“Far from being a selfish decision, I've been able to do things that I think are more important than raising one more human.”
When I was 15, I told my mother that I didn’t want to have children.
She wasn’t happy about that, but she let it be until I was 23 and home from grad school for the summer. Somehow, she arranged a job for me at a childcare centre, doing things like reading and drawing with 5 and 6 year olds. I quit after 1 week.
That experience convinced me – more than anything else had- that I had no interest in being around kids, my own or anyone else’s.
40+ years later, and only once did I have a second thought (a really short one), when I met a guy who I was infatuated with and he wanted kids. I’d think: do I want to be called “mom”?; do I want to have a baby? (even writing that feels strange). Overwhelmingly, no and no, and he and I parted.
I just never felt the desire. If I hear a dog cry, it reaches me inside, I feel the cry. When I hear a baby cry, I feel nothing (except on airplanes, I feel annoyance).
Far from being a selfish decision, which some people oddly still believe it is, I’ve been able to do things that I think are more important than raising one more human; I’m sure I wouldn’t have had the time, energy, and ability if I wasn’t childfree.
For 40 years, I’ve worked in biodiversity conservation in the US, Central/South America, Caribbean, and Africa. While doing that, in 2007, I started Animal-Kind International, a US nonprofit supporting animal welfare organisations in Africa and Latin America/Caribbean. I’ve always volunteered at animal shelters and rescues and with the elderly.
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