“When I grow up, I want to be like you. No kids and two dogs"

August 13, 2021 10:20 AM

"In a place where there were so few acceptable ways to be a woman, she modeled something different, vibrant, and fulfilled."
posted by Lycaste (24 comments total)

I never met another nonbinary person until I was 21 years old. Or, come to think of it, any out trans person at all. I think a lot about how nice it would have been to have a trans Harriet. I might have known who I was a little sooner than the middle of my twenties, for one.
posted by Gymnopedist at 10:33 AM on August 13, 2021 [6 favorites]

Working on being Harriet. Still trying to arrange the dog situation, though.
posted by praemunire at 10:53 AM on August 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

Aw, thanks for posting this.

When I was a kid, I thought motherhood was a sort of given future for girls, and it wasn't until I got older that I realized it didn't have to be. Somewhere in my late twenties--after a half decade being partnered with someone nearly twenty years older than me (IKR?)--I fully understood that I wasn't terribly interested in being a mother. That led to that relationship ending, but eventually, I found the person I wanted to be with who didn't mind that motherhood wasn't going to happen. (I definitely gave him fair warning. After he proposed, I confirmed that if we got married, I didn't want kids.)

I have two nieces on my family's side, and a niece and a nephew on my partner's side, and I love being the weird aunt. My own independence and weirdness has definitely sparked something in my oldest niece in terms of seeing what life is like as you are, but without kids.
posted by Kitteh at 11:06 AM on August 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't have kids. I want more kids in my life! More other people's kids! It takes a village, I'm happy to help! Kids in small, one-on-one doses! When I was on Buy Nothing, there were like a million people thrilled to have me petsit, or walk their dogs, or do any number of other things. But when I offered to walk their kids, I mostly would get crickets.

I mean, it's not like I've never interacted with kids as an adult. I've held babies. I've babysat some awesome three year olds. I've been the adult who the kids gravitate to at the family gatherings on those rare occasions when I'm in the same cities as my family. But in general, it seems like there's a segregation.

I guess my point is, I could be the weird child-free person who becomes a part of the childhood story of a handful of children who transport herself in a bike with a sail on it, and so on. I'm just not sure how to connect with kids any more than the families with kids know how to connect with me.
posted by aniola at 11:25 AM on August 13, 2021 [11 favorites]

I never met another nonbinary person until I was 21 years old

Same, except closer to 27. Glad I managed to get there in the end anyway, shame that it took so long and required so many rough years to get there.

Not sure I'm social or kid-friendly enough to end up being this person in other people's kids' lives either, but I'm entirely open to other people taking their own meaning from my non-traditional existence if that's a thing that strikes them.
posted by terretu at 11:43 AM on August 13, 2021

This is so good.

There was an older woman down the gravel road from my house when I was a kid. Occasionally my grandparents included me when they dropped in to hang out with her, and she was quite something. Fed a 10 year old boy foraged watercress and ramps and mushrooms (she taught courses on mushroom identification) without making a big deal of it. House stuffed with plants in macrame holders suspended from the ceiling. Books and magazines everywhere. An ever-changing cast of dogs and cats wandering in and out. At one point, she was a local celebrity based on her role as the cranky lady in the bank commercial.

Yvonne was fascinating and odd, but treated me, a fidgety kid, as though I was just part of the furniture. I was never ill at ease around her. When I wanted a snack, she offered dried rose-hips, because that's what she had.
posted by Caxton1476 at 12:08 PM on August 13, 2021 [13 favorites]

I don't know that I had a specific Harriet in my life as a kid. I definitely had in mind a life without kids, though, and have always prioritized my career path. I'm 40 now and ambivalent about kids; maybe it'll happen, maybe it won't.

Part of the reason I'm ambivalent instead of against is watching a few friends (some from college, some current colleagues) who have maintained their own identities even after having kids. Growing up, almost all the moms I knew (including my own) didn't show their non-mom sides to us kids. I suspect many didn't feel they could *have* a non-mom side. And as a kid, that scared me deeply; I had and still have absolutely no interest in having my identity swallowed up by a child. (And I have no wish to inflict my kids with responsibility of living for me as well as for themselves). But watching these modern mothers still be themselves and still have their own paths (even if it comes at a societal cost) makes it seems just possible to keep a little bit of the Harriet-style even with kids.

Of course if I don't have kids, it's not like I want my identity to be swallowed up by the lack of kids either; the societal expectations there are some bullshit both ways. Childfree/less people can be happy individuals with fulfilling lives, and it seems like the same can be true for parents (to my surprise).
posted by nat at 12:15 PM on August 13, 2021 [9 favorites]

Oh, I quite enjoyed this. I tried to write about my personal journey of deciding how I fit in the world as someone in her late 30's who is single and childless and plans to stay that way, but it kept turning into some therapeutic word-vomit of thousands of words that still didn't quite say what I wanted to say.

I grew up in a fairly conservative religious environment, so was told at a young age that a woman's greatest goal in life is to get married and have children. The women who were single seemed bitter about it, or desperate to still find a way to fulfill that "wife and mother" goal. There didn't seem to be much of an embrace of an alternate way of life. Unless you were a missionary/nun.

Although, to be fair, my grandmother -- a minister's wife -- was the greatest champion of me doing whatever the heck I wanted. She said the only reason she married was because my grandpa seemed special and different compared to all the other guys she knew back then, and she believed that it's better to be single and happy than stuck in an unhappy but "dutiful" marriage.

There's a small part of me that does grieve a little bit over that fact I'll never have kids, even if I know it's the best choice for me. Pregnancy horrifies me (even if my PCOS would allow it) and I don't want to be running after a toddler in my 40's. My life is still too erratic to consider fostering/adoption, although I love the idea of taking care of kids that have no where else to be.

And I'm great with kids! I always have been, even when I was a kid myself. I was always the most in-demand baby-sitter (and now I'm an in-demand house/pet-sitter for friends when they take their family vacation) and I also worked at a daycare in high school. Kids love talking to me because they know I'll take them seriously, but also play with them. I also spent years and years mentoring teenagers once I was no longer a teenager, which is a different kettle of fish, but the same concept applies -- I took them seriously, but I'd also have fun with them (and never assumed that "marriage and kids" was the only option for their future!).

I do have the vague worry about what will happen to me when I get old and frail. My mother and I bought a house together a couple years ago after my father suddenly passed away. Our realtor told us it would be an easy fix to remove the ramp to the door and the large handles in the bathroom that were placed there by the previous elderly owners, but we're keeping everything with the knowledge she'll also need such assistance in the near future.

Once I got a new job a few months ago, I made sure to beef up my regular donations to retirement, since I realized that there will be no one to care for me when I am old and need assistance. At least I should still have a house with ramps and bathroom handles!

Anyway, I'd be delighted to be someone's Harriet, and can only hope that I will be, one day.
posted by paisley sheep at 12:31 PM on August 13, 2021 [4 favorites]

Great piece; thanks for posting it.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 12:40 PM on August 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

I read this a few days ago and I thought of a friend of my mom's when I was 13 or 14 who was probably—in retrospect—queer but who was just the lady without kids or a husband to me at the time. I loved talking to her because she loved science fiction and she was always giving me old books to read. My most distinct memory is of us sitting on our back deck one crisp fall day, looking into the woods, and talking about the Peloponnesian War.

We moved shortly after and I don't know what happened to her—at the moment I can't even remember her name—but I've thought of her often over the years.
posted by a Rrose by any other name at 12:48 PM on August 13, 2021 [4 favorites]

My Harriet was a teacher at my high school. She was married to another teacher on the staff. They both taught English and Ms. Harriet (always Ms., never Mrs.) also ran the stage crew. Ms. Harriet was awesome. She didn't wear makeup, kept her hair short, and dressed differently than any other woman teacher I'd known. She and her husband had no children. What they did have was a big wooden farmhouse, a garden, a rotating cast of pets, and a collection of hobbies that never seemed to overlap (except for reading, of course, and telling stories about their pets). Because she and her husband commuted in one car, he'd wait for her on the nights she worked late for stage crew, usually in his classroom, sometimes reading or grading in the back of the auditorium. He never spoke to her while she was doing stage crew - never rushed her or complained or in any way interrupted her work.

No kids, and no husband-wife bickering of the variety that sitcoms and local parents led me to expect. They seemed like two adults who liked and respected each other and who were living their best lives individually together. It's not a straight line, but Ms. Harriet is at least partly responsible for my realizing, years after high school, that I didn't have to settle for a life I didn't really want. That it was possible and reasonable to want something else, and to leave behind the things that you were supposed to want but didn't. That it was possible and reasonable for a male partner to respect and support your work, and for this respect and support to be treated as something so ordinary that it never merited comment. It's hard to describe just how alien their marriage was to a bunch of AFAB adolescents raised in such intensely cis heteronormative suburbia that some percentage of the populace was always a little scandalized at my mom having a full-time job.

That alien-ness was a beacon, and it probably saved my life.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 12:50 PM on August 13, 2021 [23 favorites]

Interesting. I'm a man, but one who also chose to be childless. My grandmother is my Harriet: by the time I became conscious of her reality, she had retired (on the day of her 65th birthday) and moved to a tiny cabin on a 10 acre plot in the woods to garden in the company of her cat, dog, geese and chickens for the remainder of her life.

She had fully two lives, one as the impoverished wartime mother of seven children and wife of an abusive alcoholic, and one as a fiercely independent solitary gardener and activist. I only ever really knew the latter half, so was more like an influential aunt than the archetypal grandmother. I wonder how I would have perceived her differently had I witnessed those other aspects of her life and the way she carried them.
posted by klanawa at 12:53 PM on August 13, 2021 [9 favorites]

I had a Harriet as my aunt, and everyone in my family was already starting to notice how much I took after her when I was only about three - there is a story she tells about how at one family event, she and my father and I were in a room together at one point, and I said or did something that was a little kids' echo of exactly the way my aunt did that thing, and then walked out of the room. And after my father and aunt watched me go, Dad turned to her and said "okay, be honest with me - which one of you is really the mother of my daughter?"

It wasn't only a role model for me, it was also a role model for the rest of my family - I blessedly got very few questions about when I was going to get married or settle down or what-not, because the rest of the family already had "Oh, EC is like SB" in their heads, and just chalked my single status up to that and left me alone because they just had to look at my aunt to see that "see, women can stay single and childless and still be okay."

Save for her having gone for Trump within the past few years, my aunt and I still are very much in sync (I'll grant her being a Trump supporter is a BIG HORKIN' exception).


....I even had a second Harriet briefly, in the person of my small hometown's children's librarian, Miss Moody. When I was small, Miss Moody oversaw the super-tiny library that was on the town green, which boasted a lively children's section which I was diving into quite happily. I was a voracious reader and probably caused Miss Moody quite a few headaches trying to find books to keep up with my habit.

Anyway, when I was about eleven or twelve Miss Moody announced her retirement, via a short chatty letter she sent around to everyone with a library card. But what struck me was that she was announcing that she was retiring to "travel the world" - and to me that sounded like the absolute coolest thing ever.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 1:37 PM on August 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

I don't have kids myself and most likely will not; my niblings LOVE me visiting because I can give them 100% of my attention! Like others who've commented above, I would love more children in my life, related by blood or related by community, and am wondering how that will go, especially when I leave childbearing age (I'm in my late 30s now and I feel like I'm still viewed as "still may become a mom, so will not shun yet" by people who know me, instead of "never became a mom"). Even my niblings will ask in a confused voice, "Do you have a baby?" and when I say no, they'll reason to one another, "She doesn't have a baby YET." I don't say anything to that, because who knows, maybe in the next 2-3 years the U.S. will magically become a place that is supportive to parenthood, close relatives who could provide free childcare will move next door, and gender dynamics will change to became equal. (I mean, who knows! Could happen!)

To be more connected with my community, I asked if I could help pull weeds at the community garden of the school down the street and was told that I couldn't because I "wasn't a parent". It made me feel weird for asking, like something was wrong with me and I'd violated some taboo by offering, especially as I walk by daily and there are so many weeds and dying plants there. (Of course I fiercely support very strict background checks and every possible protection of kids, but it would seem like the qualifications to pull weeds at a parcel of land next to a school would be more about background checks, character references and supervision, rather than "Are you a parent".)
posted by rogerroger at 3:00 PM on August 13, 2021 [8 favorites]

Loved this, the comments section was also excellent if anyone missed it.
posted by Emily's Fist at 3:05 PM on August 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

I don’t have any real life examples, but reading books growing up helped me see this lifestyle as a valid option.

Anne LaBastille in particular showed me women can also live like Jeremiah Johnson.
posted by jilloftrades at 4:31 PM on August 13, 2021

Add me to the list of people who would like to be a part of helping out other people with their children, but will probably never have any of my own. Even in the kind of communities where everybody is helping raise everyone else's kids it's portrayed as parents helping parents.

I really, really like the idea of being a woman on her own in a house full of cats who is able to be a part of her community but I am not sure how you do that. Even Harriet in the story is married. How do you convince people you are not some sad, lonely, creepy creature? Where is the roadmap?
posted by Anonymous at 4:41 PM on August 13, 2021

schroedinger: I really, really like the idea of being a woman on her own in a house full of cats

eponysterical!

But seriously, there is such a cultural taboo around not having kids, as you say. I'm trying to lean into supporting my friends who do have kids and making sure I'm a presence in their lives. But especially with Covid and people retreating into their smaller bubbles, it's been isolating.
posted by rogerroger at 5:22 PM on August 13, 2021

I really, really like the idea of being a woman on her own in a house full of cats who is able to be a part of her community but I am not sure how you do that. Even Harriet in the story is married. How do you convince people you are not some sad, lonely, creepy creature? Where is the roadmap?

I feel your question so much. I wish I had an answer, but all I can say is that I've been craving connection in some kind of community, some kind of network of mutual respect and support and socialization, and realizing that I never learned how to do that. How to find one, or build one, or become a member of one; basically, how to reach out without coming off as a sad, lonely, creepy creature. And I think that is a skill, or a set of skills, and it wasn't modeled for me and now I don't know how to learn it.

I'd watch your cats, though, for what it's worth.
posted by Fish, fish, are you doing your duty? at 6:21 PM on August 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

I have long said that part of the loss of people having much smaller, more atomized families is that there are far fewer role models/types of humans in your life, especially as a child. I grew up in a gigantic Catholic family, where you basically cannot be voted off the island No Matter What. So I had aunts and uncles who had no children -- because of fertility, by choice, by happenstance. But I also had an Uncle Alan who had a roommate named Joe, who eventually we called Uncle Joe, any my parents were not suuuuuuuuper clear in the 80s on why Uncle Alan's "roommate" was my Uncle Joe (although they were very clear we were not supposed to talk about it outside the family; they both could have lost their jobs). When I was in junior high I finally twigged to why Uncle Joe was my uncle AND why I wasn't supposed to talk about how exactly he was my uncle. I had spinster aunts and bachelor uncles; I had relatives who went into the clergy; I had single parent relatives and married couples who decided against kids; I had relatives with long-term partners they never married (gay or straight); I had gay relatives before that was a thing you were allowed to say out loud.

I never knew, as a child, that if I liked kids, I was supposed to HAVE kids. I had so many aunts and uncles and relatives who loved kids -- who loved me! -- who didn't have any of their own. I never felt any pressure in that direction; there were SO many models of adulthood available in my family. I sort-of knew, from my grade school, that a heterosexual married couple with children was "normal," because nearly all my friends had heterosexual married parents. But I also knew, from my family, that there were 40 bazillion ways to be a "normal" adult, and they were all great. I knew that some of my childless relatives adored little bitty kids, and others were more interested in us once we were teenagers. But these were all people who were in my life from the time I was born, who loved me -- even if they didn't necessary like me very much when I was 2 years old and they didn't know what to do with toddlers -- and they were all part of my family.

I was at the funeral of a relative earlier this month, and it's sort-of hard to explain who he was -- my father's cousin's husband is the plain fact of it, but they lived really close to us so he was more like an uncle we saw at least monthly, and his wife had two much-younger brothers, and their father died (very young and very suddenly) when the boys were 5 and 7, so he was their father figure although he was only in his early 20s; his first date with his wife was to take the little boys ice skating, and they slept over every weekend until they finished high school. This is a hard person to explain! It's hard to explain how wildly important he was in our family! How my father's cousin's husband became a moral center around which everyone orbited! My parents were there right before he died, because he was like a brother to my father, in the end.

My grandfather's second wife's brother wrote me letters until the end of his life. My grandmother died at 58, and my grandfather remarried to a widow a couple of years later. (She is still alive and thriving, and I sent her postcards every two weeks.) Her brother, whom I only met once, at their wedding, when I was 8, was deeply invested in his sister's step-grandchildren, although he had plenty of grandchildren of his own. When I went to college at his alma mater, and majored in theology, he would send me news articles about theology he clipped out of the NYT or the International Herald-Tribune, with a beautifully-handwritten note about why he thought they might interest me. I would write back my thanks, in short notes. Sometimes he would ask questions and I would do my collegiate best to answer them. He sent me a beautiful letter when I graduated, that I still keep in my jewelry box. When he died, his daughter wrote me a letter, saying how much he used to talk about me, and all his sister's step-grandkids, and sent me his funeral Mass card, which is in my favorite Bible as a bookmark for a verse he talked to me about.'

Tonight I was at my brother's house and my nephew was like, "Aunt Eyebrows, can you make me lemonade?" and I was like, "No, sorry, I can't; I am not that kind of aunt. I am the kind of aunt who explains to you how Roman soldiers were paid in salt." (A conversation we'd just been having as he tried to salt his dinner.) I said, "Generally I am the aunt who will explain old-timey things to you, not the aunt who creates sugar."
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 6:38 PM on August 13, 2021 [17 favorites]

Also PS if you love children and live in the Chicago area, we would love to have you join our family, I always bring snacks. :) When I had kids, I bought a family membership + guest to the local zoo and would invite all our childless friends to come with me to the zoo, where my kids would behave like massive hooligans but we could stroll along and chat behind them, and I always packed snacks for all the kids and all the adults.

Also if you are a single person and all your friends have kids, tell your friends, "I would LOVE to come along to the park/zoo/museum and help corral your children!" because your friends-with-kids do not want to be WEIRD and think you might like doing kid things, but if you TELL them you will willingly do kid things, they will be all over it! Like, if you are willing to stand with my stroller while I take my oldest to the bathroom, we are SQUARE FOREVER.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:06 PM on August 13, 2021 [14 favorites]

I guess I'm a really unusual person in that basically none of my mom's friends had kids or were married when I was small. I thought my mom was the weird one for having kids. Her friends babysat us on my parents' date nights. They were our pen pals and sent us richly illustrated stories about their work colleagues. For a few years my mom's friend nearby did a birthday sleepover with each kid where she'd buy us a ton of candy, rent a movie, eat fast food for dinner and then stay up late together watching the movie. Then she'd send us home, crabby, with a huge bag of candy, no longer her problem. She lived alone with three cats and I was very allergic to them but I drugged myself up and went over every year anyway.

As I got older my mom made friends with some of my sister's friends' parents and then I guess she was friends with other moms. But literally none of her friends when I was a young child had kids. I always thought being married and having kids was the outlier position for grown women. Only a couple of my aunts have kids, too. I have way more aunts and uncles than I have first cousins. And I am the only person in my generation on either side of my family to have children.

On the one hand, I'm glad procreation always felt very, very optional to me. That's as it should be. On the other, I'm really sad my cousins don't have kids and neither of my sisters have had them yet. I have a lot of very cool friends and family who would have extremely cool kids and by and large they just aren't doing that. I don't really vibe with my fellow parents, and it feels like fkn everyone says they want to be the "cool aunt" to my kids. My kids have plenty of cool aunts... I'd honestly welcome a couple of cool cousins too :(
posted by potrzebie at 8:51 PM on August 13, 2021 [3 favorites]

I come from a big Catholic family (my mom was one of seven). I think she took getting married and having kids so much for granted that she never pressured me about it because it was a forgone conclusion. So when I got married and didn’t have kids, she was startled (and asked my husband if he was barren) and did keep asking about when I was having them but I was old enough to be able to shrug it off. And then my sister had a couple of kids and I had a hysterectomy so that was that.
Even so, through books mostly, and through a beloved teacher who lived alone with an incredible library, I always saw other ways to be. Even my mom’s family had Tita Luz, my great aunt, who never married and taught in France as a young woman and was a steel-spined person who ordered her life in the exact way she wanted it to be. She was the plastic-on-the-sofa sort of person and I think all her relations realized kids were way too chaotic for her to be expected to cope with. Anyway, as I got older and realized I had no drive whatsoever to have kids, I had already internalized that there were many ways to be and somehow aside from questions about it occasionally, I have never felt any real pressure about it.
posted by PussKillian at 5:54 AM on August 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

How do I find all of these childfree people who want to hang out with my kid (& me)?! What are the signs? (besides apparently cats??) I am looking forward to embracing Eyebrows' wisdom and inviting friends to do kid stuff with me.

I grew up surrounded by loving aunts with no children and an endless capacity for storytelling, laughing at their own jokes and embracing weird lifestyles choices. Also, I was first told a relative was gay at such a young age I didn't understand the conversation. Yes mom & dad, Aunt E always brings a nice lady with her to stuff, why are we talking about this? My sisters are older than me so they may have understood the context better. I have always appreciated the many models of womanhood I witnessed as a child.
posted by Emmy Rae at 1:10 PM on August 14, 2021 [2 favorites]