Hubby and I will be married for 14 years this summer. The intrusive questions about why we did not have kids have not stopped yet. And I often find myself defending our decision, as if we should be guilty about not having kids. Whether we have kids or not is our private decision and I expect the world to respect our decision. Unfortunately, it does not work that way.
I spent little more than two weeks in India and the following people asked me: neighbors, couple cousins, my uncle, few friends from school, and shockingly an ex-professor from my engineering school whom I met after 15 years! I am tired of replying. I have also observed that these questions do not get asked to the husband, the curious people waylay the wife. Most of these people are looking for an item of gossip, like paparazzi after a juicy story.
Hubby and I had a very long courtship and then marriage. We will have known each other and stayed committed for 22 years this summer. When we were young, of course we had thought of having a family. That is what we saw everyone doing, it seemed to be a part of being a couple. We copied that dream. But as we matured, it did not make sense to us.
We do not feel the need to procreate to propagate our genes. There is nothing that remarkable about our genes that need to be preserved. We both come from messed up dysfunctional families and there seems no reason why such such genes need to transfer to the next generation. We are not very proud our genes.
Many have implored that we have kids so that they will look after us when we grow old, or fill up our time when we grow old, or be a source of fun to our aging parents. We do not subscribe to that philosophy of kids being sort of an old age insurance. Both hubby and I live very far away from our own parents and cannot afford them the satisfaction of 'being there' for them. We do not expect our kids, if we ever had any, to do the same.
Next ridiculous argument that we find ourselves fighting is that kids are the vehicle by which parents fulfill their life's work and purpose. Some love to evoke the rules set by the mysterious man in the sky, but I am not going there. We feel we have only so many years of productive energy. We want to invest that energy in doing something to make the world a better place. We both have our own pet projects. We are not very keen on investing 60-80% of that energy on kids with the expectation that they will make the world a better place by being our proxy. We do not want to delegate our work effort to our kids and burden them. They should have their own dreams and purpose. We rather do the hard work ourselves. This is our choice.
And no, we do not need kids to act as a band-aid or crutch for our relationship. When we go through ups and downs in our relationship, we will 'fix' it ourselves. We refuse to use a kid as an in-between. We have observed first hand so many cases where the poor kid has to act as the tiebreaker all his/her life. That is a very wrong reason to have a kid, we believe.
Lastly, we have never felt the overwhelming feeling of the 'biological clock ticking'. We feel that given the billions of people on the planet are already fighting over limited resources, the 'bright future' of the new generation does not look that bright. We have Freo and Ozzie, our poodles, who make our lives complete enough. If we ever feel the need to nurture another human life within our household, we will adopt. For now we do not feel any such need or desire. May be in the future, who knows....
So, there you go, I have laid it all out open on the internet. We will not be making babies.
We respect every couple's personal and private reasons for having kids of their own, we expect to be afforded the same respect for having decided not to have any.
I spent little more than two weeks in India and the following people asked me: neighbors, couple cousins, my uncle, few friends from school, and shockingly an ex-professor from my engineering school whom I met after 15 years! I am tired of replying. I have also observed that these questions do not get asked to the husband, the curious people waylay the wife. Most of these people are looking for an item of gossip, like paparazzi after a juicy story.
Hubby and I had a very long courtship and then marriage. We will have known each other and stayed committed for 22 years this summer. When we were young, of course we had thought of having a family. That is what we saw everyone doing, it seemed to be a part of being a couple. We copied that dream. But as we matured, it did not make sense to us.
We do not feel the need to procreate to propagate our genes. There is nothing that remarkable about our genes that need to be preserved. We both come from messed up dysfunctional families and there seems no reason why such such genes need to transfer to the next generation. We are not very proud our genes.
Many have implored that we have kids so that they will look after us when we grow old, or fill up our time when we grow old, or be a source of fun to our aging parents. We do not subscribe to that philosophy of kids being sort of an old age insurance. Both hubby and I live very far away from our own parents and cannot afford them the satisfaction of 'being there' for them. We do not expect our kids, if we ever had any, to do the same.
Next ridiculous argument that we find ourselves fighting is that kids are the vehicle by which parents fulfill their life's work and purpose. Some love to evoke the rules set by the mysterious man in the sky, but I am not going there. We feel we have only so many years of productive energy. We want to invest that energy in doing something to make the world a better place. We both have our own pet projects. We are not very keen on investing 60-80% of that energy on kids with the expectation that they will make the world a better place by being our proxy. We do not want to delegate our work effort to our kids and burden them. They should have their own dreams and purpose. We rather do the hard work ourselves. This is our choice.
And no, we do not need kids to act as a band-aid or crutch for our relationship. When we go through ups and downs in our relationship, we will 'fix' it ourselves. We refuse to use a kid as an in-between. We have observed first hand so many cases where the poor kid has to act as the tiebreaker all his/her life. That is a very wrong reason to have a kid, we believe.
Lastly, we have never felt the overwhelming feeling of the 'biological clock ticking'. We feel that given the billions of people on the planet are already fighting over limited resources, the 'bright future' of the new generation does not look that bright. We have Freo and Ozzie, our poodles, who make our lives complete enough. If we ever feel the need to nurture another human life within our household, we will adopt. For now we do not feel any such need or desire. May be in the future, who knows....
So, there you go, I have laid it all out open on the internet. We will not be making babies.
We respect every couple's personal and private reasons for having kids of their own, we expect to be afforded the same respect for having decided not to have any.
