I should know. For whatever reasons, I never had children. So, sue me.
And now this private matter has become a scolding stick by the political Right. When my colleagues find out I do not have children, their reaction has always been first one of sympathy and second a remark meant to be comforting, like “You’re better off.” Then they tell me the problems they’re having with their adolescents, serious ordeals I’m glad I don’t have to deal with. Child rearing is the hardest job in the world, I think we all can agree. After all, Oprah Winfrey (also childless) said it several times on her TV show. As a teacher, I suppose I know a lot more about kids and teens than my childless contemporaries who work in occupations that do not involve dealing with kids on a daily basis.
But more than one school principal has asked me point blank, “Are you a parent?” Like this means anything. The implication being that only parents make the best teachers. Allow me this one brutally honest clarification: Teaching and Parenting are not the same thing.
In fact, my feminist sisters assured me that a prospective boss or employer cannot ask our (women’s) parental status. They said it’s downright illegal. Nevertheless, it happens. Still. And come on, get over it. That boat has sailed. Maybe my figure looks like a woman who’s bore a few children. So it’s an assumption … made only by male supervisors. What’s up with that? Women supervisors never ask me if I have children. And male supervisors never ask men if they’re parents. So, childless is a sexist adjective. It is intentionally meant to insult and break us presumed emotionally frail women who’ve never reproduced. There was a time when people felt sorry for women who never had children or couldn’t have children. Those days are gone. Ehhh, we don’t need their pity anyway.
And that’s another problem with the Right: Women like me, who’ve never given live birth, aren’t ‘Marilyn Monroe’ about it. We’re not all emotionally broken, harboring a deep secret sorrow throughout our entire lives, on the verge of tears, feeling incomplete as women because we never became mothers. Instead, we carry on as career women (who are, more often than not, also mothers). Not having children is sad to a point, but in this country, I thought, work and career are most important. Look at how the U.S. treats mandatory time off after giving birth, still letting each business call the shots by offering a few weeks to a few months—then it’s get back to work. Compare with Germany that provides both mothers and fathers up to three years off after the birth of a baby. Now as a teacher, I can attest, that’s more like it. The first three years of a child’s life are the most important in overall emotional, physical and psychological development. The U.S. is so far behind on this human right.
They made Murphy Brown have a baby
The difference between women and men is we have a biological clock. Tick tock. Tick tock. We’re keenly aware of the best age to reproduce (our 20s). And if we miss it, it’s gone. Only the wealthy have access to additional methods to try to create a new life, one being in vitro fertilization. But wait, the Right has problems with that method (because it involves abortion).
A couple of decades ago, it was a woman’s choice to reproduce or not. There are many reasons why some women don’t have a baby already. Has the Right forgotten about genetics, miscarriages, still births, and myriad things that can go wrong with mother and/or unborn baby during pregnancy? Pregnancy is all about the gray in life, the uncertainties, never the assurance of a perfect healthy baby. It is a huge risk for some women. To know each woman’s reason for not having children would be heartbreaking—to people who have hearts.
When I was a single career gal in my 20s and 30s, I watched TV shows with characters relating to my lifestyle, like “Seinfeld,” “Cheers” and “Murphy Brown.” The latter intrigued me because I was a news reporter, and Murphy Brown was a TV journalist based in Washington, D.C. She was the consummate career woman who worked her way up from the 1960s covering every kind of story, mostly politics. But way after she was in her 40s, she became pregnant. And she made the decision to not marry the father but have the baby. It was a decision heard round the world because Vice President Dan Quayle made a big Republican deal about it, calling this decision, by a fictitious TV sitcom’s character, inappropriate and falsely influencing young girls to do the same. (Almost half of all American girls and women who give birth are unmarried, and it’s been this way since the 1980s.)
The “Murphy Brown” premise didn’t wash with me either. I knew the network suits made TV’s Murphy Brown have a baby to bring a contrived family angle. It was like the baby didn’t belong in Murphy’s world of political banter, investigative journalism, and high-pressure national TV news. It was strange. Yet most of my work colleagues in the news biz had children, managed to do their jobs and raise kids. If it were me, I don’t know what I would have done. But that was and still is how I’ve always seen my life and careers: as a service to mankind because I don’t have children.
In closing, let me point out the one fact that has been unspoken in American politics since the Clinton administration: Teen pregnancy is the number one reason for lifelong poverty. And it’s generational: A teen mother who has a child she cannot afford often becomes a grandmother of her teen daughter’s child that they both can’t afford, and so on. See, not every female will opt for abortion even if it’s legal. But the majority of teen mothers will remain in poverty for the rest of their lives. Their opportunities are few, their future bleak, their self-worth diminished. This is true for both mother and child(ren). Poor kids are the ones I teach.
It’s a lot to ask of every woman in this country: Get busy having babies. What may be a piece of cake to most women is not for everyone. And most importantly, to have or not to have children is a woman’s private matter; no one’s business; and, despite the Right’s assumption, not political—not in the slightest.