I’ve never wanted kids. I remember standing in front of my mom and I was like eight years old, or maybe I was ten. I was very young and I was mad about something that one of my siblings or my niece or my nephew, somebody was doing something awful. And I was like, “this is not my problem. I’m never having kids.”
I was standing in the kitchen by the phone, the one with the really long cord that you used to watch TV all the way around the corner. And I was like, “I’m never having kids. I would never put up with this if my kids did this.” And my mom said, “you’re going to have kids one day.” I said, “maybe I’ll adopt an eight year old, but I’m not doing this.”
To this day, I still bring it up. I’m like, “remember that time I told you I didn’t want kids and you said I wanted kids?” And here we are, I have four legged kids and that’s it.
I get so tired of people second guessing me that when I say I want this or I don’t want this.
When I was a teenager, I had horrible periods and never wanted kids. All the things I wanted to do, kids would be in the way. My family’s very Catholic. They wouldn’t even let me get birth control. The gynecologist that we went to, the family one that’s still there practicing, and then my uncle is an OBGYN, and he didn’t listen either. And they were like, “oh, three week periods are normal. Getting your period when you’re nine is normal.” It’s always been a horrible thing.
I wanted to get sterilized very early. When someone told me that I could skip my periods with birth control when I was in my twenties, I was like, oh, hell yeah. But they said, no, we can’t do [the sterilization]. You’re too young. You’re too young. You don’t know what you want. What if your husband wants kids? Honestly, I was like, “well, I guess I’ll need a new husband.” They would laugh, but guess I’ll need a new husband. Guess why I’m on marriage number two. That’s part of it.
My family OBGYN told me no when I was a teen. Then the Air Force told me no when I was 18, 19, 20. And then I didn’t have health care for a while because it was before I joined the Army. Then the Army told me no all the way into my thirties and the VA told me no. The only way I got sterilized is this one lady told me no.
She was like, “you have to go through certain procedures to get to the final boss that will decide whether or not they’re going to do it.” And this lady looked at me and said, “well, what about your husband? What if he wants this?” I was like, “he’s going to need a sancha or a divorce. That’s not my path. I don’t want kids. And if he does, then he’s got to go. I’m okay with losing this person.”
She laughed in my face and said, “well, I’m not going to let you go.” And I waited for the chaperone to go out of the room, and this was the VA, and there had been some tragedies very close to that where veterans who were not getting appropriate care came back and hurt themselves and others. And I waited for the chaperone to leave, and I leaned in very quietly, looked her in the eye, and I said, “this is why veterans come back and shoot places up.” And she looked at me and she goes, “are you threatening me?” I said “no. I’m stating a fact. You are denying me care that you have no reason to deny me.” I was like, “you’re not the surgeon. Put me in front of the surgeon and let her tell me no.”
This is not your choice. This is my body. And if the surgeon says no, there needs to be a medical reason for it, not anything to do with another person. I do not ever want kids. And the things that birth control does to your body.
I had a perforated uterus from an IUD. I have a big scar that’s part of my tattoo covering my arm from the arm implants. The patch fell off my body. That was horrible. I guess I’m just a greasy kid. Couldn’t wear those. None of the pills. Like, I can’t remember to take anything. Are you kidding me?
I don’t even wake up within the same four hour period when left to my own devices. And then the Nuvaring, that was great, but kind of weird. Then the older you get, the more likely you are to get strokes. So after you’re 35, it’s not an option. I think I was 36 or 37 at the time. I was like, enough is enough. Turn this machine off.
My OBGYN, she’s this quirky, hippie bohemian, and I told her the story of what happened, and she goes, “who was that?” She’s like, “she had no right to tell you that.” And I cried. Like, even now it makes me tear up. I cried. I was like, oh, my God. I just had to get in front of one person, just one person saying, “well, if you didn’t want kids, there’s no reason this shouldn’t have been done.”
I was just like, oh, my God. And then she recommended immediately after the surgery, she said, “come back and we’re going to do an ablation.” And an ablation is where they cauterize the inside of your uterus. They can’t do it if there’s a risk of implantation of a zygote.
[Now] I have spotting for three weeks. But I don’t have heavy, heavy periods, and I have ridiculous heavy period stories.
I have thrown a tampon at a drill sergeant who wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom. “Excuse me. I bled through my tampon. Do not tell me no again.” The look on his face. I had the least restrictive bathroom privileges in basic. They were horrified.
{How did people in your life react to your decision against having children?}
So in my family, for starters, people tend to have children very young, too young, in my opinion. It hasn’t slowed anybody down. Everybody’s great in my family. They all seem to be happy, living their dreams, et cetera. But my dreams never had kids in them.
We’d have these family parties, big old Mexican parties. They’re great. It’s a one year old birthday. It’s a christening. We got a keg of beer, everybody’s drinking. You got the music on and the kids run amok. And I hated it. Get out of my stuff. Don’t touch my stuff. Get out of the yard. Why do I have to babysit? Why do I have to be the responsible one? You had the kids.
My brother is like, a year and change younger than me (kind of Irish twins) and then two sisters. And then my mom has another daughter who’s ten years older than me that I don’t consider her my sister. She’s horrible to me. And she had two daughters that were the same age as my baby sister.
I wasn’t even ten years old, and I’m running around helping grab diapers, changing diapers. I’ve changed all the diapers that a mom changes. I did all that, but I did it all before. I would say before I hit puberty, but I hit puberty at, like, nine. But I did all that and then even younger than that.
Seamus, my brother, is autistic. Think I always knew, like, he’s going to be my problem. And Seamus isn’t a problem. He’s who he is. But I was just like, I don’t need this. On top of anything else, I’m going to have to take care of a human being already. Like, growing up, I never got to be first. And they tell you when you’re a mom, you’re always going to be second.
I was like, well, can I be first? I never wanted to stay second. And then once I hit a certain age, something like 16, every birthday I had was like, the family record for someone not having kids; for someone who was social and dated and ended up being a heterosexual cisgender. In my family, I was the oldest for the longest time.
I have an aunt that doesn’t have any kids. In our family, she’s referred to as selfish, but I was always like, ‘man, that’s the life. She travels, she’s pretty, she makes herself up. She does what she wants. She’s very successful the way she wants to be.’ I don’t know if it was jealousy or just not understanding, but everybody looking askance at her. And I was like, well, that looks like the dream. What’s the problem?
Seamus got diagnosed early, before he was three, so before I was four or five. And so I already had to be second because he needed all the support. I think I had to learn to read so I had something to do while he was had all his appointments.
We were close enough in age that they could sign us up for a lot of the same activities. I think some years I was down a year, and some years he was up a year, but we were so close. They’d be like, “keep an eye on your brother and watch your brother. Go get your brother.” I don’t know how many other people were, “hey, watch your brother. Grab your brother.”
But my dad’s a firefighter. My mom’s a nurse, and they work crazy hours, and they sleep crazy hours. And it was always, “keep an eye on your sisters. Keep an eye on your siblings.” So I couldn’t go to the end of the street, or I couldn’t go out of the cul de sac during certain hours.
Mom instituted a rule where she had to have both feet on the floor before any answer she gave me counted, because I would be like, “hey, can I go do this thing?” And she’d wake up panicked. “Where is my daughter? Why are all these children running feral?” And I was like, “well, you said I could.” She’s like, “it doesn’t count if I’m not upright!”
To her, that’s totally normal. But for me, I’m like, why was I parenting your kids for you? So when people say, “oh, why don’t you have kids?” I had my kids. They’re my siblings. I already parented them.
Like the Girl Scout stuff that we would go to, and I would just sleep. I think [people] thought I was weird, but I didn’t have to have anybody up my ass. But I was also weird, and my hair was never brushed, and my clothes never matched. I had clothes from the 80s because I was digging out clothes from my sister’s room. Nobody gave me a bra until I was well out of a B cup.
It was my aunt. She gave me the one off her back. She was like, “what are you doing with your chi chi’s out?” I was in, like, the fourth grade. I don’t know when I needed a training bra.
It makes me cry to think about- not on purpose. I don’t know. Just makes me teary eyed. I feel like I didn’t get to be the same kind of kid, all the people I grew up with. Maybe it’s just in my head. Maybe I’m just anxious. But then when you get, like, the validating look, you’re like, ‘oh, yeah, that was real fucked up.’
I didn’t like Girl Scouts. I didn’t like the things we did. But I liked that I didn’t have to be home. Would I have been an athlete? Would I have know such a good French Horn player? Would I have played so many sports? I don’t know. I don’t know if I would have done those things.
I feel like getting into the Air Force Academy was like, this is a guaranteed way I do not have to stay home for school.
My first husband, he wanted to have children. Our marriage fell apart because he ended up laying hands on me, which is a hard no. But prior to that, before he went off his meds, we were talking about kids. I said, “okay, I’ll do the first year, and you have to do the next year, and we’ll talk after that.” He goes, “well, I’m not going to do that.” I said, “well, why the fuck would I if I’ve got to carry a child for nine months?”
And then the three months of maternity leave and recovery, et cetera, and the permanent changes to your body if you don’t have any catastrophic things… birth is not easy. I look at everybody that gives birth, I’m like, oh, God. Hard no. Hard no. I’ll do the first three trimesters, the fourth trimester of recovery. I think it is a fourth trimester because you can’t even begin to think about getting back to normal for months.
It felt like those ‘Don’t Shake a Baby commercials’ were directed straight at me, because I always look at my brothers and sisters like, “it’s time for you to go.” I used to just put them in a room when they’d be screaming and just shut the door and walk away. And then listening to my friends in their 20s do that, “oh, I just had to shut the door and walk away.” I was like, “oh, man, I know.” But that was me at, like, 9, 10, 12 doing that. Like, “oh, God, if I don’t shut this door, I’m going to murder one of you all.”
{Why do you think you were denied the sterilization procedure so many times?}
My first instinct is always that women are less than. They just didn’t listen. They didn’t care. They didn’t care when I said birth control was horrible. [As a kid] I would wear a shirt tied around me because I didn’t know timing of periods. I would always have a bleed through, and I would always have stains on my clothes, and my mom didn’t listen.
I taught myself how to wear tampons in elementary school. From the instructions- I don’t think anybody’s looked at the instructions. Nobody ever listened. “Hey, I don’t think my periods are normal. I don’t think they should be three weeks long. I don’t think I should be bleeding this much.” I still think I probably have endometriosis. And nobody ever realized.
So I got my IUD; it was great. I just had little spotting, all deployment, which I cannot imagine having my periods on deployment. I’m so grateful. Then I ended up with a perforated uterus because it shifted. That was really uncomfortable. So that was after I got back.
When I got my tubes out, they didn’t cut them. They took them out entirely because most uterine cancers apparently start in the tubes. My periods did weird things for a little while and then they came back just like a constant- it was like The Shining all the time. And then I went back for the ablation and they said, “it might not work. It might only be temporary relief.” And I was like, “I will take it.” But it’s been much better. It’s been uneven. It’s been kind of chaos. I never know when anything’s going to happen, but it’s been so much better.
One more thing on that. When she took my tubes out, she said, “I would be shocked if you had ever even been able to get pregnant because you have so many cysts in both tubes.” And I was like, “so we’ve been playing stupid games all these years”, when there’s a chance I never could have carried a kid because nobody would listen when I said it hurt, they didn’t care. “It’s normal.” That was very rage inducing. And I have a great OB GYN. She was like, “nobody ever should have made you wait this long.”
{What does the word motherhood mean to you?} Prison.
{In all of your babysitting times, your whole childhood, was there anything embarrassing that one of the kids did?} I mean, I knew about being peed on and projectile shit while you guys were still playing mommy to your dolls. Watching you guys like, rock your dolls, and [being] like, “oh, we’re going to change the diaper. We’re going to feed them.” I’m like, “oh, you better put a rag over that. That thing’s going to squirt at you.” So that was embarrassing that I couldn’t play dollies with y’all. I had nothing but weird Barbie.
{What surprises you about people becoming mothers?} What surprises me about people wanting to be a mother is when people get shamed for having to make choices, like when they’re pregnant. You’re a mother when you want to be a mother and it’s a baby when you want it to be a baby. Otherwise it’s a clump of cells. It’s not anything until it’s acknowledged and you shouldn’t force anyone to make it anything.
If someone wants to have an abortion, they don’t want to be a mother or they’re already a mother and they can’t be a mother to more, then there’s no shame in this thing. That’s not a person yet. It’s not a person until you say it’s a person. And I think we have a real problem with not acknowledging that mothers are people.
A mother is a person and should get to decide that the person carrying it is a person before whatever this thing is. To me, it’s always going to be this thing and it’s foreign and it’s got to go. And it’s like the scene from Alien like, I want it out. Do not put that anywhere near me.
But if you want to be a mother and this clump of six cells, head of a pin, is what you want in your life, then that’s your baby. It’s your baby when you call it your baby. I hate that people invalidate what women are saying.
If you have a miscarriage and it’s at like four weeks and you say, “I was a mother,” yes, you were a mother, and I will back you up till the end of time. But if you are at eight months and someone has forced you to carry this child and there’s a fetal abnormality and now you’ve got a stillbirth and you tell me that you were never a mother, then yes, you were never a mother, and I back you to the end.
If you didn’t carry a kid at all and you say you’re a mom, [I believe you]. I feel so much for all the children in Texas who are being forced to carry and birth children because at least I didn’t have the huge body changes that they had. But I know what they’re going through in a lot of ways.
You can have all the family support you want, but if you didn’t want to be a mom, if you can’t consent to a marriage or to join the military or to vote or to drink, why should you have to carry a kid? And nobody should have to do any of that, any of the parenting.
If you’re a parent and you have so many kids, even if you have two kids, you should never, ever ask one of the kids to look out for or take care of the other in any way, shape or form, because you have those kids. Those are your problem. And if your kid’s disabled, you need to make every plan up until the end as if that other sibling is not going to take care of those kids.
Because nobody should be forced to take care of anybody- a dog, a kid, a plant, (got a lot of plants getting murdered in this house.) Nobody should have to take care of anything except for themselves. Ever.
Unpopular opinion: Up to the point that women stop being able to choose their abortion, I think that men should be able to choose to relinquish parenthood as well and not have to pay child support. Because you shouldn’t be paying that [or] expecting to get that.
You shouldn’t be making those life choices, expecting someone else to subsidize it that doesn’t want to. I know that’s unpopular. I know that’s someone will come for me, but I don’t think that anyone should have to parent children in any way.
I know there’s a lot of single moms that are going to be like, he’s never here, but he didn’t want to be there, and you chose to keep it, knowing that you procreated with someone who doesn’t want to be there, or they’re unreliable. We all make bad choices. The other thing is, sometimes they’re really hot. Like, enjoy it, but you don’t have to have an 18 year reminder of it.
I lean into it because it aggravates people. {What do you mean?} People get so mad when I’m like, oh, dog moms. Oh, plant moms. Happy Mother’s Day to me and all these four legged assholes. But I get [it] at the end of the day, I’m not going to jail because I shut the door on my dogs for 12 hours and ignore them because they’re driving me nuts, and I just leave a dog door [open]. You can’t crate a kid and throw some Ritz crackers in there. I know there’s people that do, but CPS is involved.
I get that my experience is not your experience, but I want to make the point that I chose to not have your experience. And you’re not a martyr. This isn’t a cross you bear. You’re not better than anybody.
I applaud the job you do, but I look at it the same way as when I watch that show Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. The same thing- he’s in the septic tank wading through shit. You’re a parent changing a diaper, wading through shit. Like, oh, I can’t believe some people do that. Better them than me.
I have the same feeling about it, like, you chose it. You get some sort of reward from it. It’s hard to convince me that you’re getting a lot of validation from it when all you’re doing is bitching. There you go. I’m not going to high five you for your struggles. It sucks, and I will empathize with you that life sucks, and choices that we have made suck, and things suck, but I’m not going to lionize you.
You’re not saving the world because you do [what] every critter out there can do. I’m so happy for you that you are happy with that choice, but stop acting like you’re unhappy with your choice because your kids pick up on that.
I’m happy being a cool aunt because I can give them back. I can get them all hyped up on sugar, spoil the shit out of them. I’ll give them Legos for you to step on at home. Like, I am packing some shit for you when you give me your kids to watch, and they’re coming home to you, and they’re not my problem.
Zelda came to live with me, and I was a terrible. I was terrible. Like, why do I have to get up for this kid to do, like, Zoom School? Zoom School is so stupid as it is. It was watching everybody struggle. Oh, my God. I’m stuck with these kids in this house all day. Like you chose that. This looks awful. You’re right. God, I’m glad I don’t have kids, I was a terrible mom.
She was eight. And I was touched out just from an eight year old coming into my room like an hour a day. That was too much for me. I don’t want to be touched. And a lot of that has to do with the things that I experienced that were traumatic.
So anybody who’s gone through any sort of assault and still has kids and still cuddles their kids, like, more power to you because I don’t want to be touched. I yelled too much. I was too strict with her. I mean, I get why people yell at their kids. I get why you want to spank your kids, but I know that about myself and decided not to inflict that on any small people.
I have been a big advocate for Seamus consenting to sterilization himself, because what if someone takes advantage of him? I don’t think he can consent because he can’t function independently. I’m not saying you have to be completely self sufficient to consent. I’m just saying that mentally, I don’t think he’s fully capable of consent.
I want him to choose sterilization because my parents won’t make that decision. And he didn’t want to. And he didn’t want to. And he didn’t want to. And we sat down and we talked about it. And I was like, “Seamus, what’s the problem?” I was like, “you won’t be able to have your computer time. You’re going to have to go get a job. You’re not going to be able to sleep in. You’re not going to be able to have a dog.” And he was like, “I don’t want to give up any of that.” I said, “then why do you want to have the risk of having a kid?” And he says, “because then I can’t get married.”
I was like, “Seamus, you can get married without having kids.” And he goes, “you and Aaron aren’t ever going to have kids?” And I was like, “no, Seamus. And we’re married and we’re happy.” He was like, “oh, okay.” And that was it. That was all he needed to know, is that you could get married, but you didn’t have to have kids. And nobody told him that.
My mom sheds a lot of tears over him not having the same future as everybody else, and I think it would be too hard of a door shutting. I asked her, “hey, why are you crying about his kids and you’re not crying about my kids?” She goes, “well, we knew you weren’t going to have kids.” Like, why did you look at me in the face and tell me I was?
All content and information on this blog is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult your doctor for advice on your particular medical situation.
To read more about the tubal ligation procedure, Planned Parenthood has an overview. They also provide information on different methods of birth control, including lifestyle changes and permanent solutions.
The Mayo Clinic has an article on Endometrial ablation, including reasons for having one done.
To read more about uterine perforation, the JAMA network has information.
The Mayo Clinic has information on endometrial cancer. The article does not mention whether or not this type of cancer usually begins in the fallopian tubes or not.