One Thing Missing from My Regrets
By Patty Somlo
November 15, 2024
November 15, 2024
Some women don’t want to have children. They don’t want children in their prime child-bearing years. They don’t want children when the clock has ticked almost past midnight. Neither do they want children when that miraculous event has been impossible for years. I am one of those women.
I am not, however, a woman without regrets, something females who don’t procreate – or who have abortions to terminate pregnancies -- are expected to suffer. Having reached an age when I’ve lived longer than the life I have left, I could fill pages with what I should or shouldn’t have done. One thing missing from those lists would be not having a child.
My mother and I were not close. We might have been when I was very young, though I have almost no memory of such a time.
Did my mother want to have children? I can’t say. We never talked about her life before marrying my father or the hopes she had when young. I do know she didn’t hold up well under the stresses of military life.
By my junior year of high school, my mother had suffered several long stints away from my career Air Force dad. Her nights were now spent alone, sipping seven and sevens, smoking, and mumbling to herself.
From the vantage point of years lived, therapy and my own struggles with anxiety and depression, I recognize that my mother was both depressed and addicted to alcohol. She also regretted the life I suspect she didn’t have the ability to change. When we fought, which was often, she frequently reminded me that her life would have been better if she hadn’t had me and my two sisters.
Like many teenage girls, I babysat. Nights I spent in other people’s homes, I prayed the kid(s) wouldn’t wake up. Children, and especially babies, terrified me. I couldn’t fathom what children wanted, needed, or liked, and feared they could see right through me, knowing I wasn’t prepared to take care of them or be in charge.
By the time I graduated from high school, looking forward to leaving that sad home and heading to college, I was clear. No matter where the next steps in my life might take me, I was never going to have any children.
If I had ever wanted children, teaching at Twelvegates Elementary School, where I landed my first post-college job, would have wiped that desire from my heart. The school, which prided itself on being alternative, was located in a dusty corner of Albuquerque, New Mexico, dotted with unpaved roads. We had a mix of kids, many from single-parent homes. As late as the late seventies, many of the moms and dads could still be considered hippies.
Yes, there were a handful of cute and sweet girls and boys. But we had our bully, a messy boy who extorted other kids, promising protection – from himself, no less – in exchange for their allowance. And there were kids like Dylan, whose single moms were too overwhelmed with work and parenting to give them what they needed. The Dylans devoted time at school to setting the trash in the outside metal bins on fire and being disruptive in other ways, simply to draw attention to themselves. The Dylans made my job more like that of a prison guard than an educator, hoping to spark the creative flame waiting to be lit within my young charges. Being a disciplinarian did not come naturally to me, a born people-pleaser. When the school year ended, I bid a relieved adios to Dylan, Twelvegates, and teaching, or doing anything with young children for the rest of my life.
I learned I was pregnant on a sunny April afternoon, surprising weather for the city where I lived, Seattle, Washington. The father of this uninvited guest and I had gone our separate ways, days after the act that delivered what I’d never wanted into my life. I sat for hours in a rocking chair, looking morosely out the window, confronting a question I never expected to ask. Do I want to keep this child? Though I couldn’t approach the subject as coldly and clearly as before those hormones had taken hold, the answer, over and over again, was a resounding no.
If anyone were to look for a good candidate to raise a child, I would have been the least likely person chosen. I’d had a mother who abandoned her maternal role in the years when I reached puberty and needed her most. I was poor, a freelance writer, and alone. I didn’t have a savings account or own a car. In fact, thanks to my mother who refused to teach me, I had never learned to drive.
I shared a house with two single men. One of them, Chris, was involved with a woman named Sarah, who was raising a small child alone, treading water with the help of government assistance. Chris liked his girlfriend but wasn’t prepared to take on a wife who would come to the marriage saddled with another man’s daughter. Even if the motherhood hormones activated in my system had convinced me to keep this child, fantasizing about the fun this little boy or girl and I would have, seeing Sarah’s drawn, tired face told me everything I needed to know about what my life would be like for the next eighteen years.
One extra glass of wine had let me forget to put in my diaphragm, on a sultry night in the beautiful city of Guadalajara, Mexico. I was in this predicament, like countless women find themselves, who don’t want children or can’t afford another one or just aren’t in the right place to bring a child into the world.
My ex-boyfriend drove me to the clinic and waited while I underwent the quick safe abortion that, not surprisingly, was my choice. In the life I have lived since that day, I’ve experienced an abundance of joy for which to be grateful, including a decades-long happy marriage to a wonderful man who, like me, never wanted children. In all this time, and especially since the choice that was available to me is now, in so many parts of the country, being denied, I have never stopped feeling thankful to the women who fought to make my choice possible.
Like most people who reach a certain age, I have regrets. I wish I’d started therapy earlier. For years, I wasted time dropping in and out of college, with no clear direction. When I’m in a beautiful wilderness area, I wish I’d gravitated toward the sciences, preparing myself for a career as a park ranger. Other times, I think I would have enjoyed teaching college.
As much as I’ve occasionally wished I’d had a fun group of people, maybe kids and siblings with their broods, to go camping together, sitting around the fire roasting marshmallows and telling scary stories, I still don’t regret my decision to never have children. I know I was never in a position to create such a fantasy scenario in my life.
There are people who manage to overcome unhappy childhoods to build closeknit families they missed when young, but I was not one of those people.
Years later, knowing the life I have lived without children, I would still make the same decision my younger self made. Thankfully, I had the choice to follow my heart and instincts about motherhood, at the time when it mattered most.
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Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), was a Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and Best Book Awards. Previous books, The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), were Finalists in several contests. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Delmarva Review, Under the Sun, the Los Angeles Review, and over 40 anthologies. She received Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Association Contest, was a Finalist in the J.F. Powers Short Fiction Contest, had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net multiple times.
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Author’s Note:
For years, I have heard anti-choice activists claim women who choose not to have children will regret that decision. As a woman years past her childbearing years, I wanted to express my deeply felt opinion on what about my life choices I do and do not regret.