The Truth About My Child-Free Life

My dad loved Thanksgiving because it was a holiday that was full of once-a-year foods he enjoyed, and it wasn’t attached to any religion. I was 40 when my parents visited me and I cooked the whole meal in my small apartment. I’d recently broken up with the guy I’d been seeing for several years, and there was an assumption that there was still time to have kids, and I would. Mom constantly pushed for grandchildren in our weekly calls. It took me more than a few years to realize that that visit with them was the last time I would have any holiday with my family. Without my own offspring, I was phased out. There was never a word spoken about it. I just stopped being invited. My very old fashioned tribe measured a woman’s worth in grandchildren and bank accounts. I had neither. I wasn’t even worth asking if I’d like to attend their yearly gatherings anymore. They might have said that tickets cost more or there were other times they could see me, but I knew if I’d had kids we’d be at those special events together.

Some assume my child-free status was because I didn’t want kids. Many people were a chorus of “Just grab a guy and get knocked-up! Stop being so picky.” or “Do it on your own.” I didn’t want those options. I wanted my kids to be born out of love, not desperation. I wanted them to have a solid base that I wasn’t able to provide on my own in the way I knew I wanted to. The men I seemed to date were often as immature as I was. I looked young, acted young, and unfortunately lived like I was still starting out in life. I kept thinking things would get better. Los Angeles is a dreamers' town. I knew many overnight success stories where one day someone was living like I was and then next they had a contract that elevated them into the elite class. I wrongly assumed that would be me. I thought I was one commercial job away from being okay. Instead of even going on auditions or being continually asked in for work, I was barely surviving teaching how food could heal you.

That was another assumption most got wrong about me. They thought I didn’t have kids because I couldn’t. I’d led with curing my extreme eczema and the complications that led to near death, for so long that the story defined me. It was true. What was also true was that my food and health discoveries worked. They were not health food store hype. The story pulled in the few clients I needed to keep paying for my rent-controlled apartment and reduced utility bills but it kept me stuck too. My identity was too steeped in the past and I didn’t realize how incredibly strong and healthy I had become. I worried too that my kids would get my wonky immunity and I didn’t think it through that they wouldn’t because their births wouldn’t be full of drugs and the lack of human touch for the their first month of life that led to many of my issues. I worried that they would reject my plant-heavy lifestyle and I projected so much of what I’d grown up with onto my imaginary kids, I felt like maybe I shouldn’t have any after all. It was a tug of war between my emotions and my hormones and the fact that I really just wanted a life like everyone else seemed to have kind of fell away. If I’d played my cards right, I could have had amazing kids and maybe met my single Mr. Right at some school function. Instead, my fear won and the years kept going by.