Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes

by Phoebe Robinson

  Oh! Almost forgot. Even though I was a royal shit to my parents when I was a teenager, my adolescent kids and I will be the Black Lorelai and Rory of Gilmore Girls, just bff’ing it and talking out all of our feels. (Reality: )

  Yep, this is real ignorant, but can you blame me? Ever since I was a child, society painted motherhood as this effortless job that every woman automatically knows how to, wants to, and is always happy to do, because the patriarchal narrative is that every woman is the same, thinks the same, and wants the same things. Huh? Women can’t even agree on whether man buns / ponytails are attractive or terrible on men* but we’re supposedly all on the same page about something as life-altering as motherhood? Err, I don’t know who keeps flapping their gums and telling this lie, but they need to stop. Actually, I do know who keeps this theory about women alive: basically EVERYBODY. Seriously, the notion that women are destined to be moms and if they don’t fulfill that destiny, something is wrong with them is reinforced everywhere. I’m talking about the friends who warn women that they will regret not being a mother, family members who pressure women into carrying on the family legacy,* acquaintances, strangers, you name it. Practically everyone has a vested interest in women carrying out their supposed “duty,” and the people who are typically the loudest about their interest are, you guessed it, men. Oh, men just love having opinions about and creating the parameters women are supposed to live within that then get passed down from generation to generation, shaping communities and societies and ultimately resulting in a suffocating definition of what a woman can be and what her life can look like.

  As I’m approaching my late thirties, I can’t help but marvel at how the boundaries of modern womanhood are expanding, thus allowing more of us to architect our lives. That is certainly worth celebrating. However, though we’ve evolved significantly from how women were treated during the fictional events of the sixties (Mad Men), as well as the real-life events of the sixties (having trouble getting a credit card; Yale refusing to admit women until 1969; women being discouraged from entering the workplace), there is still much to do in terms of reconceptualizing what it means to be a woman and to be a mother. Being honest about how messy, complicated, and difficult child-rearing can be sometimes still puts mothers at risk of being viewed as failures (because motherhood is supposed to be a joyful breeze) or ungrateful complainers (because voicing any normal frustrations is proof of one being unappreciative about the miracle of life), when it should be viewed as someone acknowledging the complexities of being a mom. More and more women speaking their truths on issues such as postpartum depression, the uneven division of household labor in two-parent homes, how the love for your child is unlike any other kind of love in the world, and that there’s no storybook, one-size-fits-all way to be a mother actually allows people who want to have kids to make a more informed decision rather than being duped by a fantasy they’ll never be able to live up to. But it’s not just about making sure soon-to-be mothers are making informed decisions. It’s about guaranteeing that no matter what a woman chooses, everyone will refrain from judgment because choosing to be a mother and choosing to be childfree are both decisions worth celebrating because the celebration is in the fact that a woman chose the trajectory of her life.

  That’s right: Celebrate the childfree. Not the way we do with moms and Mother’s Day. No one’s asking for that. Women who don’t have kids want more than merely being “accepted” or “tolerated.” Celebrate them the fuck home as Kenny Loggins sang. I’M BLACK, I SWEAR! In all seriousness, society has a long way to go in its treatment of childfree women. Such as: People must learn to not treat them as an inconvenience that’s been thrust upon them, or even concern themselves with why some women opt out of motherhood, and, most important, the public must put effort into resisting the almost Pavlovian impulse of relegating childfree women to the outskirts of society. And, finally, we must task ourselves to stop pitying or invalidating a woman’s life simply because she doesn’t want to be a parent. Because the path to becoming a voluntarily childfree person is not an easy one. While the process is uniquely different for each person, what I can say with absolute certainty is that, across the board, not being a mother is one of the most internally scrutinized choices of a woman’s life, even if the woman has known since she was a child that she doesn’t want children. Society will do its best to sow the seeds of doubt about that decision within her and it may take some time for her to uproot them. Well, if it’s not clear by now, je suis one of the childfree, and I guess now would be a good time to resume our currently scheduled program that’s already in progress: Motherhood: How I Went from “I Wanna Be a Momma” to “That’s Gonna Be a No from Me, Dawg.”

  Being from the Midwest and attending a private Catholic prep school, even though I’m not religious, meant a lot of things—having a sense of humility, caring about the greater good, eating at Wahlburgers more often than I care to admit to—but perhaps the biggest aspect of being a Midwestern gal was the expectation that I would most likely follow the path of steady job → marriage → house → kids. Many of my former classmates were doing just that in Ohio. Securing well-paying jobs with retirement benefits. Falling in love. Buying the houses of their dreams with their spouses. Getting pregnant and having children. And preferably, all before the age of thirty. Meanwhile, my life in NYC looked nothing like that as I was entering my late twenties. I still had a day job because despite being a few years into my comedy career, it rarely paid in anything other than beer and chicken wings. I was saddled with debt, and paying rent on time was a rare occurrence. And to make matters worse, except for a few over-before-they-started relationships, my hopelessly romantic behind was very single. Just watching 27 Dresses and identifying way too hard with Katherine Heigl’s Jane, who is always the bridesmaid (twenty-seven times, duh), yet never the bride: “See, she’s totally me if I liked weddings. And enjoyed being a bridesmaid. And had that many friends.” Anyway, one evening after a long day of work, stand-up comedy, and feeling like I wasn’t measuring up, I logged on to Facebook for a distraction.

  LIES! Okay. Let me preface this by writing that I know I’m not the only person who does the following nonsense, so take your Judge Mathis glasses off and refrain from criticizing me. Truth is I logged on to Facebook because sometimes when I’m down in the dumps, I poke at the wound a little bit and wallow in the sadness because, in the moment, that’s easier than pulling myself out of it. Anyway. I began scrolling and it was business as usual: people posting BuzzFeed articles, selfies, funny videos, etc. Then I saw one of my former high school classmates. She was standing in front of a ranch-style house with her husband and their child, holding a set of keys with a caption that read: “We did it! We’re officially homeowners!” Instead of just letting out a single Glory tear and then moving on with my night, I wrapped myself in my comforter and began ugly crying and mumbling about how my life was a mess and that I was so behind. That feeling, which I had held inside for several years, was finally and messily spilling out of me. “So behind, so behind, so behind” became the refrain of the night, and since there was no one there to snap me out of it, I cried and cried and cried until my eyes puffed up and I choked on saliva. Then I cried some more and remained in a funk for weeks.

  See?!?! This is what not minding your business gets you: wailing like you’re in The Handmaid’s Tale. All I had to do was keep my masochist-in-training behind off social media and deal with my thoughts of inferiority either by myself or with a friend / family member, and I wouldn’t have tempted fate and gotten my feelings hurt. But truth be told, there was no reason for me to be throwing myself a pity party because I didn’t even want kids! Or the ranch-style house, for that matter! Don’t get me wrong; at the time, I would have loved to have been financially stable, have a decent apartment, and be dating someone amazing. However, in spite of all those perceived failings, my teenage dream was to live in New York City and build a career in entertainment. I was doing just that and s
till, I felt as though my life was nothing but a series of shortcomings, which is by societal design.

  A woman can be achieving her goals, which people swear is one of the tenets of feminism, but if those goals are not in line with what the world at large has deemed as the ultimate objective—settling down and becoming a mother—she might conclude that she’s completely missed the point of being an adult. Worse than that, she is made to feel that she chose to fail at being a woman, a failure that is not an individual one, but an attack on the greater good. The punishment for this crime can range from being isolated from friends and family, to mini existential crises, the seeds of which society planted in her long ago, which then bloom anytime anything good happens so as to undercut the joy she feels, to potentially no man wanting to spend the rest of his life with her if they know having kids is not an option. Hence the waterworks from me that night. So, there I was, twenty-seven years old, sobbing alone in my apartment, fearing that because I didn’t want to have kids it meant that I also couldn’t have a soul mate.

  Now, nothing major happened that made me decide to not have kids. There was never a deep conversation with my parents or a best friend that set off alarms that motherhood might not be for me. I didn’t have a pregnancy scare that rattled me to my core nor did I babysit one of my friends’ kids for an afternoon and think, No thanks. It was most likely just a series of little moments throughout the years coupled with the fact that as I got older, when I envisioned my life, children were never in the picture.

  Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I should want them and that maybe all I was doing was tricking myself into believing I was living the life I wanted when, in actuality, I did want kids and I was merely putting off the inevitable and refusing to grow up. Or worse. Perhaps the fact that the choice to be childfree wasn’t a torturous one meant that I’m intrinsically broken, which, for a hopeless romantic, feels devastating. If I don’t want to be a mom, I must be damaged, so why would anyone want me as their wife? is something I’d ask myself routinely, because despite the messaging that all women are baby crazy while men have a “take it or leave it” attitude toward being a parent, it’s simply not true. A 2013 Associated Press poll found that 80 percent of men wanted to be fathers in comparison to 70 percent of women. The AP noted that “dads were more likely than moms . . . to say they saw positive effects from fatherhood on their love life and career” (no surprise there), and 14 percent of men stated that the top reason for becoming a father someday is “to carry on traditions or family history.”

  The idea of “someday” haunted me and mutated in my brain to mean “someday, my biological clock will chime, alerting me that I should have a family,” “someday, I’ll find the One and realize that all along, I wanted to be a mother,” and “someday, if I have children, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll be what a woman should be.” Every day, I wasted energy hoping that “someday” would turn into “today,” and the anxiety I felt would disappear. Until it did, I stalled with any dating prospect, because while I continued not wanting kids, I wanted to want them so I could feel normal and hopefully the guy would choose me.

  So I projected the idea that when it came to motherhood, I was keeping my options open. I went from “Maybe in my thirties,” to “Once I’m in my thirties and I’m not where I want to be professionally, I’m definitely freezing my eggs,” to “I mean, I can always do IVF in my forties like some of my friends have already done,” to “Who knows? Maybe in my fifties, I’ll be like Janet Jackson or Sandra Bullock and want to be a mom. I can always adopt,” to “When I’m eighty-nine years old and about to Crip walk into Heaven as a Kirk Franklin song plays in the background, perhaps I’ll be ready to raise a child.” Clearly, the subtext in all this text was I’M STALLING TO THE POINT THAT I’D RATHER BE AT DEATH’S DOOR THAN SPEND FIVE MINUTES ENTERTAINING MY OFFSPRING BY DOING A REMIX OF “HEAD, SHOULDERS, KNEES, AND TOES” WHILE MY HUSBAND BEATBOXES AN 808 BEAT. A subtext I’m sure that everyone in my life picked up on while my goofy behind was the last to know. Sort of like the time when I thought Jon Hamm wanted to date me because we emailed twice, so I started talking to some of my friends about how I’m down to be bicoastal since he lived in L.A., and while they were supportive as all good friends are, they were also like, “Uhhhhhh, y’all have only exchanged basic-ass Gmail addresses, so maybe stop doing Kegels while calling your Alaska Airlines rep to cash in those miles?” Clearly, there have been many times in my life where I was de–Looney Tunes. And this whole song and dance about how I was going to be a mother one day was yet another example, but I couldn’t help it.

  The finality of rejecting motherhood seemed so . . . rigid and stubborn. Like not having children was due to my unwillingness to change my mind about motherhood one day rather than because I’m a rational person who knows what’s best for my life. And we all know, according to society, there are few things worse than the perception that a woman is uncompromising, as if being a mother when you don’t want to can even be considered a “compromise.” So I kept pretending and relationships kept not working out, which I never realized was partially because I was not being my authentic self and the stress from that manifested in me being a workaholic or more neurotic than usual because distractions are always the easier option than facing the reality of who you actually are.

  Then I met British Baekoff. Being in the presence of someone who has their own doubts and insecurities yet walks through life certain of who he is and what he wants was dope to witness. I mean, if he could so thoroughly like me for me and never once second-guess those feelings, then I ought to stop questioning myself and my feelings when it comes to parenthood, especially because he was giving me an out to reveal my true self by hinting at not wanting to be a father. Right?

  Nope. At least that’s how I felt in the early stages of our relationship, since he’s younger than me. How many times have we watched a grown-ass man living the bachelor / serial monogamist life, professing that “kids aren’t in the cards” for him, and then he turns fifty-one and a half and all of a sudden, he wants a son to play catch with; meanwhile, his geriatric sperm is going, “Uh, I was fully enjoying going to the cinema at three p.m., drinking room-temp Metamucil, and wearing the memory foam sneakers that retired NFL quarterback Joe Montana wore in a Skechers commercial”? All. The. Damn. Time. Now, does this man adopt a child and become a single dad like many a Hollywood starlet? No. Does he date and eventually marry an appropriately aged single mom and get an instant family? Hell no! He decides only the carrier of the youngest (of legal age, of course) and freshest womb is worthy of being his wife. Le sigh.

  Whenever I see pictures of [insert famous/wealthy man], age sixty-six, and his new girlfriend [insert ridiculously attractive woman trying to turn a gap year into a gap life], age twenty-four, and the pics are accompanied by an article about all the things they have in common, such as them both knowing her checking account and routing numbers, I truly wonder if not working is worth it. Like, I get that obtaining money and nice things without actually having to work is tight, but . . . IF STARING DOWN THE BARREL OF A TENURED PEEN HAS YOU TAKING A DEEP BREATH LIKE JAPANESE COMPETITIVE EATER KOBAYASHI IN THE FINAL ROUND OF A HOT DOG EATING CONTEST, PUT THAT DONG DOWN AND UPDATE YOUR MOTHERFUCKIN’ LINKEDIN PROFILE. LIKE, GET A REGULAR OL’ JOB AND FILL OUT TIME SHEETS BIWEEKLY. IT WON’T KILL YOU.

  Point is, I knew British Baekoff was the One early on in our relationship, but I was afraid that all his jokes about not wanting to be a dad would eventually stop once he turned thirty, or thirty-five, or forty, or older. So I either didn’t say anything in response to those comments or I chuckled and assured him that he would be a great father. After all, I’d rather be right all along about my unfounded fear that he would eventually leave me to start a family with someone than be blindsided that I was not the One for him. Again, he repeatedly said he didn’t want children, but that truth wasn’t louder than the paranoia in my head. So we kept right on with our relationship without
me being all the way honest about my concerns until we moved in together.

  I’d just turned thirty-four. After sixteen years of hustling and saving, I finally owned an apartment. In Brooklyn. It was my first apartment without a mouse or cockroach problem and the first time I ever had a washer and dryer! That’s right! Just down the hall from where I sleep I can do laundry. Aah, I made it. Anyway, one afternoon British Baekoff and I stood in our brand-new kitchen. I was content . . . and yet.

  “Do you think you’d be happy if this is it?” I asked.

  BB was sipping tea while scrolling on his phone, so he distractedly responded with “What?”

  “I mean, if it’s just you and me. No kids. Just us. For the rest of our lives. Would that be enough? Would your life feel full?”*

  He put his phone down. “You’re more than enough to fill my life.”

  Aww! How sweet! Now, the prevailing thought is that when a straight man says this to a straight woman, she’ll become so overwhelmed with love that she’ll want to poke holes in all his condoms like they’re a tray of choux pastry buns that a Great British Baking Show contestant has to fill with hazelnut buttercream before time’s up. But in the case of my boyfriend and me, we just high-fived to not having children and carried on with our Saturday afternoon. In all seriousness, I was relieved. I finally believed him and stopped fearing that he would walk out the door one day and find someone much younger to have babies with. I was also touched that I could be enough. That we could be enough. Sure, I have a small circle of friends who are voluntarily childfree, which made me feel less alone, but when it’s your soul mate, this like-mindedness feels like a cocoon that you didn’t know you needed, but now you can’t live without it. There is safety in numbers. There is safety in knowing that another person wants the same life as you. So I no longer needed to be afraid in my relationship; it was just the world that I had to contend with. And the world is a busybody with sciatica, a cute wardrobe, and a penchant for gossip, especially when it comes to women and whether or not they have kids.