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I never want to have kids.

A combination of factors has led me to this decision. For one, I am tokophobic, which means that I have a crippling fear of pregnancy. That fear mixes quite well with my concurrent utter disinterest in children. My stance is purely logical, but other people can’t seem to grasp why kids are not a variable I want in my life. To my frustration, many try to actively dissuade me from my voluntary childlessness.

According to the internet, my position has a name and an identity: childfree. While I have never ascribed to any community based on this, I do find myself craving validation and understanding in the face of a society that often equates womanhood to motherhood.

This correlation has become increasingly prevalent to me as I get older. Not many of my friends have had children, but plenty are married, so these discussions come up. When I express my total indifference to being a mom, many people seem shocked, as though I have crossed some primordial line and have forever damned myself to a lonely and meaningless life.

Most of the blowback comes from older women—friends of my parents, parents of my friends. I know these people well. They are otherwise lovely and multifaceted individuals. Some I consider not just family friends, but my own friends. However, this one issue, the gaping hole where apparently my maternal instincts should be, is a sticking point, never failing to bring out the most dismissive sentiments.

“Lex, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Yes, I do.

“You’ll want kids. This is just a phase.”

No, I won’t. I’ve felt this way for as long as I can remember.

“You’re only twenty-six. That’s too big of a decision to make at this age.”

My age is irrelevant. I don’t want them now and I won’t want them later.

“I didn’t want kids either. Then I had one and it changed everything. Just wait.”

This won’t change. And I’m totally cool with that.

The tokophobia is visceral, the kind of feeling I can no more control than, say, hunger or exhaustion. The idea of my becoming pregnant is so unbearable that I can barely make it through this sentence without my anxiety peaking. The whole process creeps me out—from conception to birth and even breastfeeding—but what underlies it all is the feeling that it is somehow a violation of my corporeal self. When I think of pregnancy, I imagine parasites and the chestbursters from Alien. Remind me again why I’m supposed to want this?

Beyond that, kids don’t charm me the way they do others. While some people find no greater joy than being around children, cooing at toddlers and babysitting the preteen set, I am not that person. If my tokophobia was the sole problem and I otherwise wanted children, I could follow in my parents’ footsteps and adopt. But really, kids just aren’t appealing to me. I’d much rather be hanging out with a dog than a human child.

It sounds sort of funny and I definitely joke about it often. But I also take the implications seriously: I have prefaced all my burgeoning romantic relationships with a caveat about my childfree status so no one feels misled further down the line.

Last year, the CDC released the results of a survey it conducted on family growth nationwide. Of the 61.8 million women between the ages of fifteen and forty-four at the time of the survey, 43% were childless, but only 6% of those childless were voluntarily so. Though we didn’t need the stats to prove it, these confirm that people like me are definitely a minority.

Consequently, it’s rare for me to find others that feel the same. I know a handful of women who either don’t care for or abhor the idea of having children, but it’s not surprising to me that other women (and some men) have turned to virtual outlets, like the subreddit /r/childfree, to establish a place for commiseration. In these virtual spaces, the childfree are, well, free to be as honest as they would like about their decision to abstain from the parenting life.

I’m not active on Reddit, so this is my space to be honest about my childfree status and ask for acceptance.

While I cannot speak for others, let me be clear about what my choice means, or rather, doesn’t mean: this is not an affront to motherhood. For many, motherhood and pregnancy is a defining facet of their life. It can be stressful and fraught with emotional potholes at times, but for the vast majority of mothers I know, the negatives are negligible when juxtaposed with the mutual devotion between mother and child. All of that is fantastic. I’m all for people doing what it is that makes them feel whole, which is why I wish people would recognize that I already feel whole without offspring.

Oh, and one other thing: for those who might make the mistake of assuming that my mother and I had a poor relationship that could account for my disinterest in kids, that’s not true either. My mother was everything to me, a confidant and a guide. When I wasn’t at home, we spoke to each other several times a day by phone and email, even when I was living in London and there was a five-hour time difference in our way. When she passed away in 2011, I was devastated and still am.

But despite my enduring love for my own mother, I still have no desire to play her role. She knew that and was comfortable with it. It’s hard for me to see why others deny me that same acceptance by deriding my perspective as youthful naiveté.

Motherhood is not inevitable. So please don’t bug me about having kids. I don’t want them, even if I’m glad you do. What I do want is my choice to be understood and respected.