I Don't Want Kids Anymore

The greatest grief I’ve ever experienced is the transition from wanting kids to no longer needing to have them.

For 15 years, I was the Class Rep for my grade at Kent, a boarding school in northwestern Connecticut. For 15 years, I sent emails, asked for donations, and sent reminders about reunions and holiday parties.

Then, at 30, I was diagnosed with and had surgery for a 3” neurocytoma. But I continued to send the texts and emails, because I thought—despite all of it—that maybe my kids might want to go to Kent one day.

Five years after brain surgery, I spent my 35th birthday sobbing. Ditto 36. That’s when I finally let go of it: that I, in all likelihood, would never have my own kids.

Yes, there are many ways to have a family: you can freeze your eggs (I did), you can adopt, you can use a surrogate, you can be a stepmom (where I’ve landed, more or less).

But the grief of never having your own kids has nothing to do with the lack of options for how you might have a family. It’s the letting go of a dream you thought was inevitable; something that you believed was just a matter of time. It’s giving up the if, someday, maybe of it all and replacing all three with acceptance.

On an episode of Armchair Expert, actress Jennifer Aniston reflects on the peace she has found in not having her own biological children.

“But then people say, you can adopt. I don’t want to adopt. I want my own DNA in a little person.”

I think the most beautiful part about having children is seeing your partner in someone else—their eyes, their nose, their hair, their little hand gestures and facial expressions—for all of the years you didn’t know them. And on the flip side, having children helps with self-love, too, because you see your flaws—the things you struggle with—within someone else, helping you love yourself a little more because you love someone with those flaws, too.

After 37, I refused to hate my birthday anymore. I threw myself an unhinged birthday dinner at Rotary Sushi, a conveyor belt sushi establishment, where specialty rolls came out on mini electric trains, followed by karaoke across the street, loading up the cue with the Eras Tour set list and pushing play.

Finding joy despite the grief and uncertainty of not having my own kids—especially on my birthday—has been like skiing down a very steep mountain. The mountain is steep. Too steep, in fact. But the only way to get down the mountain is to push harder into each turn.

To get through my birthday, I’ve done much the same: I’ve turned harder into my own self-care, because each birthday has the potential to be a reminder of everything I don’t have but wish I did.

Recently, The Cut came out with an article: “Why Am I Being Judged If I Do or Do Not Want Kids?” In it, IDK!, an ambivalent 32-year-old woman writes that she never felt a particular pull towards motherhood. Going on to share that her sister, who was survived by her 3-year-old son, died a couple of years ago, she writes, “I love him more than anything or anyone else—but it’s not enough to convince me I want this for myself.”

If I were in the same room as IDK!, I would make her a pot of tea, wrap her in a warm blanket, and remind her that you can mother as a verb without being a mother as a noun.

At my 20th high school reunion this weekend, one of the 5 years came up to me and was just fixated on the fact that I don’t have kids and no longer want them. Reiterating the same points over and over again with the vigor and seriousness of cult recruitment, this man finally stopped after a friend of mine intervened.

And I was grateful that she intervened, because if she hadn’t, this 23-year-old was about to get a lecture in the form of a string of political hot takes about AI data centers and how, if we continue at this rate, we’re going to run out of water within my lifetime, let alone a child’s. How the world I thought was waiting for me when I graduated from high school 20 years ago—with noble careers and salaries you could live off of—is no longer a reality today. How I no longer believe the quality of a child’s life will be better than or equal to my own.

But he wouldn’t understand.

He wouldn’t understand how it feels to choose not to have your own kids while you, technically, can still have them. How devastating it is every time you’re in a circle of moms and there’s a conversation you can’t contribute to. How it feels like watching yourself miss a train, all while knowing it’s the right decision (for you) not to get on it.

But this random 23-year-old (and your mom and your dad and that random Reddit user) doesn’t need to understand because you do.

You understand how you can hold both your grief and your longing. Only you can understand how you can hold both at the very same time.

Because motherhood can be about nurturing three people: your inner child, the person you are right now, and the person you’re becoming. And someone else can make the alumni phone calls.