Childless By Chance? How Revolutionary.

No matter your politics, or even where on the Earth you live, 2017 is just a little crazy. Cray, if you prefer. Not that politics–American in particular–aren’t Different with a capital D this

year, or that a violent act of terrorism could blow up during your next shopping expedition.

I’m adding one more slice of 2017 bizarreness that might be noticed only by those within its

matrix. Someone asks, “Do you have children?”

You respond, “No, I don’t.”

And, when you explain that motherhood just didn’t happen for you, the other person is ASTONISHED.

W.T.F.

Good News: Reporters from around the globe are reaching out to me more and more as a

person of note in the community of women without children. Yay.

Bad News:Five reporters have started their interviews by asking me,“So, why did you decide not to have children?”

Many more “everyday people” have basically done the same thing.

Seriously?

The reporters lost a whole bunch of brownie points because they didn’t take the time to read my bio before speaking with me. I WANTED children. As time went by I admit to adopting

some ambivalence about it, but did I choose a childfree life 100% from first period on? Nope.

What’s up with bad journalists and others? Was it Lauren Sandler’s 2013 cover story for Time magazine spotlighting“The Childfree Life”? (Childless by chance adults earned a box of their own in the print layout.)

All I know is that somewhere between the start of The NotMom in 2012 and today, the news

about the rise in women around the world deciding to forego motherhood has become the

norm within an abnormal group. It wasn’t that long ago that when a woman confessed she had no desire for children, she was determined by the masses to be weird, if not a complete heretic.

Now, increasingly, it’s women who wanted to conceive who are deemed to be out-of-trend.