As I Like it

American Fiction Prize

2008-10-09T10:01:00.001-05:00

Judge: The Member-Guest and The Weatherman author and two-time American Fiction Prize winner Clint McCown

First Prize: $1,000

Second Prize: $500

Third Prize: $250

Entry fee: $12

American Fiction will revive this year with its American Fiction Prize contest, a competition whose past judges include Joyce Carol Oates, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Anne Tyler, Louise Erdrich, Tim O’Brien, and Tobias Wolff.

This year’s judge, Clint McCown, teaches in the creative writing program at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a recipient of the Associated Press Award for Documentary Excellence for his investigations of organized crime and corruption in Alabama politics, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. His novel, War Memorials, was designated for Outstanding Achievement in Literature by the Wisconsin Library Association. McCown's short stories and poems have appeared widely, and he has published two books of verse. He has worked as a screenwriter for Warner Bros. and as an actor with the National Shakespeare Company. He has edited several literary journals, including the Beloit Fiction Journal, which he founded in 1984.

Contest winners and finalists will be published by New Rivers Press in Fall 2010 and distributed nationally by The Consortium.

Entries must be postmarked by March 15, 2009. Winners and finalists will be announced by September 2009.

Contest Guidelines:

We accept all genres of unpublished literary fiction. Entries must be: unpublished; strictly 7500 words or less; postmarked by March 15, 2009; clearly marked "American Fiction Prize” on both the story and the outside of the envelope; accompanied by a $12 entry fee per story (make checks payable to American Fiction). Please include a cover page with your name, story title, mailing address, and email address. Do not include your name on the pages of the story. Please ensure all stories are typed, double-spaced, and that the title and page number appear on each page. In lieu of an email address, please include a self-addressed, stamped envelope.

We welcome multiple entries ($12/story). For entries outside the U.S.: please send entry fee in U.S. currency or money order. While we cannot return manuscripts, we will forward a list of the winning stories to any entrant who includes an SASE; as well, we will e-mail contest updates to anyone who provides an active e-mail address. Entrants retain all rights to their stories.

Mail entries to:

American Fiction Prize / 5712 Briarwick Court / Hermitage, TN 37076

Please e-mail any questions to americanfictionprize AT yahoo DOT com.

Reasons to miss New England

2008-10-06T14:36:00.006-05:00

Which is not to say my new home in TN doesn't have its own brand of beauty, but...

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 4A

2008-10-03T14:37:00.005-05:00

Finding a mate

[cont'd from here]

When the end phase of my relationship with my first ex-husband arrived – the phase at least one person in the relationship reaches when they realize the love, if it was love at all, is gone and there’s no salvaging it – I was too chicken to say I wanted out just because we weren’t a good match. That was too easy to argue, and it was too abstract. He could have said, "Not right, how?" In fact, he had asked that before, and I'd told him I didn't feel the kind of love between us that I thought we should have.

"The kind of love you want only exists in the movies," he'd said. How could I argue that? I had nothing to present that would prove otherwise. *

So, I started fights.

One night, while Bill slept, I sat in the dark on the windowsill and smoked a cigarette. (This was back in the blissful time before I recognized my mortality and could inhale deep and exhale slow and watch the smoke cloud form and drift out the window toward the trees, all without a thought of cancer or heart disease.)

When the cigarette finished, I stubbed it out in the ashtray and climbed down from the cold sill and jumped on the bed and said, “Let’s go on a trip somewhere.”

Bill, sleepy, didn’t open his eyes. “Hm?” he said.

“A trip,” I said, and waited for him to say ‘no.’ “Let’s just go somewhere. Anywhere.”

“Like where?” He squinted, rubbed his forehead. “When?”

“I don’t know where. And now. It’s Friday.”

“You want to go somewhere now?”

“You don’t?”

“Kristen, come on. Don’t do this.”

“Don’t do what?" I said. When he didn't answer, I slumped down and leaned back against the headboard and sighed. "You always say no to things."

Making someone else feel inadequate, however--if they don’t take the hint and leave you for it in a reasonable amount of time--eventually goes from being a noble effort to being cruel.

Eventually, I pulled out my trump card: our differing thoughts on children.

And then I latched onto it.

And then I relentlessly harped on it.

“What do you want for dinner tonight, Kris?”

“Chicken. You know I’m not changing my mind about kids, right?”

(That I was nineteen might not be a valid excuse for the behavior, but, still…I was only nineteen.)

Bill was coming along in his own time, though. Slowly learning he was as unhappy with me as I was with him. But using the child excuse was a good way to get things moving a little faster. After all, we’d already dragged it out a lot longer than we should have, and we were both young. There was living to do.

And I really wanted my own apartment.

And it worked. Bill finally agreed: if I didn’t want to have kids, he said, he didn’t really see a future for us.

Hey. Wait a minute…

“So, wait,” I said. “You say you love me, but then you tell me you only want to be with me if I’ll make babies for you?”

Why had that not occurred to me before? My plan had seemed so simple, until then. Make him see a woman who doesn't want kids will never be right for him.

But, that it had actually worked felt a little too much like he was saying, You’re not enough by yourself.

As much as I’d been counting on just that, when I finally understood I was not more important to him than some random uterus (as I saw it) that would incubate his baby

—when I learned I was replaceable—

our breakup caused by differing views on procreation suddenly went from being no-fault to being very much his fault. He had lied when he said he loved me. He didn’t know what love was, if he could toss me aside so easily for a maybesomeday baby that wasn’t even born.

In the end, of course, we divorced – amicably – for all the right reasons, and there was no regret, on my part, about my decision to not have children. Having a baby with a person means accepting the person you’re having a baby with will be in your life for as long as that child will. Not only did I not want children, but I didn’t want children with someone whose role in my life was temporary.

My second husband and I were also not right for one another for more than one reason, but the as-yet-to-be-created offspring once again played a primary role.

My relationship with Bill had taught me the value of discussing certain things before getting married. Like children. So I told my second ex-husband (who I'll call Ted) one night at the table in his small, attic apartment, “I probably might not want children, I don’t think.”

A box of mac and cheese waited to be cooked on his narrow, antique gas stove. Low music played from the living room, which was separated from the dining room by a foot of empty space, an imaginary line. Tall beer bottles lined the top of an entertainment center/cabinet that served as a wall between bedroom and living room, and records set on end filled a cubbyhole shelf in the space over the couch.

A few minutes before, he’d given me an engagement ring. (The actual proposal had happened weeks prior in my own efficiency living room.) The band was beveled, and I pinched it between my fingers, made it flip back and forth under the light.

Sparkly.

I said, “I mean, I don’t want you to go into this with the expectation that I’ll have kids.” To be perfectly clear, so he would not be in any way misled, I added, “Even one kid.”

“We don’t have to have them,” he said.

“Really?”

“If we have them, we have them. If we don’t, we don’t.”

I believed him.

Within two years, I discovered that at least one of us was, in fact, expected to have them.

[to be continued...]

* He was wrong.

How to (Not) Have Children - Part 4

2008-09-29T15:00:00.003-05:00

Finding a mate who also doesn't want kids

[cont'd from "Dealing with the opposition," here]

You would think the absence of children in a relationship would mean the absence of children in a relationship, but apparently, they’re part of it one way or another.

When you don’t want kids, finding someone to be with long-term might not be as easy as it sounds.

First, I should say Ian isn’t someone I ended up with after launching an all-out quest for a husband who wouldn’t try to get me to have babies. I’ve known him since we were 17. I saw him at school in the hallway, wooed him with secret admirer notes slipped through the vents of his locker, became the best of friends with him, and loved him evermore. It took eleven years to get together, and I consider myself extraordinarily lucky that the one person I most want to be with happens, by fortuitous coincidence, to not have that undeniable longing to be a parent.

I hate to think what it could mean for us if he did.

That said, I should also mention he’s not the only person I’ve been married to, and that my feelings about parenthood contributed (in their own way) to the demise of prior relationships.

Popular culture would have us believe women are the baby-crazy sex, but a surprising number of men – as vehemently as they might deny it – want families. It seemed like it should be an easy thing to find, a man who didn’t want kids, but it wasn’t. The more I got to know my male friends, the more they would reveal small traces of daddy-in-the-making, even with such off-hand remarks as, “When I have kids…,” which takes for granted they’ll have them. Someday.

A woman who doesn’t want children has surprisingly limited life-mate options.

Which isn’t all bad, really. Break-ups can be messy when they’re cluttered with differences in moral beliefs and/or hobby preferences. The child argument is, if nothing else, almost indisputable, the break-up faultless. No one is really being rejected, so it’s hard to be justifiably angry.

But, oh, is it easy to be unjustifiably angry.

I married for the first time at nineteen. Bill (whose real name is not Bill) and I were too young to get married, and we were also too young to know that before we married we were supposed to talk about things like religion, kids, finances, and anything else people planning to spend their lives together should know about one another.

The reason we didn’t work out is simple: we weren’t right for one another in a number of ways, only one of which was how we saw our future. He saw me having babies in it; I didn’t. And the more we argued about things that meant little more than that we weren’t happy, the more I – young and non-confrontational as I was – thought about children, the fact that he wanted them, and the fact that my not wanting them was a clean way out.

“I don’t want kids” is, as a popular TV show host might call it, a deal-breaker.

[to be continued...]

Media and the sex slave industry

2008-09-27T10:43:00.001-05:00

Ms. magazine reported in the summer of 2007 that sex trafficking is one of the most profitable crime industries in the world — second only to the drug trade — and that U.S. trafficking victims are most prevalent in New York, Texas, Florida, and California. The question now becomes, how is it females have come to be considered a viable, and apparently an even somewhat palatable, commodity, particularly in the United States?

While it’s not possible to blame the use of female slaves on any one factor, it’s difficult not to question the effect media and advertising could have on a society’s perception of women...

read the rest here.

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 3B

2008-09-25T07:42:00.003-05:00

Dealing with the opposition

[cont'd from here]

“You have pets. You must want kids.”

The following blog entry, written by radio and television producer and talk show host Linda Lowen, who specializes in women's issues, appeared online on October 19, 2007:

Pets as a Substitute for Children?

In the midst of the big fuss over Ellen Degeneres and her dog, I kept thinking that her situation is yet another example of a pet theory of mine:

Raising a dog or a cat is a trial run for raising children.

Others have called pets "practice children," but my favorite term comes from Helen Smith, a forensic psychologist in Knoxville, Tennessee, who blogs under the name Dr. Helen. Her post “Invasion of the Fur Children” Invasion of the Fur Children not only tells a good tale about one woman who sheepishly says, "My dogs are my kids," but also reveals many candid responses from dozens of readers. These comments run the gamut from "Our dog is very much a part of our family, but she is not our child," to this heated statement from a mother of two young boys:

I really believe that those who CHOOSE to raise pets instead of children (the ones that CAN have children, but have chosen not to--ESPECIALLY "DINKs") are a very selfish "breed." I also think its their way of not being "locked in" to any real long-term parenting commitment. Dogs and cats have a maximum life expectancy of about 15-20 years. When that pet dies you have the option of whether or not to get another pet--not so when you have children.

Is it selfish for a person or a couple not to have children? Many of us realize our capabilities and our limitations. Sometimes fur children are all that we can handle at a given point in our lives. But that doesn't diminish our commitment to them or our loving care. Yes, it does get crazy (not to mention expensive) when we carry them around in our handbags and dress them up in pricey outfits. But one person's love is another person's lunacy.

I'll confess that my husband and I had a dog before we had our first child. To be honest, during that first week in our home, the dog was a heck of a lot harder than the baby ever was.

So Ellen, my sympathies go out to you. You and Portia de Rossi are ready for kids.

While the blog post suggests that women who choose not to have children might just be realizing their limited capabilities, or that animals are ‘all we can handle at a given point in our lives,’ both of which imply shortcomings are what influence the decision, it also likens pets to a gateway, of sorts, to parenthood.

A ‘trial run,’ she called it.

Which may be true in some cases. It makes sense that someone who can’t handle the responsibility of the pet won’t have much luck with children. On the other hand, I’ve known a few people who slack in the pet department but who would make fabulous parents.

Instead of getting too far into what is largely a bunch of supposition and comparisons based on very little research and a lot of speculation, it seems most simple to say animals are not comparable to children any more than plants are comparable to pets. (Would you walk into someone’s house, look at all their plants, and say, “Geez – why don’t you just get a dog, already?”)

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 3

2008-09-20T06:15:00.004-05:00

Dealing with the Opposition

[continued from "Telling People," here]

One Thanksgiving evening, my father and I sat out back on the patio of my old house in Rochester, New York. Ian was out flight instructing, and my dad and I were having a few drinks in the cool, windy dark. It smelled like snow and dried leaves cracked and snapped apart in their tumble across the lawn.

As happens when conversations and drinks go long together during festive holiday times, topics turned toward the more personal and we talked about kids/grandkids.

I was, after all married.

Not only married, but married to the man I’d always wanted to be with. It was permanent, this time. It was real.

A long time ago, I’d told just about everyone – including myself – that if I were ever going to have a child, it would be with Ian.

That night outside with my dad, I told him that it was still true; if I were going to have a child, it would be with Ian.

But I still didn’t think I’d have one.

He’d heard it all before, of course, when I was younger. When there was still time for me to change my mind. But when nothing changed from fifteen to eighteen to twenty-three to thirty years old, it finally registered with him that I might actually not have kids.

“Raising you girls,” he said. “That’s the best thing I ever did.”

Then he called me selfish.

He didn’t mean it in a bad way, even though it’s almost impossible to not feel insulted after being called selfish.

He meant it as a statement of fact, and he was right.

Having kids means a whole life changes, and I don’t want my life to change in that way. I cringe at the thought of being pregnant, and recoil at videos of babies being born because it’s the furthest thing imaginable from what I see for myself.

I don’t want a newborn, a baby, a tot, a toddler, or a teen.

I, I, I.

Me, me, me.

But women who want children are selfish, too.

They want kids because they want them.

They want someone to love unconditionally.

They want someone to care for.

They want their genes to carry on. They want to give someone a better life than they had. They want to feel useful. They want to create something that is the sum of the husband and wife. They want to solidify a relationship. They want to make a husband stay. They want someone to love them unconditionally. They want a “Mini-Me.”

There are just as many reasons to have children that are selfish as there are to not.

What it boils down to is that parenthood is a life choice. A career-path. Or, for some, a calling.

Why would anyone do it if it doesn’t appeal to them?

Propagation of the species, sure, but that’s not likely to be necessary for some time. Should a landscape artist at heart find a lifetime of work with an accounting firm?

“Stretch marks are the badge of a real woman.”

That’s a line from a movie that was a favorite of mine when I was a teen. The movie is “For Keeps,” and in it, actress Molly Ringwald plays a pregnant high school girl. She, her boyfriend, and their parents are arguing about the pregnancy when one of the parents hints an abortion might be the best option. The boy’s father, who is against abortion, is the one who shouts the line in bold.

“Stretch marks are the badge of a real woman!”

Defining “womanhood” and “manhood” is a fun party game, but physical limitations aside, any idiot with a fertile reproductive system can make and birth a baby.

(And if parents are reading this, I beg you not to take offense. It doesn’t read “Parents are idiots.” I wouldn’t insult parents just to insult them – after all, I have two of them, myself.)

[to be continued...]

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 2C

2008-09-16T07:20:00.004-05:00

Telling People

[continued from here]

Once you know there won't be any children in your life, you'll probably end up having to tell people. Won't you?

Making an Announcement

Why make an announcement? Unless family members are bothering you for babies, there’s no reason to announce your personal decisions any more than there’s a reason for them to pry into your intentions for your uterus.

Answering the Baby Question

If you’re going to be straightforward when people ask whether/when you’re having children, expect to answer, “Why?” After answering it enough times, if you’re spunky, you might come up with fun reasons for your decision that have no bearing on truth just to keep it interesting for yourself. Watching someone shift uncomfortably isn’t bad if you remember you’re doing it for good—to teach politeness—and not for evil.

My friend D, when she read this, said that when she was pregnant, she didn’t like that her baby-filled abdomen was such a comfortable topic for others to discuss, and said that had she been a woman who didn’t plan to have children and had she been asked such personal questions, she might have told people who asked when she planned to get pregnant that she was unable. "Just to watch them squirm.”

If, however, you stick with “I don’t want them,” as an answer to “Why?” be ready for another, “Why?”

“I just don’t.”

“Why?”

You’ll shrug.

“No, really. Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened.” You might, for a moment, doubt yourself. Did something happen? “Like what?”

“I don’t know. Were you abused?”

“No.”

“You get along with your mom?”

“I get along with her just fine,” you’ll say.

“Was it your dad, then?”

“Was what my dad?”

“Was he distant? Never around? Working all the time?”

“No.”

“Your mom. She’s an alcoholic, right? Probably never showed you she loved you.”

“She wasn’t an alcoholic.”

“Is she now?”

“No!”

“Really? Even with you not giving her grandchildren, and all?”

If I’m asked about kids by acquaintances, my answer largely depends on mood. If I feel like talking, or arguing, about it, I’ll say I don’t want them and itch for the forthcoming “Why not?”

But if I just want the conversation to stop short, “No immediate plans” works. The assumption that kids could someday come is safe, then, and it satisfies people well enough when they’re reassured that I, a veritable walking uterus, will eventually undergo what looks like the excruciating hell of squeezing an entire person through my cervix in a room full of people staring at my vagina, and that afterward, I’ll spend eighteen years to life caring for it.

If the mere possibility of future offspring is all it takes to quiet someone’s baby curiosity, I’m willing to give a little. At least until “I just don’t want them” is less unthinkable.

Note: a commenter to this blog, oh2btigger, asked when it became polite conversation to ask a woman about her baby plans. I'm guessing it was a long time ago, when that was such the expected norm that the alternative wasn't even considered. Even my mom said that in the '70s, you got married and you got pregnant - that's just what people did.

[to be continued in Part 3: Dealing with the opposition.]

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 2B

2008-09-13T20:05:00.003-05:00

Telling People

[Cont'd from here]

It hadn’t been telling my husband I didn't want kids that had posed the problem; it was saying out loud, even to myself, that I would never change my mind, and that I didn’t have to pretend, anymore, that I might consider popping out an offspring maybesomeday.

I imagine I felt the same way those who want children feel when they finally discover they’re pregnant: something welled up in my chest, moved under my skin and through my pores, and made my hair follicles tingle. It was like the very possibility of the one thing I didn’t want for my future had formed into its own heavy energy that, at that moment, had simply lifted away from my body.

Children!

Now that I’d told myself while, at the same time, telling my husband, there was the question of whether we should tell others. After all, people who want children make any number of announcements...

“We want children.”

“We can’t wait to have children.”

“We figure we’ll wait a couple of years before we start having children.”

“Oh, we want children right away.”

“We’ve decided we’re going to start trying.”

“We’re officially trying.”

“We’re going to specialists.”

“We’re pregnant!”

Whether you’re a single or involved woman, someone will at one point or another invariably ask you – because your uterus hasn’t yet been put to appropriate use – when you plan to have children.

Even if you’ve accepted for yourself that you won’t be having them, you might still find yourself staring at the ceiling, pretending to think about it.

Well, I don’t know, really…probably not before next week…

Maybe you’ll shrug and say, “Well, I’m only thirty,” which you’ll immediately realize sounds ridiculous because one of your friends only a year older than you has a twelve year-old and a ten year-old, and the other, who is your age, has two in elementary school.

In fact, almost everyone your age has had kids for five to ten years, already.

You’ll change your answer. “I mean, what I mean is, I don’t know.” The ice cubes in your glass will need a stir. You’ll stir them and say, “In a couple of years, probably. You know. I don’t know.” You’ll keep yourself from striking back with, When are you going back to work? Aren't your kids back in school, now? After all, she didn’t mean to put you on the spot you’re growing more and more irritated with as you come to recognize there shouldn’t even be a spot.

It’s easier to pretend to want kids someday than it is to admit to not wanting them, because you’re expected to want them some day. Saying “I want kids in five years” will usually satisfy just about anyone.

But say you don’t want them and an eyebrow will raise, or a drink will stop being drunk, or a mouth will open, or a forehead will fall.

“You don’t?” they’ll say, or, “Why?”

I used to be guilty of asking that, myself, but not because I thought women should have babies. It was because I wanted to know if their reasons were similar to mine.

And then I stopped asking because, one time, the answer to “Why?” was “I can’t.”

It’s interesting to discover how different responses to questions reveal what might not have been considered a very personal question. The woman, even if a veritable stranger, who smiles and says enthusiastically to the clearly established couple, “So! When are we going to hear about a due date?” Nudge, nudge, tickle, tickle, the Woman-As-Baby-Maker clearly public property.

Public Property says, “I’m barren.”

Smiling, enthusiastic woman suddenly hushes and tightens her fingers around the stem of her white wine spritzer.

A “simple” question, in a moment, becomes impolite prying into the most personal aspect of someone’s life.

But, since that hasn’t stopped people from asking, “Why no children?” and likely never will, it still makes sense to think about how to tell people you’ve decided not to have children, or even whether to tell them.

[to be continued...making an announcement]

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 2A

2008-09-12T06:09:00.006-05:00

Telling People

[con't from "Accept your disinclination toward motherhood,"
the final part of which is found here]

Every year as my father's birthday approaches I'm often susceptible to the TV-commercial version of the parent-child relationship. The sweetness of a child sleeping on her father's chest. Sunlit mornings in the kitchen, mother and daughter sharing a bowl of sugar-free cereal.

Studio lighting and child actors have this way of filtering out reality, of dropping softened edges on parenthood to make it look suspiciously appealing.

But they don’t blot out my own, unmediated visions of parenthood, which – before I decided I was absolutely not going to have children – came with panicky sensations akin to miniature minefields exploding under my ribs.

One day, a baby appeared in one of my dreams.

It was a girl, and she wore a white, patterned jumper with booties attached to encase her feet. Her head rested on my shoulder, and I can still remember the weight of her on my arm.

There is no way for me to know the love a mother feels for her child, but that dream might have come close; it was one of the more intense and unique experiences I've had.

It was sweet.

It was nice.

Her plump, diapered behind weighed on my arm and her soft face was so close to mine I could smell that baby smell. Too, there was something about being unconditionally trusted, counted on, and required that was oddly appealing.

Still, it was just a dream. I’ve dreamed about many things, none of which seemed like quite as much fun in the morning. Last night, for example, I had an exhilarating dream about being tossed into the ocean from the shiny, white wing of a passenger plane.

Ten seconds of dream-inspired, warm baby feelings weren’t quite enough to sway me, and it was the inability of such a powerful and beautiful sensation to change my mind that clinched it.

I just didn’t want one.

I told my husband about the dream, shared the strange sensation of being what I imagined was a “mother,” and ended with emphasizing I would really, honestly, very much hate to accidentally get pregnant.

[for the original version, and an extension, of that story, visit women's enews.]

We’d talked before about the slight possibility of a future with a child, and he’d been a little more open to the idea than I was. But to the question, “Do you want one now?” he would say, “God, no!”

“Still,” he would say. “I don’t want to do anything permanent. What if? What if I change my mind? What if you do? You never know.”

I’d allow for that with, “Yeah, maybe.”

(I knew I wouldn’t change my mind.)

As time went on, and as we found ourselves having stronger and stronger aversions to all things parenthood—whether the aversions manifested as scowls at kids knocking down cereal boxes in the grocery store aisles, or as tight-lipped annoyance at child-heads popping up to make faces at us over the back of our chain-restaurant booth—it became pretty clear we were stepping ever further into the Non Parent (known today as DINK – Dual Income No Kids) demographic.

In fact, the older I got, the more I worried I might have twins if I got pregnant, or that I’d not only have a child, but that my pregnancy would be high-risk and that the baby would be born with an “abnormality,” which meant it could require extra devotion, extra care, extra attention, and extra worry. The only comfort in accidentally getting pregnant so late in life was that it had the potential to increase my risk of having a miscarriage, which—admittedly—would take the pressure off of me to make a decision one way or the other.

A few weeks after the dream, while Ian and I were sitting on the couch watching TV and groaning at a child actor intentionally acting like an annoying child, I said, “I really, really don’t want kids. I’m over thirty. I never wanted them before, and I’m not any closer to wanting them now.”

And there.

It was out.

Decided and said.

[to be continued...]

How to Not have Children: Part 1D

2008-09-10T06:26:00.003-05:00

Accept your disinclination toward motherhood [cont'd from here, which ended with hitting 20-something and using contraception to avoid catching pregnant while most others were concentrating more on not catching diseases.]

Once your friends started having babies, houses replaced their apartments, baby-bumpers outfitted furniture corners, and zippy-quick cars were traded in for SUVs to accommodate the one baby, which – with its baby seat, baby bag, baby toys, and baby self – must, you reasoned, need more space than the average car can handle.

(You, not having a baby, would never quite come to understand why something so small couldn’t fit in the back seat of a sedan, its accessories in the sedan’s trunk. You would begin to suspect some people have children as an excuse to buy an SUV.)

Your apartment, when you were in your twenties, was naturally not baby friendly, and when friends brought their babies over, you would find yourself taking from toddler-hands sparkling geodes, delicate vases, and coasters with sharp edges. Everything you owned, it would seem, was a choking hazard or a cranial danger.

Your friend, sitting cross-legged on the floor and bouncing her baby on its chubby feet, would smile and “goo” and “gah” and press her nose to her child’s. Baby fists would curl around Mom’s fingers and line of pristine drool would drip like syrup to the floor.

You, watching from the couch with cheeks aching from maintaining the “isn’t it cute” smile, would stifle a yawn and wonder why, why, you didn’t want to bounce that baby, yourself, and why all you could think about was that your friend had only been there ten minutes, and that those ten minutes of keeping things from the baby while making “so cute” noises had you wanting to get drunk and take a bath, and you’d only been out of bed for three hours.

Work wasn’t safe, either.

Inevitably, someone would eventually step off the elevator toting a handled baby-seat, newborn swaddled just like the dolls your friends masterfully tucked in those unimaginably soft cotton blankets. You wouldn’t even really notice until the sudden “Ohhhh” chorus drifted through the cubicles and dresses trailing perfume rushed by, stopping short at a cluster by the desk that hadn’t been occupied for some odd number of months (you weren’t really keeping track) while the woman once stationed at that desk had been away on maternity leave.

Maybe you would eye the group of women and wonder if their giggles and enthusiasm were contagious, if maybe you just hadn’t given babies enough of a chance.

You would push your chair out from your desk and wander over to the baby-viewing mosh-pit and wait while being nudged back, and back, as women more aggressively interested than you pushed through to get a look, just one look, at that “sweet,” “precious,” “adorable,” face and to have a finger held in the fist everyone would say was uncommonly strong, notably healthy.

Finally, the crowd in front of you would thin enough for you to see the baby if you stood on your toes and looked over the shoulder and through the hair of the woman in front of you.

And there it was.

Yep. It was a baby.

White socks barely clung to wrinkled feet, fingers clenched and unclenched, and puffy lips sucked at nothing while it looked side to side and released short bursts of air and a few sparkling spit-bubbles.

Maybe you half-smiled and thought, yeah, it was cute.

But after two seconds, you would have had enough and would be ready to go back to your desk, wondering why you didn’t feel that irrepressible urge to gush.

Why you would keep hearing your own voice whispering, Oh, hell no.

You would eventually conclude that the kid thing just isn’t for you.

If you’re anything like me, you would feel a little excited by the discovery and, at the same time, maybe a little rebellious.

A woman who didn’t want to have a child?

Most literature, movies, TV shows, and even news programs communicate the exact opposite. Women want children so strongly they’ll “try” for years, going as far as paying thousands of dollars to fertility clinics even if it means they could end up with sextuplets. Others will adopt.

The extreme and mentally dysfunctional case will kill a pregnant woman, slice open her abdomen, and steal the baby straight from her womb.

And even in the storylines willing to depict women who don’t want children, the women invariably very much do want children, but they have very good reasons for saying they don’t. Either they don’t think they can get pregnant and they’re protecting themselves emotionally, or they want them but think they’ll be bad parents.

But what about the women who really, honestly, genuinely, and simply – without having to think about it for very long, if at all – have no desire to be mothers?

They’re not represented very often, which helps strengthen the perception that they’re not natural, that – as women – if they’re not looking forward to being nurturers, there’s something wrong with them, something different about them.

My friend D says, “This is true, but its probably also safe to assume that they are, in fact, in the minority and that would be why they aren’t represented as often. Just to be fair.”

She’s probably right, but unfortunately, being in the minority means not only being underrepresented, but being susceptible to open criticism and judgment. You may have noticed people are much more comfortable questioning women who don’t want children than they are about questioning women who do (even if the women are noticeably unfit), and that women without children in books we read or movies we watch don’t have children because they can’t, not because they don’t want to.

The sooner women can confidently say “so what?” about not wanting kids, the sooner we’ll stop fighting to convince ourselves we do want them just to appease a large percentage of society that seems to dictate childrearing as the one unquestionably acceptable route for women to take.

Even if we’re interested in careers, there should still be at least a glimmer of baby-interest hovering in the background, right?

No. Not right.

Stop thinking you’re supposed to want them.

If there’s very little you find enticing about spit-up and heavy diapers, accept it.

Accept that you don’t want to wake up for feedings or to a floor cluttered with toys. That you don’t want to have to pack a diaper bag and ready a bottle and prepare a baby every time you leave the house. That you’ve seen those bathroom baby-changing stations and have walked by, almost every time, thankful to not have to deal with those contraptions and to be the one who gets to use the stall and leave, the only thing weighing down your arm a bag stuffed with new sweaters.

If one of the most restrictive futures you can imagine for yourself is one requiring babysitters, school district comparisons, and conversations about diaper rashes and ointments and which baby said what word when and who’s crawling, walking, or wearing colanders as hats, big deal. Accept that there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to make dinner every night and breakfast every morning unless you’re hungry, that not wanting your life as you know it to undergo an absolute and irreversible reconstruction is perfectly natural, and that being a mom simply isn’t the life position you’re looking to take on.

Accept that raising a child is just not your thing.

But do it without feeling like you’re an unimaginably horrible person.

You don’t have to want a baby.

[to be continued in Part 2: Telling People. For an article on this subject with commentary from NOW co-founder Sonia Pressman Fuentes and others, read They're Not Kidding, originally published in the Journal Inquirer.)

How to (Not) Have Children: Part 1C

2008-09-07T07:07:00.006-05:00

Accept your disinclination toward motherhood [cont'd from here]

I can’t remember exactly when I discovered I didn’t want to be a mom. My first clue should have come when I was about eight years old and playing in a cave I’d made under the dining room table. Blankets hung over the sides, and doll-daughter and I sat in the dark to wait through an imaginary snowstorm. At some point during that made-up catastrophe, made-up daughter and I had a pretty strong disagreement. I threw her on the floor. Then I picked her up and whapped her one on the side of the head.

I remember her long red hair whipping around her face.

I'd also carry her - and sometimes swing her - by that hair. My father said once, “How would you like to be carried around like that?”

After I cut her hair into inch-long clumps, I didn't carry her around much, anymore.

As a little girl I preferred my Matchbox cars, machine gun squirt gun, and "spy" glasses to baby dolls and Barbies, and later, as a teen, I noticed there was still a difference between the other girls and me. Nothing I can put a finger on even now; the closest I can guess, and with no scientific evidence whatsoever, is that they simply had more estrogen. They liked painting their nails, seemed to hang out in groups, and had bigger breasts than I did.

It had to be estrogen.

Maybe you were as young as eight when you first suspected you were different.

Your friends, eerily adept at such things, would swaddle their dolls in pastel baby blankets, doll-feet tucked inside miniature socks made to look like bunnies or puppy-faces. You, though – you would carry your “baby” around by its barely curled fingers, not noticing when its head smacked door frames and table corners. You could never quite get the hang of swaddling, always leaving a foot or a hand poking out, exposed to the elements. After trying once or twice to get it right, maybe you ripped off the blanket and tossed it on a pile of Legos in the corner.

Your friends, at doll feeding time, would use a steady hand to wipe imaginary blended peas and carrots from their babies’ chins, arranging bibs over tiny torsos while you, fist tight, scraped your doll’s face with the spoon and jammed spit-out peas against its hard, puckered lips.

After lunch, when it was time to take the babies to the playground, your doll, not even dressed, would dangle at your side like a lunchbox or a worn stuffed animal, bouncing off the pavement when, excited at the thought of climbing a wooden ladder, you forgot you were even holding it and let it fall. And as your friends nudged their dolls down the slide or pushed them back and forth, back and forth on the swing, your doll was lost, left somewhere in a shaded pit of sand while you took your post in the fort’s only tower, swinging an invisible sword at knights from a rival kingdom.

Or maybe you were a teen when it happened. When you were the only one not squeaking at the cuteness of the baby clothes you and your friends passed on the way to the shoe section.

Your friend Jenny, eyelashes mascara-thick, would pluck a kitten-patterned onesie from the rack and rub the soft cotton between her fingers. “I can’t wait to have a baby!” she would say. She was probably bouncing.

You, seeing a mother trying to shush her toddler over by the baby shoes, would think, Egh.

You’d look around to make sure no one heard you, that you didn’t think it out loud. You’d even smile, maybe say, “Mm!” and finger a pink dress hanging in front of you to show you, too, couldn’t wait to play dress-up with a kid.

You began to wonder if you were even supposed to have been born a girl.

It wasn’t that you felt like a boy, necessarily. You didn’t think you should have a penis, didn’t want to grow a beard. But if you weren’t dreaming of having a family and an SUV or minivan like all the other girls, what must that mean?

What must that mean?

The mall wasn’t the place to think about it, so you waited for your friends to pick and poke their way through the tiny clothes while you, staring somewhere over the perfume counters and thinking about hamburgers, would take a pair of miniature jeans from a rack, absently play with the cuffs, and hang them back up.

Pick up small pair of corduroys.

Smile nurturingly.

Return to rack.

Repeat.

When you were in your twenties, friends bought condoms to avoid catching diseases, and you bought them to avoid catching pregnant first, diseases second.

[to be continued - when your friends start having babies]