Rebecca | Sisters as Chosen Life Partners

ChildfreeOverpopulation

Sep 23

Written By Population Balance

Rebecca grew up homeschooled in a conservative American family, later serving as a Marine, attending university, and traveling the world. Bound by the shared trauma and values of their upbringing, Rebecca and her sister remained very close. Awakening to feminism and the planetary crisis together, they both decided to not have children. Today, they live together as each other's chosen life partners surrounded by mutual security, comfort, love, and trust.

Rebecca (00:00):
Siblings can choose their siblings to be their best friends for their chosen life partners just as much as we choose any other person. I live in my house with my sister. We are not bound to each other. Our life together is simply because it makes us happy and it brings us safety and security, comfort and shared values going through the trauma of growing up in the odd way that we did, the military and being subjected to such patriarchy, we just grew a closer bond. Once you have lived such a lengthy life together and all our memories are so compatible, it starts to be that she's the person I'm most comfortable with.
Nandita Bajaj (00:50):
That was today's guest, Rebecca. 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 Rebecca, and welcome to Beyond Pronatalism. It is lovely having you here.
Rebecca (01:48):
Thank you Nandita, and thank you for having me on your show. I've listened to probably every one of your podcasts, some more than once or even twice, and you really inspired me to reach out to you and be a part of this big talk that is out there.
Nandita Bajaj (02:03):
I am so happy to hear that. Thank you so much. And well, when you reached out to me with your incredible story, I was deeply inspired by the life path that you've chosen, and that is of choosing your sister to be your best friend and your life partner and all of the important life decisions that you're making together and how you are truly redefining what family means. So Rebecca, why don't we begin with a brief introduction. Could you start by sharing a bit about your background, where you grew up, where you live, how old you are, and generally what kind of work you do?
Rebecca (02:47):
Yeah, well, my sister and I are in our mid-thirties and we mostly grew up in rural Montana, homeschooled. So we were very close to our family growing up. The closest people I knew were my sisters. They were my best friends. I didn't have many little children as friends until I got older. And I did go to public high school and I was raised by my parents and my mom was my primary educator, and that really influenced the way I was, of course. If your only educator is your mom, then your only values and the way you see the world is going to be through her eyes. So my sisters and I all went to public high school. We all went to the military. I have to admit now that we were very conservative and Republican growing up. And as I've gone through my life journey, as I've become more educated, I have leaned completely liberal and democratic.
(03:45):
And I think that brings such a valuable insight to any discussion I have because I can look at topics and conversations through the former lens of a conservative and now the new educated lens I have as a liberal Democrat. And so going through this entire shift, I have also learned about the world of the patriarchal institutions that are so heavily prevalent in conservative values. And I can see very clearly why my parents saw things and did things the way they did and why I see and do things the way I do now. And so my sister and I did lead a very untraditional life. We grew up in rural Montana, away from the world. We go to public high school in Ketchikan, Alaska because my dad gets a job up there, and I get exposed to the world in a very uncomfortable way. Diving straight in from being homeschooled and your best friends being your parents' friends to children your age was very hard.
(04:45):
And then we take even deeper dive into the Marine Corps. We enlist in the Marine Corps at 17, and we do that for five years and it takes us all over the world. We have great experiences, but in that time we start to see how hard the world is. And with all the traumas we endured through the military, it brought my sisters and I closer. We finally decide to get out and go back home to the family ranch. And it was not a success. I'm going to say don't go into business with your parents or your family, at least not that close. So finally my sister and I just decided to break away from it all. There's a lot of other family history that I will just leave out, but my sister and I knew it was time for us to go and create a better life for ourselves.
(05:29):
And so through the trauma of growing up in the odd way that we did, going through the military and being subjected to such patriarchy and the hardships that all women I think can relate to in the military, we just grew a closer bond and then we went to college together. We've kind of gone to all our education institutions together. We stick together. And it wasn't until we decided to just quit our jobs right after COVID, escape the chaos the COVID world was facing in America, and we just dropped it all. And we call it a personal sabbatical. We went around the world, we went through the Balkans and Indonesian and into Iceland. And it was in that time where I truly discovered the world had too many people on it. It was on that sabbatical because walking through the Balkans I could see the debris crisis, and my sister and I were the people that would pick up trash everywhere we went.
(06:26):
And then once I would be picking trash everywhere and I realized I can't pick it all up, and then I would round a corner and there'd just be mountains and mountains of trash. And I just started to think we have too many people on this planet consuming too much, discarding too much. And I started to try to just read everything I could find that would educate me on this topic, which is how I stumbled upon your podcast. And from there, I've read as many books as I could from all the speakers on your podcast. I saw what the world was like. I saw everything that was happening from climate change to a debris crisis, to overpopulation, to women's disempowerment. I thought, is this really a world I want to bring children into? As soon as I came back to the USA, I went to a primary care provider.
(07:11):
I said, I want my tubes removed at the time. And then I ended up having a salpingectomy, which removed both tubes entirely because now research shows if you just remove them entirely, you reduce certain chances of certain cancers. So I was like, well, I'm not having kids, just go ahead and remove that whole entire part. And I did. And I can't tell you how liberated I felt after that. I felt this major sense of relief. I felt like I never had to worry about having an accidental child or whoopsie, a surprise baby. I felt like I could be more comfortable in my relationships now because I didn't have to be the only one to carry the conscious burden of being careful not to get pregnant. And I don't like to take birth control because I don't like the adverse effects of it, but I felt like I had to do it by myself, felt like I had to always explain, no, this is the time of month and no, I need to be more careful.
(08:04):
And I felt like I was carrying that burden. And so when I finally just got the tubes removed, I felt like I could finally live comfortably in my relationships like every other man gets to. Men don't have to wake up and wonder, oh, am I pregnant this morning? And I felt like I finally got that. And just the sense of relief I got from it, I think my relationships have improved from it to be honest. And now I don't have to ever worry about the talk of do we want kids? The answer is always, I can't have kids. I've found that I finally got to make that decision for myself, and I am just liberated by it.
Nandita Bajaj (08:40):
Thank you so much. And what an incredible journey you've had with all of the different shifts that you've had to go through, both personal, political, in your thinking, but then also the practical, the moving or being part of the military life and then traveling. It's amazing how much you've picked up in just a short amount of time. And you said that you were homeschooled, you and your sisters. So let's start with your experience of being homeschooled and being raised in Montana within a conservative environment. What kind of messages were you receiving from your immediate family and also from the culture at large around family, gender roles, et cetera?
Rebecca (09:30):
It's very interesting because we weren't a religious family. We didn't go to church. But in some ways, my mother is very religious in her own way. She follows the Bible and she never had us read the Bible, but we live by it. So in some ways, I don't even know if I know what the religions are out there. I know what my mom wanted me to believe. I used to be opposed to abortion, and now I'm entirely pro-abortion, and I say pro-abortion and I mean pro-choice as well. And so I came back to the USA right when Roe v Wade was being overturned. And I honestly had a hard time wrapping my brain about it around it. And I told my sister, I was like, I think this is about perpetuating human growth. And at first I think she thought about it and later she I think agreed with me.
(10:23):
And I see how all these policies that are being written in America right now and with our current president saying he wants to be the fertility president, and I can see clearly how everything is about perpetuating human growth. And because without humans, we can't have growth. We can't have mass consumption. And so I'm a complete advocate of abortion because I don't think it is a negative thing. I think it's giving the rights to the people who are currently alive. I think it's giving women a chance to have an opportunity at living their life, about being able to financially sustain themselves, about giving them their chance towards education. And so when I think about my childhood, how my mom would be so critical against abortion and death, and now I can see now that I think that is a complete subscription to a religious thought. My mom would always say, God will bring the right person.
(11:13):
And I was just like, well, if I'm not out actively looking, God's not just going to bring someone to the doorstep. I don't say I'm religious now. I don't think I'm an atheist. I think I am agnostic, but I don't live my life by the rules written in religion. I don't live my life by the rules written by policy. I try and live my life forming the values based on what brings happiness and wellbeing. And so those were some of the early childhood foundations I had that have completely shifted in my adulthood. And the only way I got to see it was to get out into the world and to see the consequences of human overpopulation. And so now that that's not a part of my life, the only pressures I feel is one, I feel like I'm treated like less of an adult because I'm not married.
(12:05):
I work in a workspace where there is a lot of very young people who've just graduated college. So around the 22, 23 years of age. And then the older cohort who's in maybe their late thirties and forties who are married with kids. And I'm this awkward mid 30-year-old lady who's married. So I don't fit in with the older crowd. I don't get to engage in the conversations about the weekend birthday party with the kids or Oh, I got to pick the kids up and take 'em to judo lessons or whatnot. I don't get to engage in those conversations. And I find when I talk about parenting or child rearing or the family structure as a whole, I don't feel people view my opinion as credible. Even though I have a degree in sociology and I study this stuff on my off time, what inspires me, I don't feel like I'm credible because I'm not a parent. But I don't quite fit in with the young crowd either because I'm too old and my interests appear to be too different.
(13:04):
So I'm in this awkward spot where a lot of the friends that I have who have gotten married and have had children, they dissipate. They become too busy for me. It's also getting hard to maintain the friendships with the single people because they're all starting to be 10 to 15 years younger than me. So the only pressures comes from societal standards. And I think that I want to maintain my single position and I don't want to subscribe to marriage just so I fit in. I think I want to continue trying to be a role model to people that we don't have to get married just because society tells us to. We can find long lasting friendships and relationships and we don't have to have the piece of paper that tells us we love each other. So I am in a committed relationship and I do just fine.
(13:52):
I don't think we need that piece of paper to tell us that we love each other and we can have a life together. And I live in my house with my sister and there's a concept out there called living together apart with committed couples. And I kind of feel like that's what me and my significant other are doing right now. We live 20 minutes away. We take turns staying at each other's house and meeting each other's friends and cooking for each other. And he doesn't seem to have any problem that I live with my sister. And he doesn't seem to have any problem when he stays over that she has her room at the end of the house and I have my room at the center of the house. And I think it's fine. I don't know what his family thinks about it, but I'm happy with it.
(14:33):
And so those are the only pressures I feel is from society at large. And I find that the women I connect to most are the women who aren't married because we have time to indulge in each other. We have time to visit each other. We have time to drop what we're doing for two weeks and spend a lengthy vacation just doing things together and talking deeply about all the things we're passionate about. And so those are the women I find I connect with most now are the women who have chosen a path of self-fulfillment and liberation from societal standards.
Nandita Bajaj (15:05):
That's just beautiful. I really love this concept of kinship that you've created with your sister while still being in a committed relationship with your partner. At what point did you have this realization that this was the path you were going to choose? You were going to live together, buy a house together, make a lot of important life decisions together. So how did that epiphany come about?
Rebecca (15:31):
We didn't wake up one day and just say, we're going to meet each other's life committed partners. It just happened. It happened when we became estranged from our family. It happened when we were the only people we could relate to through the traumas of the military. And once you have lived such a lengthy life together and all our memories are so compatible, it starts to be that she's the person I'm most comfortable with. The first thing was one of us was in a relationship who had ended up moving in with their boyfriend. And it was in the time of COVID where renting prices went skyrocketing. So one of us moved in with our boyfriend and the other couldn't afford the rent on our own, so moved in with a coworker and we had chosen to separate geographically. We were in the same town still about 40 minutes away.
(16:17):
And it was a very kind of sad, stressful time. I had to drive 40 minutes to see my sister, and it became so hard. And then that relationship didn't work. And because we had lost our house, because we gave it up, because we couldn't afford the rent, it felt like that relationship couldn't end because there was no safe place for that person to go. And finally, when one of us got our own apartment, again, a two bedroom apartment, that relationship had ended very quickly. And then the other sibling moved in with the other. And we look back and we reflect and we realized that that wasn't a good relationship to be in anymore. But the only reason it persisted was because that sibling had nowhere to go. And we decided that that would never happen again. We would never put ourselves in a position where we had to be essentially forced to maintain a relationship because the alternative was homelessness.
(17:12):
We said, let's just buy a house together eventually. And how it will go is if one of us gets married, they can move in with the husband and the other sibling gets to keep the house, and that house will always be in our name. That way if there's ever a divorce in the future, we have somewhere to go. So it was an essential way of protecting ourselves because we don't have any other family and we have been estranged from our parents that we would never put ourselves in a position of unsafety and insecurity again. And so just with the way time has worked out, now we find that we're much happier in our house together. We have all our furniture together. She has bought the dishes, I have the silverware. We think, gosh, if we were to split up, we'd have to take the silverware and you'd have to take the dishes.
(17:58):
And I love my books and this table is yours, but I feel like it's mine. And so we've just decided that this is our house. And since I don't intend to get married, what's the harm in just living in the house I'm comfortable in with a person I feel safe with. I have heard horror stories on the news and from other people I've known personally of nightmare roommates. And I just think to myself, why would I give up a perfectly safe roommate for someone I don't know? Why would I move in with a man that I've known for a year or two when I can just live comfortably with the person I've known for 30 years? And so to me, it's been about safety and security. And then I would say the second thing beyond that was when we've traveled abroad together, we've traveled to places such as Morocco and Tanzania and Indonesia, and we realize that we are each other's best travel buddies.
(18:50):
It's hard to travel with people who are under or over your financial wave. And so since we always tend to stay in the same financial zone, we find it's easier and we find we're comfortable in the same places, and we can look at each other and read the expression on each other's face and we can realize, no, this isn't a good idea or yes, let's go for it. And so when you have the best of both worlds, I have the best travel buddy I can imagine. I have safety and security in a home in America, I think, why would I change all of this? And so I'm going to say a lot of it came down to safety and security and now comfort and shared values. And because our values are so similar, she's the person I feel like can talk about anything with. And because she loves me unconditionally, I can confide in her with anything. And so while I advocate for smaller families, there are going to be families out there that have more than one child and have siblings. Siblings can choose their siblings to be their best friends just as much as we choose any other person to be our friend. And we are the true definition of a family. Why does family have to be a married couple? Why can't family be the family I was born into? So my family's the family I was born into and the person I've kept in my life.
Nandita Bajaj (20:08):
I really really love this, and how thoughtfully you're making all of these decisions and the different aspects of both of your lives that have informed that this is the safest, most secure, loving, and joyful partnership. And the other thing I know you brought up in your write-up was the experience that you had in the military learning about all of the families that were getting divorced and how that informed your view about marriage. Could you speak about that?
Rebecca (20:42):
Yeah. Well, I worked in the legal office for a while and I started in dissolution, which is divorce law. And when I would look at why people were getting divorced, it was either one because they were so young and a lot of people in the military get married to stay together. And so that's an unfortunate situation, but it's not the right reason to get married. And so after the true marriage honeymoon is about three to five years, and that was the big zone where we saw people getting divorced and then we saw long-term marriages getting divorced. And I hate to say it, but what we tend to see was a lot of older men exchanging maybe their wives out for a younger model. And I just thought, gosh, we all age, but why do men get to grow up and be silver foxes and women just get old?
(21:30):
And I just thought that I'm not going to put myself in that position where someone has to let me go for someone younger or different. People get divorced for many reasons, we grow apart. And I just view if I am with somebody, I want it to be because I love them. And if you're not married, you can make that decision at any time to part without the legal battle behind it. And there are amicable divorces out there. I've seen them, but I've seen probably two out of the hundreds I've seen. Just seeing that I just thought, I don't really want to be a part of that. And I just saw what people were fighting over very often boiled down to something silly like who was going to get the table? And I just thought, this is not for me. I don't need to put myself through this. And honestly, I don't think we need to. I do think I remember reading or listening to one of your podcasts how marriage, I believe was first legislated in the Roman era, and it was about perpetuating human growth for armies to fight battles, to take conquer lands. And I just think, why do we need marriage? Why can't we just choose to be happily together?
Nandita Bajaj (22:37):
Wonderful. And is that a decision you and your sister have made together or you've kind of left it open in terms of where each of you might go?
Rebecca (22:45):
There is that, and that's the thing is because my sister and I aren't married, we don't have to stick together. We do do our travels on our own. We do a lot of traveling together, but right now my sister's applying to a scholarship that could take her abroad next year for 10 months and she will go, and that's fine with me. I don't need her here for that. And if I were to ever choose to agree to move in with my significant other, that would be an option. We are not bound to each other. Our life together is simply because it makes us happy and it brings us safety and security. And honestly, when I'm not doing anything, I'd be hiking in the mountains by myself and I'll just think, gosh, this would be so much more fun if my sister were here. And so that is the beautiful part about our relationship is we are not confined to each other like a married couple.
(23:34):
And there's also never an element of jealousy that can come between us. In a married couple, there often times surface some elements of jealousy. There never really is an element of jealousy because we're not married. We have the option and the liberty to come and go as we choose. And we have the option to date who we want, and we do allow each other significant others in our house, and we do allow each other to just go. So honestly, we've just created a dynamic that is a space that is safe, where we have the liberty to make the decisions that best suit us and make us happy. And I will say that we have both have decided not to have children. We both have decided to lead a childfree life. And I do think that in this time that we live in, I am grateful daily that we have chosen not to have kids, especially when I just flick on the news and I hear about the climate crisis, the debris crisis, famine, the water crisis, the heat crisis, hurricanes.
(24:36):
I live in Florida right now. The numbered storms are increasing each year. The storms are intensifying each year. And I just think I'm daily grateful I have chosen not to have kids, not only for the life that I'm able to lead now, but for the guilt-free aspect I can have when my time comes to pass. I don't have to pass feeling this guilt that I have brought someone into this world who has to shuffle through the burdens that we have placed on this planet on an environmental, a pollution, a societal level. I do think that we are regressing in the United States as far as human rights go. And if I were to have a daughter, I would deeply worry about what her future looked like. And so not just to have a childfree life hasn't just only liberated my life and made my life better. I don't need to feel guilty about bringing someone into this world at the state of our world. And I'm not that kind of person that thinks the human race needs to go away. I think we need to decrease the human race naturally by having smaller families. There doesn't need to be all the weird things people think of. They always want to jump to the one child policy or genocides. We don't need to have that to reduce the human population. We can do it naturally. We naturally grew. We can naturally shrink.
Nandita Bajaj (25:53):
That's so well said on all the fronts in terms of personal liberation, but also not having to live with the guilt of imposing this really increasingly dangerous situation on someone else. The other thing as we wrap up the conversation that I want to make sure I touch on is you said that sometimes you get weird reactions from people about you both living together. How does that show up and how do you respond?
Rebecca (26:22):
I give a quick example. We moved into our house and we met our neighbor. And it's puzzling when people hear that two sisters bought a house together and I had to make a decision about something, but I wanted to run it by my sister. It's her house too. So I was like, oh, the neighbor had asked me a question. I was like, well, let me run it by my sister and see what she thinks. And he goes, what? Are you too married? And I'm like, it's her house too. We both put down the down payment. We both pay the bills and no, we're not married. You don't have to be married to own a house. That's not a prerequisite, at least one I've never heard of. So that was one example. And the other example is when we were both deciding to get out of the military.
(26:58):
This was a long time ago, and I didn't think about it then, but I was talking to my gunnery sergeant and I said, no, we've decided to get out. And she just looked at me and she's like, we, who's we? I was like my sisters and I, and she told me then that I'm too codependent on my family. And I just thought, my sisters have been the only people who've been here for me through the military. They're the only people who have supported me. They're the only people who've truly cared about what's happened to me. And so now I'm being judged because we have made a decision to get out of the military together. It didn't make sense to me then when I didn't even have these ideas in my head. And I know lots of young people who are starting to live together in larger groups because you can't afford to live single anymore. And that's another thing I think a lot of older generations aren't understanding, the cost of living to survive single is not very possible. I do think that forces a lot of marriages, which I think could be by design, but I'm not going to be the person that is forced into that. So I've chosen to share my financial burdens with my sibling. And honestly, it's been very helpful.
Nandita Bajaj (28:06):
No, this is so helpful. And it kind of makes sense, right? If people really only have one dominant narrative running through their heads, then it's really hard for them to wrap their head around a completely different way of living. To some degree you can understand it and empathize, and to another degree, it just makes you wonder why people are so invested in trying to define a relationship in ways that make sense to them. Why can't we just leave it alone and just trust the way people have chosen to live? Was there anything in your final thoughts you'd like to say about the really unique and joyful life that you've chosen?
Rebecca (28:49):
I think just while there can be hardships socially, I go to an event and I do want my sister there, the person that I feel I can relate to most, and I share my happiest memories with. While society sometimes makes it feel hard to live this life, it's when things get really tough that I'm grateful I've chosen the life that I have. When a massive bill, perhaps a medical bill comes across my table, I'm extremely grateful that I only have me to worry about. When I am traveling abroad and I get in a sticky situation and I don't quite understand what's going on, I'm grateful I have my sister there with me. And so I wouldn't change the life that I've had, even though it might make me feel a little estranged from others. And I think that it's good to have people like me who are brave enough to make the choices that make me most happy, and to role model that we don't have to swim with the dominant culture, that the dominant culture is changing, and we are deviating from what the nuclear family and the white picket fence, and we are in a new era where we have new things to worry about. We have the opportunity to pick our friends and to choose our families, whether they're your true blood family or a furry critter or you've adopted. And we don't have to subscribe to the mainstream culture to be happy. And so while it feels hard, when I sit and think about it I don't regret my decisions, and I will keep role modeling and advocating for these nontraditional choices, especially for women.
Nandita Bajaj (30:20):
And for that, I thank you so much for being an example and having the courage to be that example for so many others, including me. I have been so inspired by your story and I'm really grateful that you chose to share your story with me and my listeners. Thank you so much for joining me today, Rebecca. It was just joyous to talk to you.
Rebecca (30:43):
Thank you, Nandita. I really appreciate it, and I really hope that I've inspired other siblings out there to embrace their siblings as their family or their friends as their chosen life partners.
Nandita Bajaj (30:57):
I agree.
Rebecca (30:57):
Thank you.
Nandita Bajaj (30:59):
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.