I'm Not Defined By My Lack of Progeny

The other night, someone approached me on my reasons for not having children for my own. I struggled for an answer at first, because the way it came out hurt a bit. It almost seemed that lack of children was an abomination of some sort. My answer was simple, "It was never an option." When you are young, there are a great deal of stereotypes that are thrown your way. You are told that you must attend college, meet the perfect mate, marry this perfect person, and have a couple or more children. In today's standards, that can go along with the parents both having careers and paying for a nanny or outside childcare. Many families even have stay-at-home dads or moms. The family dynamic is very different as well, because you have single parent households, blended family households, and same-sex parents households as well as the mother and father nuclear family dynamic.

Now I never went the perfect route in life, because I wasn't really the healthiest person in the world. With that element in place for me, my schooling ended abruptly and I ended up getting my GED. My difficulty in life happens to be grand mal and petit mal epilepsy, which has me on many different medications that would endanger the life of the child from conception toward birth. So when my husband and I met each other, fell in love, and eventually married, we decided that it would be fiscally sound and medically reasonable if we did not try to have a child of our own. We also decided that adoption was not something that we wanted opt into either. With epilepsy, I'm not really sure that my chances of adoption would be very likely and the cost of adoption abroad is extremely costly to say the very least. That does not count the emotional roller-coaster and uncertainty that goes along with adoption as well.

Because my husband and I have made the conscious decision to not have children doesn't mean that we do not like children, it simply means that we aren't cut out for that type of lifestyle. There are many moments within our lives as a couple where we often realize that we are not parent material. We enjoy the freedoms of being able to do anything we want without the worry of having to find childcare or a sitter. With the way the economic climate is during the financial crisis we are experiencing between 2009-2010, it is not fiscally responsible for a couple in our position to conceive. My husband and I will not have to worry about the fiscal and environmental strain that one or more children will put on us as a couple. (i.e, college, cars, diapers, food, clothing, transportation, medical care, utilities, etc.) The environmental wake from every child is absolutely astounding if you think about it.

I have been married for almost fifteen years without the pitter-patter of little feet in our household. Statistically the odds for our marriage lasting over ten years were actually against us according to the most recent study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control in 2002. They say that seventy-nine percent of couples who conceived and had children within eight months of getting married were still together after ten years of marriage. Fifty-five percent of couples stayed together more than ten years if they had a child prior to marriage. Here is the clincher! Only thirty-four percent of couples, who remained childless, celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. I found that to be unbelievable and sad at first. When I sat there and mulled it over and over in mind for a while, I thought, "Wow, Donald and I beat the odds! How intriguing!" Those who think that our life is joyless, because we are childless, distinctly forget that you make your own happiness as a couple.