From a very young age, girls are told to be quiet and small. Society tells us how to look (again, small), outlines the many things we need to “do” to maintain our appearance – shave legs, pluck/wax eyebrows, color hair – preferably lighter and blonder – and leave it long, breasts should be big and perky and if they aren’t buy a different bra or get an augmentation, starve ourselves – again, be small please, botox for the forehead and Juvederm for the cheeks – no aging here either. We’re told that getting married and having kids is our future, that career is ok as long as it comes after these other more important things.

I was ten years old when I realized I didn’t want to be a mother. Young enough to not understand the rules society expected me to follow, young enough to not foresee the programming that was in store for the next ten+ years of my life. Sure, I played with dolls as a young child. I also played with Legos and Construx, I was obsessed with building things. I loved to color, draw, and read. I played outside in the summer from sunup to sundown, chasing one of my best friends – Ronnie (a boy) – all over the neighborhood on my dirt bike. I played sports, starting with softball when I was four years old. I had short hair because I wouldn’t let my mom fuss with it. I was what we’d call a tomboy.

That didn’t change as I got older. In junior high, I was still the tomboy with short hair. I still preferred playing sports and being outside to just about everything else. I babysat here and there to make some money, but babysitting was always a job. Caring for kids was a means to an end. (usually a new pair of jeans, as tomboy or not, I loved clothes. Still do.)

By high school, I wanted to be a meteorologist when I grew up, and would tell people I didn’t want kids if they asked. I did want to get married if I met the right guy, but was certain I didn’t want to be a mom. This inevitably made people uncomfortable and was the start of several decades of people telling me I’d change my mind. I was confident I wouldn’t, and sometimes said that, but politely listened to the hundreds of people who told me otherwise. (It was ENDLESS through my 20s. Endless.)

That’s really the crux of what it is to be a woman. An excessive amount of external input telling you how to look, how to behave, how to live your life. Some women drink all of it in, swallow it whole, and then spend their lives as addicts, and/or living within the confines of an eating disorder, so poisoned by these external inputs that they lose themselves completely and become legitimately ill. Other women find a way to repel this barrage of feedback and are able to live life on their own terms. Many women find themselves some place in the middle, deeply influenced by these messages, but at the same time aware of their presence and trying to live their life around and in between them.

As a quiet woman, an introvert, I’ve had to learn to embrace my quietness, to inhabit it in a way that makes it fully mine. So that I am quiet in my own unique way, and not quiet because society tells me that a good woman is a quiet woman. I am quiet, but I have strong opinions, and in the last few years I’ve practiced speaking more of them out loud. It sometimes makes people uncomfortable. It sometimes make ME uncomfortable. It sometimes pisses people off even though that’s never my intent. But that’s something I’m practicing too. Allowing people, especially women, to have their anger. Including myself.

With regards to becoming a mother, I’m 44 now. I’ve been married for 21-1/2 years. I’ve spent the last 25+ years of my life listening to people tell me about how I’ll change my mind about kids or that I’ll regret it if I don’t have them. No decision I’ve made has invited so much input as my decision to not be a parent, especially when I was in my 20s and 30s. Everyone else knew more about how I should live my life than I did. And yet. At 44, I’m more confident than ever that I made the right decision for myself. There is not an empty chair at my table. There is no longing for the life not lived. If anything, I’m more certain by the year that I’ve made the best decision for myself. I’m not sure I would have survived being a parent, and that’s not hyperbole. And before any parent reading this feels compelled to comment on the love I’ve missed out on, the happiness I’ll not experience (I’ve been told I won’t know happiness until I become a parent, not kidding), trust that my life is full of love and happiness. It manifests itself differently in my life for sure, and there are experiences I will never have not being a parent. I’m entirely comfortable with that.

Society tells us that people who don’t have children, especially people who choose not to have children, are selfish. I’ve even said that myself. As I’ve reflected on that over the last ten years or so though, I fully reject it. I am not selfish. Or I am selfish, but not in any particularly special way. I am selfish in the way that most people are selfish. My not having children is not rooted in selfishness. It is rooted in a deep knowledge of self, a trusting of my instincts. A trusting of a knowing that first revealed itself when I was still a child.

And while these cultural messages about fulfillment and happiness being available primarily through parenthood are damaging to people like me, they are most damaging to those who desperately want to be a parent but aren’t. For every person like me who made the choice not to be a mother, there are so many more who didn’t make the choice. Who do have an empty chair, or more, at their kitchen table. While I would have enjoyed not spending 25 years explaining myself to strangers and acquaintances, I would enjoy even more if these folks didn’t have to reckon with that absence every time a stranger or a friend has an opinion. May we greet each other with more compassion, grace, and trust, may we create space for love, happiness, and fulfillment to look many different ways. May we understand that “family” can mean many things. May we not see a life lived differently as a challenge to our own choices. May we realize it’s not about us at all.

What I want for my sisters is freedom. Freedom to live, look, and act how we please. I want us to be able to define family however we’d like. I want us to freely inhabit the bodies we were given – big, small, every size in between. No more dieting to make our bodies artificially smaller. What could we do with all of the time and mental energy we’ve spent worrying about (and controlling) the size and shape of our bodies?? I want us to have long hair, short hair, no hair, and have it not mean anything. I want us to be quiet, to be loud, to be sometimes quiet and sometimes loud. I want us to be angry. I want us to tell our daughters they can be anything they want when they grow up, and for it to be the truth (in 200+ years and counting without a woman president, this is still a lie we tell our daughters). Mostly, I want to see what our society would look like, how we’d care for each other, when women are free.