I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids

... I think that childfree by choice is the new gay. We're the new disenfranchised group. People think we're irresponsible, immoral sluts and that our lifestyle is up for debate.

Invalidating a woman’s life choices by saying things like, “Oh, but you’ll regret it if you don’t have kids,” or, “I didn’t think I wanted kids either until I had one,” is like me going to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and telling the newly sober that eventually when they grow old, they’ll want to take the edge off with a little gin and tonic and that if they could only just be mature enough to control themselves, they could go on a fun wine-tasting tour in the Napa Valley.

I had no idea that marriage was only supposed to be between two people who wanted to get between the sheets and make more people. What ever happened to marrying for love— or to get on your partner’s health insurance policy, or for presents? No one was going to buy two people in their thirties a four-slice toaster if we just continued to live in sin.

It's a weird thing society puts on us women. They tell us we can have careers (well, after they told us we could vote-they sort of said it would be ok if we wanted to have a career, as long as we agree to get paid less than a man for the same job), and then they tell us that we aren't real women if we have careers but no babies, and if we dare pick a career over a baby...we better at least talk about that career like its a baby in order to blend in and not call attention to the fact that we're selfish women who are not carrying on the human race.

I have a stand-up routine I do about masturbation and the unwanted thoughts that go through women's heads when they put their hands under their sheets. I need a story to think about. I need a fantasy that makes sense. I can't just finger myself and picture Johnny Depp's face. It needs a sense of realism, like how did I meet Johnny Depp? He lives in France. I don't have a work visa. Besides, he has children and I've made it quite clear that I don't want to be a mom and I don't want to be stepmom either.

Can we all admit that the sound of a kid squealing, even if it’s with joy, sounds like squealing? I can angrily press the button on an air horn or I can press the button on an air horn with a sense of carefree fun and either way it sounds like an air horn.

I finally understand that it’s okay to be a little afraid of things but that obsessing over them does not mean you have any more control over what you fear.

tantrum. I don’t want to have a baby but sometimes I want to be a baby because it’s socially acceptable for them to cry and scream in public.

It’s not that I can’t cook. I just don’t enjoy cooking. It takes too long and you have to stand there monitoring everything, which doesn’t work well for me and my ADHD.

And perhaps the best reason of all: “Kids? What the fuck am I going to do with a kid?

I THINK THAT people confuse a woman with empathy with someone who has the emotional means to raise a child. I’m not mother material but I’m a nice person, sure. And I’m a nice person because I’m usually in a good mood and I’m usually in a good mood because I’m not responsible for raising a child I don’t want.

I’d love to be considered unselfish and Christlike, but as a woman it’s nearly impossible. Jesus had a penis, so he could feed a homeless person without the dude saying, “Hey, I know phones haven’t been invented yet but can I have your number?” Jesus could be nice to strangers without them getting the wrong idea and calling him a tease. And let me remind you once again that Jesus, aka the original Oprah, did not have children either. 7.

The bottom line is that the choices we make often make sense to us but can confuse others. Somebody is always going to be disappointed with your life choice, and my rule of thumb is that as long as I’m not the one who is disappointed, I can live with that.

like as long as you’re cleaning up some living thing’s poop after age thirty, family members really respect that lifestyle choice.

I’ve always had a thing for guys who make a living doing something in public (with the exception of someone who hands out sandwich shop flyers or dresses up like Pluto at Disney World).

You know who does a lot of good deeds and doesn't have kids and totally understands what's important in life? George Clooney. Unlike me, he doesn't give a fuck what you think about the fact that he's not "selfless" enough to father a kid. He's not writing a book defending his position. He's having sex with a cocktail waitress and then saving Darfur. Both are noble positions.

I'd learned that you couldn't talk to kids about death or show them music videos of of men who sing in eyeliner. I possibly had turned one kid into an obsessive-compulsive with the urge to murder, and another kid gay. I'm not equating being a murderer with being gay, but from what I understand, either can be a difficult thing to admit to your family.

Listen, it is scientifically proven that pregnant women get super horny, because it helps them hold onto their mate who impregnated them. If they weren't horny, their mate would just be living with an overweight pickle-eater who stopped shaving her legs. Yet every pregnant woman tells anyone who will listen (I'm looking at you, Jessica Simpson) that she's, "eight months pregnant, and has never felt sexier or hornier!" Guess what? If you didn't feel sexy or horny during your eighth month of pregnancy, you'd be crying in a ball on the bedroom floor, clutching a snot-filled tissue, and wearing your food-stained fleece pajama bottoms as your cheating husband walked out the door with your non-pregnant pilates instructor. It is not interesting that you are horny when pregnant.

I resent having to refer to my career as my baby in order to explain myself to parents. It suggests that as long as a woman has something she feels maternal toward, then she passes as a regular human being. "She want to swaddle her career! So we'll make an exception and give her a pass." Women don't have to have maternal urges to be women. My career is not my surrogate baby, just like my car is not my surrogate sex slave just because I turn it on and ride it. Men don't call their careers their sons or daughters. A fireman without kids doesn't have to pretend his job is his baby replacement. "Oh yeah, when I walk up those forty flights of stairs fighting back the burning and falling asbestos, I just cradle the hose in my arms and think, 'this is my baby'.

get out of that mentality that there is a "right" way to live.

I can barely forgive myself for the time when I negged Billy from my improv troupe onstage. He said, “I have a gift for you,” and my first instinct was to say, “No you don’t.” The scene died right then and there. See what happens when I try to nurture something? I know it seems dramatic to relate destroying an improv scene to possibly destroying a child’s life, but improv and child rearing are not so different. Both are jobs that people volunteer for and complain about endlessly, and they bore everyone around them as they talk about the process.

Still, whenever someone asks me why I don't want to have kids, I think about how abandoned I feel when my friends get pregnant and that's usually the last little tiny little hint of a feeling that pushes me into the maybe territory - I just want my life to stay the same and keep my friends. Then I remember that losing sleep, picking boogers out of a child's nose, and having said booger maker wake me up every day at five thirty is not worth my bringing a human life into the world just because I could probably mimic the other parent chimps in the wild and manage to raise a kid without killing it.

I envisioned the next phase of losing my friends to their children, which is when the people with kids realize that their childfree friends don't have any handy tips for them based on their own experience...so parents naturally gravitate toward other parents and they start to speak their own language. Nobody needs a childfree person there -- it wastes too much time to try to translate. I'm just going to come out and say it: this is the real reason lots of people end up changing their minds and having kids. They don't want to lose their friends.

You'd be such a good mom!" This statement is at best condescending and at worst patently false and potentially dangerous. It's like telling a friend who you know has a paralyzing fear of wild animals that she would make a great game warden. Seriously, she should just shake off her deep-seated anxiety and guide some poor, innocent family on a safari. I'm sure you'll do fine!

I got the benefits of motherhood -- feeling like I fit in with a tribe of women, not feeling judged, actually being told that it's not rude of me to close my eyes and tune out the person rubbing lotion in between my toes -- without having to sit there with a human being growing inside of me and pressing on my bladder, causing me to have to cut the pedicure short so I could pee.

Typically moms are laying a guilt trip to convince their thirty-five-year-old married daughters to have children. I've always thought that mothers who ask their children to provide them with grandchildren are acting like Joe Francis, the mastermind behind Girls Gone Wild: Come on! Take your top off for the camera because it will benefit me!

Being overweight made me feel sad. When I'm sad I eat, then I feel fat and that makes me sad, so I eat more. It's a vicious (but fun) cycle.

It's so taboo to say that you don't really enjoy the company of children. May I point out that the adults who brought their kids to the adult pool obviously did so because they did not want to be around only other children? Do they get a free pass because they procreated? I see parents all the time who get a kick out of saying, "I only like my kids. I don't like other kids." But if a single woman without children says, "I don't like kids," she sounds like a sociopath.

A lot of my friends who have kids say to me, "We'd love to travel more and go out every night, but we have a child now. We got that out of our system in our twenties, so now it's just the time to settle down." Well, I got nothing out of my system in my twenties and I'm excited about starting to put things in my system.

Death is like getting a ride to the airport. Sure, someone can escort you to the curb, but it’s against the law/laws of nature for your ride to see you all the way through to the departure gate/pearly gates. The