As for my sister who announced her pregnancy, she is definitely one of those “smug pregnant women.”  It is all she can talk about, and she is only a little more than one or two months along.  Everything is about her, and she wants to tell everybody every day how sick she feels. It is so annoying! I have blocked her on Facebook because I can’t put up with that for the next seven or eight months.  But she is the one who supports me most in being CF, so I can forgive her.

My friend recently had her baby and I’m worried about it.  She was always so much fun to talk to and she would laugh with me about other pregnant women and she never took herself too seriously. I am worried that she is going to change and we won’t have as much fun as we used to.  I know she’ll always support me, though.

I am beginning to be more vocal about the CF decision, because I feel like people need to realize that there is a choice!  I recently bought a “bingo” shirt and a bumper sticker that says, “You can have your pitter-patter, and I will sleep in.”  I am kind of making it my “mission” to let people aware there is a choice and there is nothing wrong with being CF and not having kids.  I believe if we are all more vocal about it, it will begin to be more accepted by others.  We’ll see.

“Your children are up in Heaven looking down at you saying, ‘my mommy doesn’t want me’,”  Dad theorizes.

“We love you even though you’re not pregnant,” Grandma whispers.

“She’s just afraid of having kids,” Mom announces.

“Why would you get married if you don’t have kids?”  my sister Michelle questions.

“Don’t you want to give your parents grandchildren?”  a stranger asks.

“ But you would make such a great mother,”  a co-worker proclaims.

For the past five years, all of these questions, statements and more have been directed at me.  It tends to come with the territory when you don’t have children after a few years of marriage.  The first year of marriage isn’t bad.  Nobody cares that you don’t have any kids as newlyweds.  But once you hit that year mark, you are fair game for questioning.

My husband and I are an odd couple in Utah County, aka Happy Valley.  We are married without children.  To understand why that is so odd, you have to know what Happy Valley is like.  Nowhere else in the United States is the term “family friendly” believed and followed more than in Happy Valley.  Here we have the highest birthrate in the nation, and on average the family sizes are larger than any other county in the US.   Family is the number one message that is proclaimed from the mountain tops here.

For those people with children, Happy Valley is like a dream because of the familial attitudes.  But there are some who are not on the inside of the “family circle”,  there are some who long to be a part of it, but because of circumstances they cannot control, they must watch from afar.  My husband and I?  We are not part of these childless couples longing to have children or these “family units”.  We are different.  Childfree.  Three years ago, I did not know the word existed.

I cannot recall a time when I have ever said the words I’ve heard from so many women,   I can’t wait to be a mother! In fact, I had always dreaded the day when I would have to have a child.  I didn’t understand why girls would gush over babies, fight to hold them, and decide what to name their future children.  When the conversation about babies and children would come up, I would go and find something else more interesting to do.

When I watched a television show with a female character who for whatever reason was not able to have her own biological child, I was jealous of her.  I wanted to have some type of problem that would take away my capabilities to bear children.  But I knew it probably wouldn’t work out that way.  Let’s just say that I have hips that would be perfect for having kids.

I knew that I would have to have a child someday.  There was a song that we used to sing as kids, “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.”  All my life, I’ve been taught that this is the way of things.  In my family, I am expected to live my life the way my parents live theirs.  At least that is the impression that my parents left on me.  They would be disappointed if I strayed from what they think is right.

My mother is a stay at home mom, and she raised seven children.  My father can’t be more proud of that fact.  He believes that  a woman’s duty is in the home, raising children.  So when I got married, he assumed that I would do the same.  He thought that I would do what he wanted me to do, because he is always right.  He knows how people should live their lives.  They should live exactly as he lives.

When Andy and I became engaged, we had no plans for children.  While many couples talk before they get married when exactly they’ll plan on having children, we did not.  In fact, it was the furthest thing from our minds.  We did not get married to start a family, we got married because we were in love and wanted to be as one.  If we were going to have children, it would not be for years.

The first year of our marriage passed, and nobody cared that I wasn’t pregnant or that I didn’t have a child.  When the questions started, my husband and I began talking about when we would have kids, but we decided that it wouldn’t be for at least a few years, after we had finished school and got some debts paid off.  Even then, we weren’t positive that we even wanted to have kids.  We were so happy just being a couple that we didn’t feel the need to throw a kid into the mix.

As the years passed, I noticed all of my married friends were becoming pregnant, even those who had been married a shorter period of time than us.  I thought a lot of these girls were insane, because they were even younger than me.  I thought that in my early twenties, I should be living it up, not being stuck at home with a child.  I became very frustrated and lonely because I didn’t know any couples who were like us and holding off on expanding our family.

About three years after our wedding,  I was sitting around feeling sorry for myself that we didn’t have a married couple to hang out with anymore who didn’t have kids, so I sat down to surf the internet.  Curious about the statistics, I typed a single phrase into Google.  Couples who are waiting to have children. And that’s when I found something out that would change my attitude about reproduction.

Childfree;  those people who make the conscious decision not to have children.  I was completely floored.  You don’t have to have children?  But what about the song?  You can’t just sing, “first comes then, and then comes marriage,” and be done with it, right?  I clicked on a single link thechildfreelife.com and entered the online forum.  I spent the entire night reading through the posts people had left.  There were many people like me, who were undecided about whether they wanted to have children or not.   Quite a few of them had known from a young age that they didn’t want to be parents.  But they all had something in common.  They didn’t feel the need to jump into parenting just because that’s what “society” says to do.  Later that night, my husband came home from work, and I told him what I had discovered.

“Did you know there are childfree people out there?  There are people who don’t want kids, and guess what?  They don’t have them!”

Andy looked at me like he thought I was crazy.  He is the type of man who is always sure of himself.  He doesn’t do what other people expect him to do, he does whatever he thinks is right.  He never worries if people like him or what other people think of him.  Andy knows who he is and knows exactly what he wants out of life.  He has never been one to follow the pack.

“Really?  I didn’t know there was a word for it,” he casually replied.

I stared at him, “so wait, you know people who don’t want children?”

“I don’t know anyone personally, but you can’t expect that everyone will want to have kids.”

“Well, what about you?  Do you want to have kids?”

Andy gazed at me, his answer tumbling out of his mouth without a thought. “Not really, I like it to be just us.  But I will do whatever you want to do.  Do you want to have kids?”

I stared at him, my mind whirling.  He would do whatever I wanted.  But I didn’t know what I wanted.  I didn’t have a strong desire to have kids.  I liked kids for the most part, but I didn’t really see a solid reason to have one of my own.  I was only twenty-four.  How was I supposed to know what I wanted out of life?  I was too young to make that decision. Right?

Throughout the rest of the night, Andy and I asked each other the big questions.  Would we have kids?  If we didn’t, what would we do with our lives instead?  If we decided against children, should we make permanent precautions?  We ended up coming to one big conclusion that night.  I needed to take some time and really think things through.  He would give me a month or two to decide what to do.

Only a month to decide?  Surely that is not enough time to plan a major life decision.  But weren’t there clues throughout my life that I didn’t want to have children?  I was never interested in babies, I never really thought about my “future kids”, and I definitely didn’t want to ever drive a mini-van full of kids!  One day I went online and bought a book called Childfree and Lovin’ It.  In the book, the author interviewed several women about their childfree lives, and how they came to the decision to be childfree.

As I read the book, I considered all of the things that I would be missing out on if I had children.  I wanted to travel all over the world, and that wouldn’t work out very well with children.  I wanted to have a career and dreaded staying at home, but I didn’t think it was a great idea to work while my child was in child care being raised by somebody else.  I loved being alone with my husband and having plenty of leisure time, which would obviously change with a child.

And then I began to think about all of the things I would be missing out on if I didn’t have kids.  I wouldn’t get to name my child.  I wouldn’t ever see what a person who was part of my husband and I would look like.  I would never hear those words that makes other women’s hearts melt, “I love you, mommy.”  I would miss out on dirty diapers, sleepless nights, a messy house, colic, pregnancy, pain of childbirth, raising rebellious teenagers, and the experience of having to schedule date nights with my husband.

But I had to have kids.  My parents expected me to do it.  My brothers and sisters needed to be aunts and uncles.  My grandparents needed great-grandchildren.  Society needed me to be a mother so I could fit in with the majority of women.  I knew what I had to do.  I looked at all of the lists that I had written up about the pros and cons of being childfree, and I had my answer. Roughly two months after the discussion with my husband about the discovery of childfree, I told him about my final decision.

“I don’t want to have a child.  The childfree lifestyle is much more appealing than motherhood.”

Andy came up to me and hugged me, “are you sure?”

“Yeah.  I realize now that I have my own mind, and that I’m free to live the way I want to.  I love our life the way it is, and I don’t want that to ever change.”

I officially didn’t care that I would be a “menace” to society, or a disappointment to my family.  I now had friends online in thechildfreelife.com forums that were my support group.  I needed to live my life the way that I felt was right, just like everyone else did.  That night, we made a commitment to each other that we would not have children.  We were officially childfree.  About three months later, we went to a doctor and made our decision permanent.   It felt so liberating to finally tell people that I would not be having children.  I was doing my own thing, and I didn’t care what people thought of me.  Except for my family… Their opinion still matters.  It will be a matter of time before I tell them anything about my decision.  I figure that conversation will not end well.  Only time will tell.

You may have heard the tune that children sing, “first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage.” To many people around the globe, this is all a part of growing up and becoming an adult. To many of us in the childfree community, we have “rebelled” from this way of life, as some people might say. Some of us grew up in very religious backgrounds, and so to many people, we have rebelled. I am one of these people. I grew up in the Latterday Saints religion (Mormons). A lot of the main teachings have to do with families and how important they are. Like most religions, you are taught heavily to “multiply and replenish the earth.” My family is extremely active in the LDS church, and I was too, mostly because it was expected of me. That changed for me, after I left the house and married my husband. I live in Utah, USA, where around 75% of the population is LDS and have the highest birthrate in the nation. People expected that we would soon start having kids because that is what most people in my area tend to do. You rarely see a couple married more than three years who aren’t either pregnant or have children already. I don’t think that I ever really wanted kids. It was just something that I “had” to do after I got married. That’s the way the rhyme goes, right? Love-check. Marriage-check. Baby-??? When we got married, I said I would wait at least five years before having a baby. I didn’t really want one, so I wanted to put it off as long as possible. One day, I was getting frustrated that I didn’t know anyone around me who was waiting years to have children, and feeling rather lonely, I went to look up some facts on Google. That is when I stumbled onto the word “childfree”. I had never heard it before, so I was curious and looked into it more. I learned something then—you can choose not to have children! I was blown away by this idea, and I was intrigued. I looked back over my life and began to realize that I never even wanted kids. I would watch movies and TV and be jealous of fictional characters that were unable to have children. While at church activities, girls would gush over our leader’s babies and want to hold them. I wanted nothing to do with that. Each year that went on in my marriage, I kept pushing back the date when we would have children. I was on the fence with this idea for a few years when nearly a year ago, we decided to remain childfree. I wasn’t on the fence because I was trying to decide if I wanted kids or not; In truth, I was on the fence because I was scared. Did I really have the courage to go against everything I’d been taught regarding family? Did I have the courage to stop singing the song from my childhood? I did have the courage, and now I’m singing a different tune, “First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Owning a home? Traveling the world? Humanitarian efforts? Novel publishing?” Who knows? The possibilities are endless!