*Before you read this, I want to put a disclaimer up here. I love all of my friends dearly, so please do not take this post as a slight to any of you. I am simply expressing my feelings of my reality as it is. I started this blog with the intention to fully commit to the raw emotions as they come, and that is what I am doing.*
I was always the last kid picked for the kickball team. I was never anyone's first choice for a group project. Hell, at Junior Prom, I was the odd number in the limo because no one wanted to be my date. I've spent a lot of my life feeling lonely and being alone, even among a crowd of people. I'm just the odd woman out. Pretty much every day, someone tells me I'm weird (that's been going on since elementary school,) so after 30-some-odd years of it, I finally acknowledge and embrace it.
I've been left out of a lot of things because I don't have kids. Let's clear something up: just because I don't want kids doesn't mean I don't like kids. Sure, facing a classroom of Kindergartners would scare the bajeepers out of me, and make me a nervous freaking wreck, but kids are funny. Kids are smart (most of them.) Kids often give better advice than adults. But the time, energy, responsibility, and commitment it takes to get them there? No thanks.
I think choosing to go against the grain comes with the natural consequence of alienation. But you see, it puts me in a strange limbo - a purgatory of sorts. Here's a real-life example (no names): a friend of mine was having a
birthday party for their kid. An invite was put out on Facebook for
anyone could bring their kid to eat and swim. I joked that I don't have a
kid but I like to eat and swim, so can I come? They told me to pick up
a kid on the way. Now, it was all said in a lighthearted manner with
no ill-intent, but it just kind of hit me at that moment that I was not
"one of the crowd." I did not belong, and I still don't. I didn't put my body through 40 weeks of torture and hormones and changes and go through hours and hours of excruciating pain and labor, so I don't belong. I'm a different kind of person.
I've told Phil on multiple occasions that maybe we should have a kid so I would be included in more things and maybe the loneliness would subside. I would be invited to birthday parties, and the Kids Fair, and the park with my other mom friends, and Easter egg hunts, and Halloween parties, and the Zoo. But if I did that, it would be the equivalent of a woman becoming pregnant to fix her marriage. My marriage is in absolutely no distress whatsoever, so there is nothing to fix (other than the government, but I digress.)
But you know what? When I have ever been around parents, and they ask me if I have kids, I do this chuckle and say, "Nooooooo, no no nooo no," and they look at me like I'm an alien. If I had a nickel for every time I heard, "Oh, you're still young," or "It's the world's greatest calling to be a mother," I could buy my own private island and go live on it. I'd rather be lonely than listen to that crap over and over again. Nobody has the right to make me feel inferior for my choice. I am no less of a woman, and I am no less of a person because I choose to do other things with my time....like watch "Catfish" and "Teen Mom" (which ironically came on as I finished up this post.)
Some may see me as broken, but I don't need a child to feel complete.
No comments:
Post a Comment