the “cool” mom as infrastructure
if i don't want to have kids yet, it's because i want to help the world raise its
Am I allowed to have an opinion on motherhood? Not convinced I do. I don’t want to be reviled for trying, but oh well.
As a woman, I often feel damned if I do, damned if I don’t, if I start talking about being a mother. People always have unsolicited opinions on this, and ironically, it’s the mothers that have the least negative things to say when I bring up these feelings:
That I want to be a mom, but not The Mom first. I want to be one voice of The Mom, like a close friend, an auntie, a secondary confidante that you trust. A child’s mother’s chosen family should be involved directly in child-rearing.
I want to be a “cool mom” who can also comfort, teach, discipline, love. I want to be one of many mothers, not perhaps the biological one of the child in question, but a whole ass village of Mothers and Fathers for the child to grow up feeling like no single adult must have the answers.
I believe that mothering is the hand of God, comforting and nourishing you, much more than the concrete manifestation that we conceive of. I don’t seek to “replace” the role that the biological mother plays, but I want to play parts in the other slots of needed adults that a child inevitably has. I think this is a better use of my time. If I am to worry about the ways my future children will feel orphaned by me, I might as well focus on creating abundance in the world first and bend the world to accommodate the children it’s already brought in.
I don’t know how this vision can concretely manifest, but as I approach 30, I know it’s more important for me to put the messy thought fragments out there than to try to obsess over refining them for now. I admit I am unqualified to understand parenthood, but I am an expert in my own lack of understanding. But unlike those who want to never touch it, I feel compelled to explore it outside of the traditional nuclear family unit.
I want to be an active participant in the lives of kids, whether or not I end up with my own. First, maybe I’ll be a substitute teacher. Maybe I’ll volunteer at a daycare. Before I get to be an auntie to some babies of my friends, I’ll expose myself to children as much as I can.
People saying, “wow, you only want part of the responsibility? If they’re not your own kids, it’s not the same investment!” miss the point. I want to “practice” being with children before I be with one, permanently, and I also want to practice being with the energy of being a child in today’s society before I take on a sacred duty.
I believe you can mother many things into existence, without being The Mother. I don’t want to be responsible for people’s brain chemistry. I would rather microdose it, and refine the ways one must parent. And I want institutional changes to help me with this.
I’ve never wanted to grow up in isolation. I want to be in an eternal village, and I believe kids feel this way too. I want kids to see optionality in the adults they choose to be like, not relegate all of their sensemaking to just Mom and Dad.
I turned 28 last week, and I woke up to dwelling deeply on the archetype of Motherhood. I recognized that I have a softer side to me that needs a release, that wants an outlet, that wants a remembering of what matters. And the next generation matters a hell of a lot more than I want to admit.
This will take me from hotheaded whining to humble understanding in a heartbeat. In the midst of my millennial 20’s-some psychodrama of dating issues, career woes, and friend breakups, I’ve recently realized the bigger picture is that I’ve always, always wanted to save people from any suffering that I’ve endured. The psychological incompatibilities of growing up in today’s day and age have gotten to many of my peers. Most of us have given up on tradition as we’ve known it, and I think for me this has led to me seeing myself in a light I didn’t realize was an inevitability.
I want to make sure the children whose lives I touch now live in a better world, and I’ve realized I want to contribute to that world as much as possible so that when it’s my turn, I don’t have to raise my own kids alone.
This was why I started hosting more community events when I got to New York, why I’ve started reading books on parenting, why I befriend older women with children and look at how they’re speaking to them.
I’ve concluded many things about being a good mom — yet it’s not because I want to have children. To be quite honest, at this moment, I’m really not sure if I want to.
I refuse to have them til I believe in the world being a place that will be well to them. And I refuse to stop working to create those types of structures, until my beliefs turn around.
The archetype of “selfish millennial who doesn’t want to have kids” inevitably comes to mind when I voice hesitation, but I’m bullish on how this is not in absolution. I will biologically give birth to children when I feel like the world around them is safe to do so. When I feel like it won’t be on just me to take care of them, when I don’t have to worry about their sensemaking being relegated to just me, when the world they’ll inhabit feels like one in which there are adults stepping up to the plate.
My stance is that if we each just have our own children and continue the family unit, we will continue the patterns of trauma where we relegate all of our expectations on two – god forbid, maybe one — caretakers. In reality, it’s on society to rear us. I learned so much about how things work through a couple kind English teachers, some older church mentors, and more. These affordances saved me when my mother couldn’t handle the weight of explaining truths to me she herself barely believed in, and when my father was clueless about how to connect to a daughter.
The “no thanks kids” crowd tends to fault our external circumstances, claiming that those who don’t heed our fatalistic and nihilistic viewpoints can’t see that we believe ourselves to be noble. Many people my age are right to venture that we don’t want to bring a child into a world we do not believe in, and they are indeed getting at something sacred when they believe this to be a type of moral code, to look at the issues of our time and not want to subject children to that.
I’m not the only one who’s ambivalent on wanting to be a mom, but there are so many people that know they want to have kids. I wager that if asked to help out with the kids that will be birthed, many people who don’t want kids would still hesitate. This is where I draw the line.
If there are other causes we want to devote our time to, with not passing on our bloodline as part of that sacrifice, shouldn’t it also be making sure the children you do inevitably bump into grow up to be healthy, even if they aren’t yours?
At this point in my life, my choice to not have children is temporary. Things could shift, and we could have more co-living options available within 10 years. At that point, I’ll probably have frozen my eggs and be down to reproduce if I see there’s a safe space for me to enter. I’ll prepare for the possibility of this era, but not wager on its certainty.
Instead of complaining about society right now, I think I’m better suited to try to understand the psychology of kids even if I don’t have any. It sucks that the only people who understand parenting tend to be the parents.
I could be using time spent complaining about my Twitter following to study up on issues of childcare and eldercare infrastructure. Paid maternal leave is still a burgeoning political issue in the West, debates about how our generation dates are revealing the deconstruction of how we see love and intimacy, and the nuclear family unit has proven to be insufficient to produce a healthy, happy, trauma-free child.
In the tarot’s Major Arcana, the Fool goes on a journey. He encounters many archetypes along the way before arriving at card number #21, The World. To get to the ends of the world, who will he meet? There’s the Magician, the Emperor, the Hierophant, but also the High Priestess, the Empress, and Strength. All are essential for the Fool to learn who he really is so he can get his shit done. It’s clear that he can’t depend on one archetype to get his needs met.
Recently, I’ve pulled the Fool as I ponder upon my relationship to my parents. I realized that I used to attribute character failings to how my mother raised me, where I should’ve realized it was institutional shortcomings. I then stopped wanting to be a “better mother” than my mom. I instead, realized the systemic shortcomings of the choices she struggled to make. I instead thought of helping create a world in which she could’ve been the mother she wished to be. We all live with the consequences of childcare, but really I think of how the village wasn’t available to her, or to my ancestors.
Much of my mom’s personality was shaped by the early years of immigrating, when she had to raise me alone while pursuing a Master’s education and working at a restaurant to meet ends meet while my dad tried to figure out his next career move. She eventually turned to the church and the University of Connecticut to provide childcare. But was it enough? The adults in my life were temporary and fleeting, plus they didn’t know me and my inner life well enough to give me proper safety and guidance. I grew up crying, traumatized, and angry in ways that my parents can’t be faulted for.
When I think about having children, I think about the world I grew up in. And I’m determined to never let that happen to my kids, whether I birthed them or not. As I approach my 30’s, I’ve let my natural inclinations take over. And I choose to not see this as selfish, but as proactive. I want to contribute to the conversation around the infrastructure to make sure all kids in my orbit feel properly parented — and I refuse to see the nuclear family as “normal” as is now. I don’t want to be in an isolated suburb with “the best education.” The best education will come from the people who know me intimately and can call bullshit on me, so my kids will also not grow up idolizing me and having me be their everything.
If I do want to have children, I am decidedly uncommitted to when. I don’t see myself having children at this moment because I believe there is more work to be done in the world before I’d feel safe raising children. And part of this is seeing what my mother went through.
When I was a tutor for a brief time in 2019, working with kids really helped me realize so much. I was protective of my students when they got bullied, when they confessed their insecurities about their grades, when there was trouble at home, and when they cried when it was time for me to leave, I felt a fury burrowing in my chest that there wouldn’t be a reliable older adult figure to replace me.
“Teacher Crystal, are you not going to be back tomorrow,” they said sadly. I didn’t know what to tell them. I didn’t know how to give a “But, on the bright side!” to these children. I felt trapped and unable to detach.
I realized then, that this was the helplessness my mother would feel when she wanted to give me the world, but saw with her hands that she was insufficiently resourced to do so. She didn’t know how to speak truth to a type of person who’d grow up to be her close confidante and greatest vice. Why should she have been expected to?
Birthing and raising a human to make good life choices and have great emotional sensemaking is not something that can just be done with two people. Even if you have two primary parents, I balk at the idea of anyone doing it with just that number. I believe anyone who feels able to do it without a proper village surrounding them has a lot of experience I don’t yet.
Of all the stances I have, I believe this one is the one most likely to change. But the change starts with me. Is it selfish of me possibly to say that if I don’t want to raise my own children, I want to help raise my friend’s children? I believe all of my stances are subject to change at this point, because the Internet has made all of our mindsets more malleable. The more I educate myself, the more I’ll feel ready. The world is dynamic and our thoughts are dynamic so if I have any convictions that aren’t based on how my life has played out for years and years, then they’re definitely held lightly.
It’s definitely because I don’t believe we live in a world that is pro-children, and I feel responsible for making my life and my community pro-children as best as I can.
I’m excited to continue down this path. I realized that the inevitable end of my journey about learning how to be a kid to myself again, was to be a mother to our world’s.
Looking back, I know for a fact that how I turned out was because I wasn’t just raised by my parents. I was raised by the world, that I went out and let myself see when I was 18, and seven cities, thousands of friends and hundreds of books later, these experiences of parenting from diverse sources was what helped me detach. What helped me forgive her.
Finding these resources alone when i was always depressed and had to learn to ask for help, was very hard. I feel compelled to see how a kid handles it today, and to be there for them along the way without burning out.
Really, what I wanted was an infrastructure to parent me. A perfect infrastructure so I didn’t have to do it alone. If I lacked that as a child, why would I trust my future child to also thrive?
I am not interested in being a mother on the world’s terms, where I have to give up my career right now just to have my resentment scaffold and someday come out at my children. I just know the work that precedes having biological children is not work I want to shirk.
I think other women have more trust in this than I do, and that’s fine. I want to honor that trust by helping them. By creating the utopia I seek of my dreams.
Yes, getting closer to 30 means I do have the yearnings of being a mom now, but I am smart enough to know it’s not time yet for me to be a literal mom. Let’s beef up the manuscript for how to be a good citizen of the world first.
So whenever anyone says that it’s “selfish to want kids” or it’s “selfish to not want kids,” I’ll just remember I have permission to figure out what that means in my own regard.