18 Reasons Why I Don't Have Children

"To be a witch means to choose the ways you will and won't care for others"

and

Oct 26, 2023

Editor’s Notes (from Lane)

Welcome new readers! I have been looking forward to this guest post for months. It’s by an essayist I love, Kat Savino (whose bio is below). And it’s about a question that haunts me—how much choice do we really have in America about whether we can have children—whether we want them, or don’t want them? And what does that say about the freedom for women and birthing people in this country?

More women are choosing not to have kids to pursue fulfilling lives without them, which is always worth celebrating. And at the same time, for many our current moment is much more fraught. Post-Roe, American girls and women are being forced to give birth to children that they don’t want. And simultaneously, many who do want children—or more children—find that they don’t have freedom of choice in that either, as the cost of raising children in the U.S. becomes unattainable.

When I was in my thirties, I did want a baby, but I was in the middle of a divorce and couldn’t afford to have one on my own. Then I went through a period of waffling about whether I wanted one after all (did I really want a baby, or did patriarchy just make me think I needed a baby to be a complete person just because I have a uterus??)

After I finally did have a child with my partner several years ago, I was faced with a lot of questions again about the expense of trying for another one, given the costs of fertility treatments and child care and the cost of…everything…including my own sanity and autonomy.

Kat describes these pressures and constraints with so much tenderness and vulnerability as she mines her own history and observes the women and children around her— there are children who are mothers, and mothers who are ghosts; there is trauma, the myth of the American dream, the realities of debt and bodies and the ways that queerness can still make you a witch. Kat examines the ways that these forces work on us and shape how much freedom we really have, even in the most intimate decisions of our lives.

It’s truly an October treat to publish Kat’s work (and to be able to compensate her for her wisdom and talent), and we are offering a one-week subscription sale to celebrate. That button down below should do the trick. It helps pay contributors. You get some nice perks. Good news all around.

Happy Halloween to all the witches out there.

Kat Savino

holds an M.F.A. from Columbia University. She has published essays in Narratively, Apogee, Marie Claire, Belladonna: Matters of Feminist Practice, The Los Angeles Review, Ravishly, Speakeasy Magazine, and Prism International, where she placed third in their nonfiction contest. She is working on a hybrid memoir and a novel.

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four persons riding brooms — Photo by K. Mitch Hodge on Unsplash

18 Reasons Why I Don’t Have Children

by
Kat Savino

During the height of the pandemic, I encounter a naked kid, around five, with a bruise on his face in the street while I’m walking the dog to the park. I’m terrified. I try to talk to him, to help him, but he’s naked and the dog isn’t well behaved or good with kids. Where do you live? The kid zig-zags back and forth on the street, and seems to be trying to get into all the houses on the block. I make what feels like the only choice: I call the cops and they come.

“You’re the little mother now,” my grandmother says to me when my own mother dies. I am fourteen, and my sister, seven. I write in my journal at the time: I don’t know when I’ll ever feel relaxed again.

My father dies July of 2020; I am forty years old. During this time, I make visual art instead of writing because something feels unsayable in language, at least that of words. I feel compelled to use a rock that had a ripple impression in it, likely worn by the river where I found it. I found fossils there, too—of creatures strange and extinct, curled and spiraled. I hold the rippled rock and place a thin paper over it and using crayons, I make an impression in various colors. Then, I cut the impressions out, in bulbed shapes and slice those shapes in half, separating them. I leave a thin space between so it can be seen that the shape was once whole. As I work, I keep hearing a repeated line in my head, a tiny whispery voice saying the generations, the generations on repeat like a private earworm. It takes me a while to understand: my loss of my last biological parent means that I’m the last generation of my family. Me, I’m the end.

When I’m in my thirties, I meet a psychologist whose research focuses on women who don’t want to have children. We’re at the beach and she dances along the shoreline. She says simply: lots of women don’t want children because they were forced to parent when they were too young to do so. The waves come and erase her footprints.

I read in the news recently that more people are choosing to not have children, in numbers that are rising. However, sociologists find that many young people in their early twenties still want the same number of children as previous generations, but as they get older, they tend to have fewer children.

“People feel more worried about the future than they might have been several decades ago. They worry about the economy, child care and whether they can afford to have children,” the sociologists writes.

I see the mother of the kid who escaped his house a few days later. She talks tough, and is mad at me, but in her eyes, I recognize a hurt animal feeling I understand. She treats me coldly on some days and warmly on others. I generally try to avoid her, but lately she seems to have relented. She told me that she is working a lot and studying to be a nurse and she had fallen asleep on the couch.

When my sister tells me that she was a heroin addict, but she’s recovering, I think: this is my fault. This is my fault as the only mother figure she had after seven. I’m twenty-five; she’s nineteen. After the call, I smoke a cigarette even though I quit the summer before. It’s the last one I ever have.

Despite my mostly hard no on having kids, there is a brief time a faint maybe rustles in the back of my skull. I’m thirty-something then and with a cis-man. He has a good job, but I’m an adjunct working multiple jobs in academia. I sometimes think about this imagined strand of the multiverse: we break up as we did in real life, and I do what I did for years with a child in tow. I move from apartment to apartment in a New York City with ever rising costs while piecing together a living from various jobs while applying for full-time work. I would have certainly gone bankrupt like so many mothers. I read somewhere that it costs around $310,000 out of pocket to raise a child in the U.S., and this number just keeps going up.

In the current iteration of the universe I live in, I’m in a same-sex relationship with another woman, one who grew up poor, with no generational wealth to lean on, and we struggle. Queer people like us tend to make less money. She has a good job now, but she’s had to dig herself out of the credit card debt she accrued when she had a much less good job, and she often reminds me that people who are poor are constantly being made to pay more just for the sake of being poor. She pays in cash for gas to avoid the $100 hold on her debit card. She has gotten charged for having below the minimum in her checking account. When we started getting serious, she turned to me in a coffee shop and said, “I don’t want children.” There are lots of reasons for her beyond just the financial that could fill another essay, and one of them is that she is very tired from being poor her whole life.

I’m asked by multiple doctors while planning a fibroid embolization, which may cause early menopause, if I’ve “completed my family.” The question irritates me, as it makes me imagine the family I think they have imagined for me, which is one with children. But what if my family is just us, just our pets? The question makes me feel like it doesn’t count. “What is a family anyway?” I want to hurl back.

During a recent massage, I make a whimpering sound when my massage therapist presses a tender point at the back of my skull. I know this hurt animal feeling comes from all the years of being left alone to raise myself as a child after my mother died, but it still embarasses me. It embarasses me that I’m still learning how to take care of myself even though I’m now in my forties. It embarasses me that I get so many massages, even though they help me heal from the fact that no one touched me for years after my mother was gone and my father disappeared into his own grief. I realize that in two years, at forty-six, I’ll be the same age my mother was when she died.

It seems like every woman in my neighborhood in this rural upstate NY town is tired, and taking care of someone or someones, plural: there’s all the young mothers who walk their kids to school down the street; there’s the mother who wears scrubs with various cartoon characters whose husband is often gone–they have four or five kids and they plant flowers in their front yard; there’s a woman in her sixties who retired early to care for her disabled mother. She tells me that both her children died: the daughter overdosed and the son got into a motorcycle accident not long after. There’s the retired school teacher whose 90-something mother died after being sick for a very long time, and while her mother was dying, she told me that she was too poor to afford the hospice her mother needs, but not poor enough to get financial support. I can see the relief and grief mixed in her face when her mother dies as she puts her trash on the curb: the portable toilet, a walker, an old rug. I don’t think she has her own children either, but we never discuss it. I only know that one of her brothers died, and she cuts the pale purple flowers off of her hostas because the blooms remind her of funerals.

When I meet various fourteen- year olds now that I’m middle-aged, I realize: oh, right, I was just a kid when my mother died. I just felt so old.

In another part of the multiverse, I sometimes envision a utopia, even the lowest bar of one. In the lowest bar utopia, we all have free healthcare and free daycare that is excellent. We aren’t carrying debts from education or just from trying to make the ends meet when we just have a few scraps. We all work fewer hours and our schedules bend easily around the eight hours a day it takes to raise a child but we all still have enough to be comfortable. If we are a parent who wants to stay at home, our work is subsidized since our work would be considered work. We all have a community composed of those who have children and those who don’t; we have a true web of mutual aid into which we are all woven and we care not only for our children, but also for each other since so many of us are healing from some form of trauma that make it hard to just be a person, not to mention a parent.

The truth is: I’m afraid of the mother I might be, and I have chosen not to know.

I like to visit the rocks and trees in the park and woods and think about not just my place, but the place of humans among them. When measured against a tree, my life is so brief, and against a rock, ever briefer. When I think of the stars in the sky and how so many of them are already gone but they are seen just the same, I feel more alive and aware of something else that feels as unnamable as the grief I experienced throughout my life; the generations that have passed and the ones to come all part of something epic and also tiny all at the same time.

I want to write back to fourteen- year-old me: you will always be kind of a stress case, but it will get better.

As I stand out on the front stoop, watching, always watching, I realize: this is why people like me would be considered a witch and why I’m a sort of a witch now. To be a witch means more than just being queer in your sexuality– it means queer in that you stand outside the circle. You are choosing something different. You are choosing the ways you will and won’t care for others. Possibly because you didn’t get to choose before, but possibly not. Possibly, you are just tired.

You are a part and apart at the same time. People might think you stand in judgment when you’re just standing outside a circle, but really, you’re only asking for something better, something different, some circle that could hold all of us.

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