Reflections on a Childless Christmas

Each Christmas I receive at least a dozen holiday cards featuring photographs of people I do not know. These are the children of friends – many of whom fall into the subcategory prefixed ‘former,’ for we haven’t seen or talked to each other in years. The photographs are always of the children on their own, never with their parents. I find this a bit unsettling. It is the parents, after all, with whom I share memories. There is never any note, no personal greeting of any kind scribbled alongside the pictures.

As time goes on, the gap between the childed and the childless – or child-free, if you prefer – tends to widen. Those with children seldom bother to disguise the suspicion, disdain, puzzlement or incomprehension they feel towards those of us, who, for whatever reason, are not parents. They may try to bridge the gap to somehow make us one of them – suggest fertility treatments or foreign adoptions, anything that would transform us from the aberrations we are to their definition of “normal.”

Dozens of times -- at work, at weddings, at funerals, in yoga classes -- I’ve been faced with someone’s back when I’ve answered negatively to the ubiquitous question, “Do you have children?”

The childlessness of a long married woman like myself tends to raise eyebrows and questions that can’t easily be answered in polite conversation. The road to anyone’s unconventional situation tends to be long, twisted and quite often arduous. Stock, false assumptions are made, the most common one being the outdated, media-bred myth that women like myself put off marrying and having children in order to establish careers.

Sometimes I fantasize about coming up with bold and innovative rejoinders to the people who ask why, in this age of high technology, I don’t have little ones. I long to relate the most frivolous and outrageous excuses I can think of:

– My husband has six children from his three previous wives.

– I just got down to a size four and don’t want to gain back the weight.

– My husband doesn’t want my breasts to sag.

– We decided that it was more important to take European vacations, eat caviar and drink fine cognac than save for our offspring’s college education.

– Didn’t you know? I’ve had HIV since 1983.