At a recent mom-and-kids brunch, in the brief lull between naptime attempts for two babies and two toddlers, a friend asked, “What are you all listening to these days?”
We all stared back bleary-eyed, no doubt thinking: Babies shrieking, obviously. Is there any other sound in the world?
“I mean podcasts,” she clarified.
A couple women offered favorites: one for curing toddler tantrums, another for baby-led weaning. When it was my turn, I threw out some titles of my own, distracted by the blueberry smoothie my son was inching toward the edge of the table.
Then I noticed that my friends’ stares were now directed at me. “Why do you listen to those podcasts?” one of them asked.
And I saw, in a rush, what she meant: Here we were at a crowded table, two babies stuffed side by side into highchairs, big kids on their knees grabbing pancakes from the stack. Sticky syrup everywhere. How, my friends’ baffled faces asked, given our shared maternal condition, had I stumbled upon an obsession with podcasts about the choice to remain child-free?
There are many true ways to answer that question, but the biggest is the pandemic. In March of 2020, I was finishing grad school and teaching online. My son was 2.5 years old and home indefinitely from day care. Motherhood had been plenty hard before that, but I had never felt trapped in exactly that way — utterly bound to my current circumstances, with no wiggle room in any direction.
Every morning, after breakfast and books and toys and games and watering the plants on the patio, after every possible household activity had been exhausted, I strapped my son in the stroller and plodded down the street to a nearby stream, where he played and I sat on a rock in grateful silence.
The day was not even half completed by that point. There was still lunch, and then wrestling him into a nap, trying to squeeze out two hours of work (unlikely) before he woke up, and then another long stint of play before dinner and bath and bed.
Still, on that rock, I took respite. My son splashed and laughed in the cold water. I plugged in my AirPods and scrolled through my podcasts, thinking for those brief minutes not of how to diagnose some obscure toddler illness, not of how to be a better mother — but of how to feel free. How to locate, within the crush of this day, one expansive moment for myself.
While my son tossed stones and drew in the sand, I listened to interviews with women who had decided not to have children.
You could call it envy. But it wasn’t that. Those interviews were like faint radio signals to the island where I was stranded, reminders of all the lives out there.
You could call it envy. But it wasn’t that. Those interviews were like faint radio signals to the island where I was stranded, reminders of all the lives out there. Even in the brutal isolation of quarantine, there were people sleeping late and savoring coffee in bed. There were people staying up past midnight watching movies. There were people backpacking, camping, climbing mountains. There were people working remote jobs without falling behind, because their children were not converting the living room into a blanket fort or knocking juice boxes off the coffee table or refusing to go to sleep.
It wasn’t that these facts did not occasionally infuriate me. Sometimes I felt crazed by the gulf between caretakers and non-caretakers, stunned at the other easier ways my life could have gone.
But usually, child-free podcasts didn’t send me into that raging place. Instead, they left me strangely calm, peaceful. These women had chosen something difficult, a path they would have to explain again and again. Out of that difficulty, they had discovered the beauty of lives lived on their own terms.
I could relate to this. When I had gotten pregnant as an unmarried 28-year-old, I’d chosen an equally stigmatized path — low-income single motherhood, to put it bluntly. From that path had come my greatest joy: my son.
What the child-free podcasts captured was the beauty of women living for themselves. Women in love with their careers. Women devoted to their art. Women who drew deep nourishment from travel and romance and food and literature and adventure and personal agency — or women who just liked hanging out in their gardens, without having to worry about toddlers rolling in poison ivy or crashing their trikes into the fence.
Our lives looked nothing alike, but I loved these women.
There were sticking points. Used to fielding criticism for their choices, some child-free women seemed a little too eager to criticize mothers in return. One woman scorned her friends who had let motherhood consume them — as though this were inherently a lesser way to live, or as if it were always a choice. Another, pushing back against the notion that being child-free was selfish, argued instead that having kids without financial stability was the selfish choice. Financially unstable mother that I was, I resented this argument, and I disputed it on philosophical grounds. I believe parenthood should be accessible for everyone, that not just the wealthy deserve to have families.
Sometimes, I wanted to slap these enlightened child-free women in the face.
But mostly what I heard in their words was care and thoughtfulness. Respect for mothers and motherhood. Gratitude toward their own parents. Love for women. And deep and generous love for themselves, too.
When the interviews ended, or when my son had had enough, I loaded his sopping body into the stroller and pushed him back up the hill to our house. By the time we got there, I was panting and sweaty and annoyed at myself for forgetting to take the chicken out of the freezer.
But these conditions were a little less all-consuming now. They were the setting of my life, the undeniable place I was in. But they no longer felt like the only place on Earth. Not an unreachable island — just a city where, sometimes, I felt I’d been hanging out for a little too long.
Other days, a place I couldn’t fathom leaving.
Eventually the pandemic restrictions eased. My son returned to day care. I returned to work. I stopped listening to podcasts as a coping mechanism for daily life. My son discovered Taylor Swift and we sang “Anti-Hero” at the top of our lungs while driving through town.
But still, when I feel constrained by the life I’m living — like I can’t access my full sense of creativity or freedom — I pull those podcasts out again. I did it recently when contemplating having a second baby, with all the professional and financial and emotional implications of having a newborn.
There’s an obvious irony here: Why should child-free moms be the ones to empower me in my choice to have, not one, but two kids?
But they do. Pushing my grocery cart through the aisles, loading up on the fruit my son loves best, I think: These women get it, what it means to make hard choices. What it means to value so deeply these one lives we each receive. How to make a decision and live that decision to its fullest potential.
That’s what I want for all of us. I’m grateful to the child-free women who remind me how it’s done.
