So, well, why did I never want to be a mother?

That’s the hard part — hard to explain, hard to understand. I just didn’t. The active, overt desire was just…not there.

I like to be alone. (Despite all this getting-married I seem to be so fond of doing.) From my perspective out here, it looks as though once a woman has a child, she is basically never again alone until they grow up and move away. I just don’t know if I could enjoy anyone’s company that thoroughly, that unceasingly.

My husband had the flu last week, and holed himself up in the guest room to sleep it off and to keep his germs from me. After four or five days, I really started missing him. I’m pretty sure you can’t do that with kids, sick or otherwise — can’t just leave soup at their door and check on them a couple times a day.

Of course there’s all the practical considerations too: child-rearing is expensive; you have to think about their schools, and their clothes, and pay attention to their friends and what they do online; you have to guide and shape them and turn them into decent human beings. But those are just reasons to pile on to support a decision that came from somewhere far deeper, far less accessible to me.

It seems to me that people who want children are just fundamentally different from me. In the past I’ve said that there’s a piece missing from me, the wanting-children piece; but I no longer really resonate with the negative connotation of that. Just as I don’t like the word childless, and am happy that others like me have settled on childfree, even childfree by choice. I’m free of having had children. I got to choose that.

I’m really, really happy about that.

I don’t actually feel like something’s missing in me. I feel complete, in fact almost too full of things I want to do, things that drive me, things that interest me. I work and I write and I read and I cook and I love and I sleep and I hike and I garden and I swim and and and…

I feel you should really want to be a parent, if you’re going to be one. It should be an active, conscious, rational and emotional choice.

It would be desperately unfair to a child to force them to have me as a mother.