendency to get married really, really late or not at all. I'd say half of them are not married. Most of them did end up having children, but there's no pressure to be married in order to have children. And children are really not pushed very early. That comes when you're in your 30, 35, and all of my friends had the children either in their late thirties or in their early forties. So it's been a very delayed process, and I might've missed that window because I was in the US for so long from the mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Maybe I would've experienced more pressure like that, but I can't say that I have, and I can't say that I've ever gotten a really weird reaction in Germany saying that, no, I don't have kids. I never wanted kids, which is not a very satisfying answer for this podcast but...

  Nandita (07:33):

  Oh no, I think actually it is helpful to have experiences from cultures across the spectrum of tism where it's very little or where it's very strong because you can also see how it informs then our own decision making and whether we struggle deeply with it or whether we arrive at it with relative liberty and freedom and authenticity. Of course, as you've heard from other guests on our podcast, for some of them it just took a lot of painstaking pushing back against norms. And for others it was something that they knew from a young age and they were able to practice. And we of course want to arrive at a place where the latter is more the norm, where what you desire is embraced and appreciated within culture rather than challenged. And so within each of your family structures, was your experience similar to the cultural experience that there wasn't as much overt pressure to follow the script of marriage and children?

  Luke (08:44):

  Well, as I mentioned, I'm the youngest of four children and two of my siblings married and had either one or two children, and they were older than me to begin with. That, at least from the standpoint of whether my parents would have grandchildren, kind of answered the question before it was even something that I conceivably could have thought about. But there was really never any pressure that I experienced. And even when I explained to members of my family that I eventually chose to have a vasectomy, despite the fact that in a more traditional Catholic setting than the one that I grew up in, that would've been a very, very grave mistake. But that was not how it was viewed within my family. So they were very welcoming. From my standpoint at least. I don't have a very interesting story of overcoming a particularly challenging background that really tried to steer me in a particular direction. It's rather sort of what both Stephanie and I have seen along the way as people who, as I imagine we'll explain, who made a decision quite early on not to have children. We've for a long time been very self-aware in a position of watching what's happening to other people and watching how other people sort of navigate pronatalist pressures that we're also subject to in various ways. But a lot of people we know have sort of succumbed to those in various fashions that they perhaps at some point swore they wouldn't.

  Nandita (10:11):

  So interesting this contrast of people who, like you may have known for a long time that they weren't going to follow a certain path, but then it's so much easier within a dominant culture to do what's expected than to fight back against it. And I know so many people similarly, who would have done things differently had they had the choice because it's just easier to not fight back. And Stephanie, was it similar for you within your family structure of having the same relative freedom?

  Stefanie (10:43):

  Yeah, for a different reason I think. I have a younger sister who also chose not to have children. And by the way, my generation of my family, none of them have had children, which is odd because it's a very traditional structure, but we grew up in a very dysfunctional family in a psychological, emotional sense. And I think one of the reasons why we were never approached by our parents about having children is because they never managed to see us as adults. They were just sort of off in their own world. And my mother died a couple of years ago, but my dad is still alive and it's never come up. They never really managed to see us as separate adult entities, I think. And so that took the pressure away, I guess, because they were both elementary school teachers, so they loved children and they always gravitated towards other children.

  (11:33):

  And now my dad is very involved with his grandchildren of his partner, for example, but he never approached me about that. So I don't remember ever being asked if I wanted to have children or it wasn't the time or didn't I want to get married, things like that. However, what you said before that with the pressure that eventually seems to somehow kick in from the outside, that I've definitely observed, not in me, but in my friends who half of them maybe said even in their early thirties, so, oh, I'm not going to have children. And they've all had children, no exception. And it seemed to me a little bit in some cases as like, yeah, but what if I regret it? What if I regret not having had children? I've observed that same tendency to still try to jump on the wagon at the last minute before you might possibly miss it.

  (12:23):

  And I think that's really not sad, but it's too bad because I can observe how it cuts lots of people's path short. And they did really interesting things before they had children, but then this comes and this takes up the center of their lives and it doesn't only impact their life, but also the friendship. And so I experience the whole issue way more now that I'm childfree, but a lot of my friends have children and the way I'm approached from that side. So that's the issue that I have with it personally, not so much having grown up with the pressure.

  Nandita (13:00):

  Yeah, I'd love to explore that thread a bit further about the loss of friendship, but what you said about this trope that is ever-present in culture that pushes people, even those who are sure about a certain life path to follow the dominant life path by presenting this threat, this fear of you might regret it, you'll never know if you don't do it, but we don't hear that of the other side, even though we know there are so many people who go on to have children who are not well suited to that path, and they are remorseful and regretful. For a number of reasons we don't hear of those stories or those fears. I'd say that would be a fairer representation of the spectrum of people's lives than just the one story that we're told. So I would actually love to explore a bit more the decision that each of you made to not have children. Is that something you knew before you met one another?

  Luke (14:06):

  I think in my case, I wasn't really in a position where I had to put it to the test until Stephanie and I had been together for a while, but I think my mind was made up quite early, especially if I think of, I have a niece and two nephews, and I saw them a lot when they were very young, but I remember seeing them as these little babies that were sort of lovely and perfect and thinking, well, that's good for my brother and my sister-in-law. I never for a moment pictured that that was something that I wanted in my life. It never clicked for me that maybe someday I would want this. And so I think it was rather a lack of a draw towards it that I felt initially rather than any sort of revulsion or a decision that I definitely don't want to have children.

  (14:55):

  But later on, as I got older and as Stephanie and I were together for longer, the question itself started to kind of hover in the background if only because other people that we knew in graduate school or from earlier in our lives started to have children. And I think the question just kind of developed fairly organically from that. And my recollection is that we were pretty much on the same page from the very start and became even more so as we talked about it, and especially as we observed the experiences that other people were having as they were deciding to have children, whether this was in their early to mid-twenties in graduate school or as Stephanie was describing, all the way up until their late thirties or early forties.

  Stefanie (15:42):

  I think it was a 32nd conversation that we had about that as in, do you want to have children? No, you? No. Okay. Fairly uneventful.

  Nandita (15:55):

  And was that early on in your relationship or you'd already been together a while?

  Stefanie (15:59):

  Pretty early. I think that was maybe within the first two or three years.

  Nandita (16:03):

  So you both mentioned this kind of a reinforcing message that you were receiving by observing people in your lives who had had children, which helped you further affirm your own decision to not want to have children. And you also spoke Stephanie about the loss of friendships that you started noticing. What did that look like and how did that make you feel?

  Stefanie (16:29):

  It's usually a very gradual process. So I'd say I've lost a few and there's some that they're kind of hanging on a little bit, but it's not the same quality, and it usually is happens sort of in the first year. People still seem to make an effort and then the child gets a bit more independent and it can't just be taken along and parked somewhere, which is also when my tolerance phase ends when they start walking and touching you. I wanted to add that I never wanted children. I never liked babies. I find them really gross. I'm sorry to say it. Everyone is entitled to loving their child. I find them really, really gross. I never want to hold them. And as a woman, people do this. They say, don't you want to hold my baby? No, I don't want to hold your baby. I'm glad you have it.

  (17:11):

  Be happy with it, love it, sniff it. I don't think they smell good. All of these things that people say, women say. But anyway, so that is one of the factors actually that comes in between me and my friends, because they have children and the children are very close to them. They're so important to them. And if I'm close to them, I defacto have to be close to the child as well. So I have found myself being friends with my friend, but then I'm also expected to hang out and feel close to this other being and this other being's mom whom I don't recognize and don't find terribly appealing as a friend. So what creeps in is this kind of, it's not very balanced, there's something missing. It's no longer on eye level. I don't really get to spend time with that person anymore. I spend time with someone's mom, and they're so tied up with it that often there's lack of interest in what I'm doing, and then meeting up becomes incredibly difficult if I don't go where they can come to or where they live.

  (18:08):

  If I'm not willing to spend time with the kid as well, then that pretty much cancels it all together. So I've not been the person to openly address it in my friendships because I find that difficult too. There are sometimes ways where I will say, I don't want to meet up with the children today. I'm not in the mood. I will not be a good conversation partner. This is not my thing. And I always make it very clear that I don't like children. All of my friends know that I don't like children at all. I don't want to spend time with them, and yet I always find myself in their presence. Somehow miraculously they pop up, which is frustrating.

  Nandita (18:44):

  Definitely. And also, I wonder even when your friends who do have children manage to find time to spend time with you without their children, to what degree does the conversation stay away from their path as a mother or a parent?

  Stefanie (19:02):

  I actually have to say that is not as much of an issue with my friends. It seems more that when I do get to meet up with them just one-on-one, they seem to be very happy to talk to someone who doesn't have children. It's actually usually pleasant, and I can always perceive that there's such a need for them to talk and to be an individual and to be seen as not little Janet's mom, but as whoever you are. And so it's usually very pleasant. And I think I'm lucky that the few friends that I have who have children, they don't talk to me about what diaper size is currently the thing of the day. It doesn't come up as much. It's actually very much focused on them, on me, and on our relationship. There's sometimes a little bit of envy I perceive, and sometimes it can be a little passive aggressive, but when it's positive, it's rather the like I do get validated. I don't get aggressed in the sense of, well, yeah, you can't understand because you didn't have children. I hear that very, very rarely. So I actually feel like with the friendships that I've been able to keep where it's worked, it still works, though the frequency of meeting up one-on-one has decreased significantly, obviously.

  Nandita (20:14):

  That's refreshing that that is happening, that you can also act as a mirror to some of your friends, of an escape from the daily grind of parenting. And is that similar for you, Luke, in terms of your friend circle?

  Luke (20:27):

  Yeah, I would say so. I mean, in many cases these are the same people that we're talking about. But I think what I would add, from a slightly different perspective, especially when we still lived in the United States and I was teaching on campus at a public research university for better part of a decade, what I noticed was that American universities, especially these days have this, especially in the humanities and social sciences, have a reputation for being far more liberal or radical than the rest of the population. And while that might be true in some ways, especially in the ideas that people hold, what I noticed over a long period of time, and this is with respect to people who I very much respect in many different ways, very intelligent, very thoughtful people, they tended to be incredibly standard on the question of family. And we also saw a lot of people who, and it was typically women, who sacrificed a career or made their own career path far more difficult for the sake of having children.

  (21:28):

  And even apart from that, because I don't want to make it sound like pursuing a career is what everyone should be all about, it was rather, I could see a great disconnect - people who were great knowers of what's wrong in the world and what causes it, but when they went home, they completely shut that off. They bought the consumer good in plastic that would make their child happy or make their child not feel left out amongst their friends or would just give them a few minutes peace at the end of the day, even though they know that the labor practices that went into that or the things that it's made of that will never biodegrade or all of the other things that go into that and that culture, at the level of ideas, they knew it and they could explain it to you front to back, but as soon as they went home, they just didn't really care to do anything about it.

  (22:16):

  The traditional nuclear reproductive family model was something that they opted for. They woke up in it each morning and they went to sleep in it each day. And in the middle of the day, they kind of got to pretend that they were radicals who saw all the angles and weren't being held down by these norms about sex, gender, family models and so on. But I could probably count on one hand the number of people who willingly defied that. There were some people who defacto didn't fit that, but who were very unhappy with the way that their lives looked, and I think ultimately wanted that. They would never have put it in those terms. I don't think they saw it that way, but what they wanted would've led them back to that same place.

  Nandita (22:59):

  That is such a brilliant point, and you expressed it so perfectly that a lot of the so-called progressives will spend a few hours each day pretending to be radicals. But when it comes to internalizing a lot of these very patriarchal, traditional kind of nationalist, heteronormative values, that critical examination of these structures disappears. And further to that, I also find that people who are so anti-oppressive systems, once you make the decision to participate in what's a very traditional, especially if you do it in a way that fits that norm, you can't really escape the system because inevitably where you buy your house, which school you send your child to, giving your child a competitive edge, being able to participate in things that make your child feel like they belong within their friend circle, all of which include dominant things like Disney and consumerism, eating animal-based products, et cetera, it becomes even more difficult to practice those things because, even if you are a purist in so many ways, in an attempt to be a really good parent and to not make your child feel ostracized, you have to then start participating in systems that you may not necessarily agree with, but you have no choice not to. So I just think that's such a great point. And yeah, I wonder if there's anything more you want to add to that and what you notice within your own field of social science.

  Luke (24:43):

  Well, actually, I have a personal story that involves Stephanie as well, but it's around the same time that I was teaching at the university in the US. This was years before I'd even heard the term pronatalism, but shortly after I got my first academic job after grad school and I finally had good health insurance. But after Stephanie and I had decided that we did not want children, we were both eager for me to get a vasectomy - not only as a matter of convenience or fertility management, but also as a principled choice about how we wanted to live, but also as we thought people who didn't want children probably should responsibly live, leaving nothing up to chance. So after my consultation with a urologist, I was caught off guard when the receptionist asked when I would like to schedule my appointment, and I asked if anything was available either later that week or the next week or something like that.

  (25:35):

  I just wanted to get it over with. And she informed me that by law in Virginia where we were, I would have to wait at least a month before the procedure could be performed. And it was annoying, and I guess it felt somewhat patronizing, but what really set me off was that I could have bought a firearm on my way home the same day. And that was a clear though unintended statement of the priorities written into law. And in that case, it was just Virginia, but neither the waiting period for a vasectomy nor the lack of a waiting period for purchasing a firearm is uncommon throughout the US. I think US culture is very overtly and self-consciously pro-family, and I think a lot of people like to think, well, that could mean all sorts of families, but in the end, it's still routinely and systematically the nuclear, biological, heterosexual, or at least heteronormative, reproductive family that's prioritized both in amorphous culture but also in really clear law.

  Stefanie (26:34):

  It's the same for women. I'm trusted if I wanted to, I could have a baby anytime provided that I can get pregnant, but if I don't want to have a baby, I have to jump through quite a few hoops. In Germany, I think there's even a minimum age. Before a certain age, you cannot get your tubes tied. So I'm enough to be trusted to raise another life responsibly, but I cannot be trusted to not raise that life or to produce that life. That's not a choice that I can be trusted with immediately. I have to have time to think about it, and then I have to go to a consultation to talk to people that I don't know, who don't know me, who don't know my circumstances, who can have an influence over whether that is denied to me to make that decision. So I find that absolutely ridiculous.

  Nandita (27:18):

  Yeah, and if anybody had any doubts about how pronatalist the culture is, as more and more people are choosing to have fewer children, and all of these pronatalist bribes aren't working to incentivize them to have more children, you are seeing politicians turning to extreme measures such as putting abortion bans into place to ensure that people will have children for the state, not for the family. So yeah, this is, I think so telling and so interesting in your own personal experiences that you've seen that. And since having made the decision, where are you at with your life today? What has this decision allowed you to manifest in your own life paths?

  Luke (28:05):

  Well, one of the things that Stephanie and I have shared for a long time is a life with other nonhuman beings, especially house rabbits who have pretty much the run of our lives. So I think we've managed very successfully to make kin, I guess the way that Donna Haraway would put it. We never find ourselves short of company and short of relationship because I feel that we have a very good relationship ourselves, just the two of us. And we do have good friends and we do have some very good family connections, but also just our day-to-day lives, I mean, it kind of fills itself even without us having to try sometimes with other beings that we feel connected to, whether it is house rabbits that we've adopted from shelters or a cat that adopted us by just showing up and working her way into our life, or just going out into the woods or the garden and seeing the other species that live around us all the time, or even just seeing the forest itself as a neighbor in a way.

  Stefanie (29:11):

  One thing that I find absolutely bizarre how often this comes up that our bunnies are referenced as like, yeah, but they're like your children, but they're your replacement for your children. And I just had to make the point just as we were meeting up with someone in Germany, and I actually said for the first time I said, no, they're not our children. They're not substitute children. They're completely different beings and we choose to live with them. I don't choose bunnies because I didn't have children, but I want sort of a replacement for children. It's a completely different mode. And I find that now that I have developed sort of a radar for it, that it comes up all the time that it's almost like, well, you don't have children, but at least you have pets. And those are kind of like children, which is a very false conclusion.

  Nandita (29:53):

  And it's also so patronizing to those animals who are living full adult lives and in participating in behaviors that are normal to their species. Of course, I think domesticated animals, they have a very truncated aspect of how natural they can be, but even within that, they're not children. They are full- blown adults in their own species, and they are, I love that you said they're our companions. I'm glad you brought that up too.

  Luke (30:20):

  If someone thinks, and I gather a fair number of people do, that in order to not be alone in life, to not be lonely in life, you have to have not just a family, but a family with children that fits a certain mold. I think that people who either explicitly or implicitly have that view have really gotten taken by a certain cultural model. And I think sometimes we've had to fight against it ourselves, but I think a lot of the time, just because of how we are as individuals and how we are as a couple relating to one another, I think we've been able to find a really, really fruitful sort of limitlessly open way for us to go without having the regrets that I have a feeling a lot of people expect us to have, sort of looking back at what could have been. Again, I don't want to speak for Stephanie, but I certainly don't look back and think, oh, could my life have been better without children? For me, the choice is absolutely obvious. I don't think it could.

  Nandita (31:19):

  I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that. And Stephanie, what are your thoughts on that? You obviously don't feel the same way as Luke about your relationship.

  Stefanie (31:31):

  No, no. I agree with everything that Luke said, and for me personally I also, and this is coming more from the woman's side, I think is I feel incredibly relieved that I did not have children because I see how the people are faring that have had children. I see how their relationship is going with their partner and how that's suffering and how that's going to pieces more often than not. And also for myself, I always knew I didn't want this. I used to have these nightmares where I would just become conscious in my dream and I would have this baby on my hands, and all I felt was absolute panic and dread, and I thought, I don't know where it comes from. My life is over. And I always tried to give it to someone and no one wanted to take it, and I had to take it home.

  (32:16):

  And that's usually when I woke up. And so those dreams have mostly stopped and in its place, it's relief. I actually think about it often and I feel very, very relieved that I didn't have to deal with all the overload of it all, which mothers never talk about. I have a few friends who talk about it, how just overloaded they are with the sensory input - the touching, the smells, the constant attention. And I think I would've not done very well with that at all. And I don't think my parents did either. And there's many parents that I see who clearly can't cope with that either, at least not well. And I think that's something that's completely sort of left aside. Not everybody is able to handle this kind of attached being all the time with all that comes with it. So for me, I feel very liberated from that burden that I never had to carry, thankfully, and I'm very grateful to myself and also for the universe sending me someone who agreed that that was never an issue. It's never come between us. It's not even something that we ever really had to talk about because I know that can create a lot of problems between people.

  Luke (33:21):

  There was one thing that came to mind that is actually something about my family that's kind of relevant. My parents were very, very supportive, caring, great parents to me across the board, but my mother expressed a number of times later in her life that she went out of her way to say, She loves all of us. She's so happy she has us, but she's sad about all the things that she could have been and could have done. She never said if she didn't have us, but if she had chosen a different kind of life. And I think even though I was only maybe in my late teens when she said this, I felt like I immediately saw that it wasn't just that she genuinely felt that there were other things that she would've liked her life to become, that having children prevented, but that she was so afraid of making us feel rejected in even being able to utter that.

  (34:16):

  And so I saw someone who I loved who clearly felt trapped, so trapped that she couldn't even openly articulate to hopefully one of the closest people in the world to her, exactly how she felt. I might be interpreting too much in this, but it seemed like there was even something that to me, she couldn't say about how constrained she felt by that choice. I mention that just because I think that kind of stuck with me because it was only several years later that I met Stephanie and that this kind of question started to come up for myself. And it wasn't just a matter of relief that Stephanie and I came to the decision that we did for my own sake, what it would mean for my life, but also thinking of my mother and just being like, okay, Stephanie doesn't have to end up like that. And that was a huge relief and it still is a huge relief.

  Nandita (35:04):

  I'm so glad that you shared that story because I think it shows the multi-layered entrapment of parents who did not have a choice or really did not know they had a choice. And I think there are so many parents and children of those parents have shared those stories with me. I think a lot of people are so afraid to out their parents because the way our culture perceives that statement is a rejection of parenthood, which it exactly is not because as a good parent would they want to protect their children from feeling that way. But you can have both feelings present at the same time. You can have immense love for your children, and you can also feel an immense remorse for the loss of your life that you didn't get to live. And they can both be true at the same time. But the pronatalist culture ensures that there's only one interpretation of that message, which is that you are a terrible parent, and which is why there are so many parents who are living entrapped with guilt and remorse, remorse about having chosen a certain path and guilt about feeling that way. Feeling remorseful causes more guilt that something is wrong with them because no one in society is expressing this, so therefore they must be really abnormal in some way.

  (36:30):

  And so I think that your mom's expression is so much more common than we ever hear about, and I'm really glad that you shared it, precisely to help normalize other parents to be able to say this without feeling like they are inadequate as parents in any way.

  Luke (36:47):

  Obviously, as a childfree couple now for going on 20 years, we've had a lot of opportunities to interact with people and precisely as you mentioned, the way that these things fit together, even if unintentionally we're childfree. We've been vegan for 15 years. We try to live a very low consumption, very simple life, trying to live as close to nature as we realistically can, given our own individual constitutions and skill levels and things like that. But we find that these things just sort of come together and they're sort of mutually reinforcing. I don't know how many people have actually come out and said it directly, but there've been plenty of sidelong or implicit statements that when, especially people who have children or who have had children interact with us, they often make some kind of remark about how easy our life seems. Not in the way that sometimes people with children say things like, oh, well, you don't have children, so you have so much more free time, or something like that as a sort of excuse for themselves.

  (37:47):

  But rather when people who know us well seem to genuinely compliment like, oh, you seem to make these things work, and the number of people who have slowly without us pushing and become vegan, or at least a good step in that direction just from knowing us for a long time, but we don't push these things. And often one of the reasons that podcasts like this are a welcome thing to hear and certainly a welcome thing to participate in, is that it's not the kind of thing that we can have terribly frank conversations with a lot of people about without risking deeply offending them because for a variety of reasons, it can be difficult for people to hold two completely, possibly true, but superficially contradictory ideas in their heads at once - that you can regret some aspects of having had children, but not loath your children by default. These things don't have to go together necessarily. In our own situation, it seems like we've been able to show, as a side effect of us doing what we wanted to do anyway, that there's a different way that opens up a lot of possibilities. And I'm a big reader of Henry David Thoreau, and it seems like just by accident we've kind of ended up doing what he suggested, which sometimes the best you can do for someone else is show them an example of a life well-lived.

  Nandita (39:02):

  That seems like an incredibly powerful statement to end this conversation on, to be an example for other people of how one can be. Stephanie and Luke, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing so candidly your life path and the incredible decisions you've made and the deeply fulfilling life that you are living and being an example of that for others. Thanks for joining me.

  Luke (39:28):

  Thanks for having us.

  Stefanie (39:29):

  Thanks for having us.

  Nandita (39:30):

  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 and Alan Ware.

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