My wife and I love children. We also love being able to give them back to their parents at the end of the day.
And that makes us weird somehow. You know, because of the natural order of things: Girlfriend becomes Fiance becomes Wife becomes Child-Producing Entity… or something like that. Like some giant proverbial game of rock-paper-scissors excepting that nothing seems to beat “Mother”.
It happens the moment you get married. Not a week after, not even a day after. Conduct a little poll among your married friends to find out how many of them on the day of their marriage were asked about children.
WE ARE OKAY TOO
The “When are you going to have children?” question feels, I imagine, to the person asking it, like a good question. But it’s really not. It assumes too much, and for many couples this can actually be quite a hurtful question.
There are people who have been trying to have a child for years without success and some of those might be struggling with infertility and physically not have the ability. There are those who may have recently had a miscarriage and the question to them in particular brings up a lot of pain.
Then there are those who have decided that they don’t particularly want children – not because we hate children, we just don’t particularly want them. And we are considered weird or strange or unnatural. We see it in your expression when we respond and we hear it in your follow-up question of, “Why not?” as if we have just told our carnivorous friends that we have decided to become vegetarian (another thing that’s okay, by the way).
JUST STOPPIT
Perhaps the worst of it all, is the person who has been completely mystified by our decision and is looking at us as if we are carriers of the black plague, and then we see the moment a light switches on in their heads and they smile and with the mustered up effort of a bull in a china shop, respond with, “Just you wait, you’ll change your mind” or “You say that now, but give it a couple of years.” And more.
That may possibly be true for some people. That may have been true for you. But it is unhelpful for us to hear, and actually quite unloving.
A HELPFUL TIP
Given the scenario of those who are wanting to have children but have been unable to and holding it next to ours, if you really have to ask anything about children, possibly the nicest and least offensive question you should consider is: Are children something you are thinking about at all?
Because then we can reply with, “No, actually we’ve decided we don’t want to have children.” To which your response would be, “Ah, I see, please pass the salt.” Or something as affirming.
We don’t want children. And that’s okay. And there are many more like us and we don’t even have a secret handshake or anything. We are normal people who have made a different decision from you. We will however play with your children (some of us) with the utmost of passion and energy and then smile and wave as we hand them back to you and return to our very fulfilled lives.