Do You Like Kids?

Today I’m sharing a portion of the talk I gave at the last HOW TO NOT BE A MOTHER, my storytelling+ salon for women who do not have kids (by choice or by circumstance).

Thank you so very much to everyone that made our second show a huge success. And stay-tuned for the next installment, this September.

It is inevitable that as a woman without kids, you’ll be asked one of the many dreaded, invasive, inappropriate questions asked of women without kids.

Tonight I want to focus on one of those question: do you like kids?

Oh. You don’t have kids. Do you not like them?

Or

Do you not want to be a mom because you don’t like kids?

Or the way one of my dental hygienists put it when I told her I was not a mother.

Do you just hate kids? Because…I get it.

She has three kids.

And I cannot help but wonder if anyone asked her whether she liked kids when she was preparing to have some. Especially the two after the first one.

We’re thinking about starting to try soon…

Nice. Are you sure you like kids enough?

Or

We can’t wait to have a baby!

Great! But, real quick, do you know that babies become kids, and do you like those in all their age ranges?

But back to me because one of the most important premises of this show is that you are the captain of your own experience around motherhood and, therefore, just a reminder, kids.

Here, are the many ways I answer this annoying question about whether I like them:

Yes! I love kids! I babysat my whole life and have tons of nieces and nephews.

Note here that I avoid answering for why I don’t have any kids of my own.

Or

Omigod, yes! I love kids so much that I don’t have any so I don’t have to discipline them.

Here I address the elephant in the room with a cutesy half-truth.

Or my favorite

Kids? Yes. Love them. It’s adults I hate!

This confuses people so they shut up.

Obviously, none of those are real answers. And that’s fine because do you like kids is an insane question. Which kids? Whose kids? Your kids? If you have to ask me if I like your kids then I don’t like your kids.

But every time this question comes up – twice with that dental hygienist – I realize that there’s something deeper going on for me. Why do I find it so triggering? Why can’t I answer honestly? What even is my honest answer? How could I possibly not know?

To try and chip away at all those quandaries, I sat down one afternoon and made some notes about what I really think about kids in their various age brackets. A wild exercise!

Group one: babies

After much thought, it turns that, yes! I like babies! I’m in awe of them, even though they’re terrifying. (So small. So easy to break. So varied in behavior. Do you know about collick??)

I think they’re a complete and total wonder. I love holding brand news ones and singing little made-up songs to them. I think a happy one year old is absolute heaven. And babies put things in perspective/make people happy (except when they don’t because oddly nothing brings out family drama like a baby!). Plus, babies of all ages tend to really like me, which is a huge piece of what I like in any person. So, I’m willing to say that yes, I do like babies as a broad concept, and I do think I would be good at taking care of one. Parents with their babies is more complicated, but I give them a lot of grace and space because they’re dealing with this brand new, terrifying thing (and maybe also collick!!), and, as I’ve learned, many of them did not do as much babysitting as one perhaps should before baby owning...

Moving onto to toddlers.

Let’s call that anything from 2-5 years old. They’re also pretty great! So curious. Sooo cute. Oooh their little dimpled elbows! Toddlers are learning everything so fast in a truly miraculous way. What a thing to behold! And yet all that learning everything, especially how not to get extremely hurt, is overwhelming to me. My specific nervous system struggles with the vibes of toddlers, especially during mealtime and/or transition time in or out of any location but especially a car. Also, I have a really hard time witnessing tantrums and/or getting sick, which seems to be what toddlers are doing a lot of the time. But this one’s tough because I really love making art with them…and telling them stories with the voices…and watching them watch things with wonder and awe. And, again, they tend to really like me…. Net/net I’d say I like toddlers as much as I don’t like toddlers. But, if I had to babysit a toddler versus a baby; I would pick baby because they move less. I’ll also add this re: toddlers & their parents: tricky… Being in the same room as a parent trying to get a toddler to do something they do not want to do — oof. If you are having a tense moment with your toddler and I suddenly go to the bathroom, I didn’t really have to go.

Things get complicated with group three: school-aged children.

Huge range. 5-11 years old. I should break it down further, but I no longer remember how they are different at each age.

While I have liked some school-aged kids, I have not loved most. Especially when I was one… And yet! I currently like a few very much and am literal pen pals with three of them. This set is a delight. Creative. Inspiring. Open-minded. Oddly wise. The rest… inconsistent. I’d say, on average, not a great hang. Especially these modern ones. I find them very mouthy. Very demanding. Very blasé about authority. As a school-aged child I was like Samantha-the-American-Girl doll without the money, which is how I think most kids should be. Dressed up. Obedient. And living in New York with a chic Grandmother.

Parents tend to chill out a little when their kids hit this range, which is a plus for people spending time around them without the focus pull of their own children, but to drill down to a final answer on this group: if I had to choose between spending three hours with an eight-year-old or an 80-year-old, it would be a very tough call. I’d need to hear the eight-year-old try to be funny before I could decide because I really struggle with a kid that thinks he’s funny but is not funny at all. Unfortunately this, by my estimate, is most of them. And I am a very good sport/liar, but I would not survive pretending to laugh at a kids’ bad sense of humor until that kid was old enough for tough love which, by my observation of modern parenting, is now never.

Final Group: pre-teens and teenagers

This is easy because I hate them all. The bad ones are horrible, and the great ones are like short adults, so they don’t count.

So, did I do it? Did I figure out if I like kids? Did I answer my hygienist’s question?

Was that even really the question I think she was asking?…

Now we’re really getting somewhere.

As I dug even deeper into how I actually feel about the energy, dynamics, needs and joys of kids at any/every age, I realized that eacg time I’m asked whether I like them, I hear another question hiding underneath: are you a good person?

As a culture, we love deciding whether people are good or bad. Likeable or unlikeable. Women especially. It’s always felt to me like we’ve decided women that like kids are good and women that don’t like kids are bad. Name a wonderful, loving, celebrated heroine of a TV/film character that does not have kids? (Besides Miss Frizzle and Miss Honey…who teach kids).

Children are innocent. Children are pure. Children are the future. Whitney Houston said so! If you’re not going to have them, you can at least earn back some goodness points by making it clear you really like them.

What’s interesting is that I know a woman that hates being around kids but volunteers with the elderly three days a week. So, is she good or bad?

I met a pediatric oncologist who eloped to avoid kids at her wedding. Her own nieces and nephews. Saint or sinner?

What about the woman that avoids kids at every turn but rescues animals that she rehabilitates into therapy pets for…autistic kids.

And here’s the trickiest one. A woman once told me that she actively hates her own kids but wouldn’t trade them for the world. How do we judge her?

How does she judge herself?

And how can we finally stop doing all this judging??

Ironically, one way may be to answer all the dreaded, invasive, inappropriate questions we get about motherhood with more honestly. To show that women without kids (women in general!) are as nuanced as kids themselves.

Because in a very weird way, the question do you like kids is a sign of some very positive change.

No one asked our grandmothers whether they liked kids. Or their mother. Or theirs.

Until now, no one had to answer the question because no one got to answer the question. As a woman, you were expected to become a mother. No one cared whether you liked mothering kids. We’ve all seen MAD MEN.

But now, so many of us are deeply considering motherhood before stepping into the role. We are asking ourselves whether we enjoy children at every stage of their lives enough to spend a dominant percentage of our lives invested in raising them, along with so, so many other questions relative to motherhood. And we are finding paths to get comfortable with ourselves if the answer is, no.

I understand that our no, my personal no, can be complicated for some people to hear for many, many reasons. Especially if one of those reasons is that the person was not willing, ready or able to ask and answers those same questions.

Because what if the other question hiding underneath do you like kids is actually do you know yourself?

Fucking kids...

Maybe the whole point of them is to push us to ask all these questions about how to be adults. It certainly helped me to be pushed. And now I finally know these things:

I don’t think you have to love kids to be a parent. I don’t think you have to hate kids to not be a parent. Sometimes I love them. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I wonder if my life would be better if I was raising them. Most times I’m certain that my specific life is better for me because I am not.

But I am a very good person, and no one can see the specificity of my goodness – and how my life can be a beautiful lesson for kids - if I hide my truth.

So, could you all please make like my dental hygienist and ask me the dreaded, but, it turns out, incredibly important question?

Audience: Do you like kids?

Me: Oh, thank you so much for asking. I love being around kids sometimes and have a really special connection with many, but other times their energy and/or the dynamics surrounding them aren’t a fit for my nervous system, my personality or my vision for the best version of my life.

Anyway, do you like dogs?

XO, J

This week’s Brave Confession: I’m reading Perimenopause Power by Maisie Hill and am ashamed by how little I know about my own body!