Stop Asking Me When I'm Having a Baby

I need to talk to you about something, and it’s been a long time coming. Please hear me out. This is personal.

PLEASE STOP ASKING ME WHEN I’M HAVING A BABY.

Stop asking me why I haven’t.

Stop telling me I should.

Stop telling me you had a dream about me having a baby and what her name was and how I would or will be such a good mother.

Do you have any idea how much I love kids? Maybe you don’t. I’ll tell you. I believe in kids. I am a kid. I fight for kids. I imagine with kids. I teach kids. I champion kids. Kids crack me up. They make me feel alive. I think kids make up a large part of the reason I fight so hard for humans in this violent world and why I believe we grown people might actually be spared from some sort of mass cleansing from this beautiful planet when it decides we are the disease.

To friends my age, younger, and older; to my sisters-in-law who say they can’t fathom having babies into their forties because they’d be so goddamned tired; to the ones who’ve been blessed with children and the ones desperately trying; to the ones pregnant now; the ones on hormones; the single and gay ones buying sperm; the ones entering an uncommonly early menopause with their dreams shattered; the ones driving middle school kids around to camps and sports and lessons; the ones with high school kids who make them question their sanity and capability; the fertile ones who choose a career; the ones pressured and raked across the coals by mothers and preachers; the ones who blacked out and got to the drugstore too late or too broke; to the ones who had an abortion at twenty and pray and wring their hands at thirty-three wishing they could take it back; the fifteen-year-olds who know without a doubt that motherhood/fatherhood is their life’s purpose; the fifty-two-year-olds whose doctors use the word “geriatric,” who hear ad nauseam about risk and who’ve already been told no way…

I support you. Do you support me? I don’t have any idea what’s next, if you must know...which you shouldn’t...but I guess, in this age of information, if you’re not defending yourself, it’s open season… But why do you care so much about what I can or will do anyway? Why do you need to know what I want my body to do? Is it because you think I’d be a good mother? I think so too. Is it because you’re jealous of my freedom? I’m not free. Do you want me to join you in your exhaustion? I’m tired too, and it’s not a competition. Don’t you think I’ve already imagined her eyebrows? Their names and nicknames? Can you not imagine how terrified I might be to raise her in a world on fire and melting down? Plastic water bottles weren’t around when I was born, and now there is an actual island of garbage 600,000 square miles large floating in the ocean. What world would I give them? What losses would they suffer, which bones will she break, and where will he do his laundry? Will there be any clean clothes for them to wear or clean water left for them to drink? Did my parents, young and building a home with their hands, my mom in her mullet and my dad with a fu manchu, think of this, or did they just tip on in?

Isn’t this still my business if I never thought or saw or said any of this? Why do you need to know?

And uh god, I love kids. I love the things they say when they’re delirious with exhaustion, love how honest, how pure, love when they need help putting their snow pants and sunscreen on, love when they cuss in context, love to watch them lie and confess, love the stick figures of families and when they start to dress themselves in leopard print and stripes, love sticky faces and shoes on the wrong feet and hair in sloppy braids they won’t let you fix. I love how malleable they are when you say, “Go help your friend! She’s sad!” and they race to hug her, and then when they look to you for approval, you get to say, “You’re such a good friend,” and watch them beam with pride. I feel so honored to have some part of teaching them to take care of each other before they enter the bigger world where it’s cutthroat and mean; and honored to be an adult kids trust… especially those kids who’ve already learned that adults shouldn’t be trusted. To also be the adult who asks them how and why questions and travels down wild paths in their imagination with them and gut-laughs at nonsensical jokes with them and compliments their still-formless art. Kids are where it’s at, so don’t get it twisted.

I need you to stop asking me. I need you to stop asking everyone. You have no idea what someone’s body cannot make or what their career drive inhibits them from doing. Do not ask me, like Bonnie Raitt got asked, if she regrets not having children, should it come to that...Know my heart will have already broken a hundred times in sacrifice of something I also felt was some form of birth—I have music and a band and aspirations and a trajectory. Know (not that it’s your business) that I never imagined my life without children of my own, but that if it doesn’t happen for me, I will ache sometimes and need the company of yours, as I will have been working diligently at another pursuit...which is a sacrifice of myself, a public one, and one which I committed to when I chose to believe the people around me needed and deserved it. I will have written and sung myself a baby.

Ask me instead how I’m doing. I’m well! Maybe I’ll give life in the traditional way, and maybe I won’t. Right now I’m trying to write songs that make people feel. We could use some songs right now, don’t you think? Isn’t that life? I don’t want to live without music. Everybody’s supposed to do something. Just please, please stop asking me if I’m going to make people. Stop asking anyone ever if they’re going to make people. There are people right in front of you—talk to them while you’ve got them, and let the next generation bubble forth as it’s meant to. We are amoebas. We’re dragonflies on a pond and penguins by the millions and kangaroos bounding through deserts with pouches full of life. Surely you don’t need to know what is or will be inside my womb. Listen to my voice for now instead. One day I may be silent. One day I may want to sing only to my babies. One day I will be dead. But today, while I’m so very much alive, all I want is the punch and the reverb—and I want it to ring around the whole fucking world.