Originally drafted November 12 and 14, and December 5, 2025.

Revised February 26, 2026.

This is part three of a three part series about the life choices I made many years before I got married (about money, keeping my family name, and not having children) that made my unexpected divorce easier to handle. Since I am talking about a lot of personal stuff in this series, these posts will be semi-paywalled. Hugs and kisses to the eighteen folks who have already upgraded their subscriptions.

I’ve known I didn’t want kids with certainty since I was a teenager. I remember one of the clearest articulations I ever had about this was at my crunchy unschoolers camp, where this woo woo Earth mother older woman staffer condescended to me about my certainty that I would never want to have kids with the heavy implication that I was too young (just a kid) to know what I was talking about. She was wrong, and I was right the whole time. Because at the age of 40, I’m as sure now as I was as a teenager that I was not called to be a mother.

Not wanting to have kids was never something I really struggled with, it always just felt clearly the way I was wired. There was no debate for me, no internal “what does this mean for my identity as a woman,” no shame or guilt over not wanting to have children. It was not something I had to journey towards, it was just my default factory settings once I had enough self awareness that precocious teenagers are blessed/cursed with to begin figuring out their own futures outside of cultural and societal conditioning.