You Didn’t Get to Decide If You Wanted Kids
The church told you
You didn’t sit down and think about it.
You didn’t weigh options.
You didn’t picture different versions of your life and choose one.
You were told.
Not always harshly.
Not always explicitly.
But clearly enough that the question never really formed.
This is what your body is for.
This is what a good life looks like.
This is what a good woman does.
Wanting didn’t enter into it.
Now you’re out.
And people are having a completely different conversation.
They’re asking whether women should have children.
Whether they owe something to society.
Whether opting out is selfish or justified or necessary.
And you’re reading it thinking—
that question assumes I got to have an opinion in the first place.
For a lot of us, the harder question isn’t:
Do I want children?
It’s:
What do I even want?
Because the answer used to be built in.
Your life had structure.
Your identity had edges.
Your decisions had a framework.
You didn’t have to figure out what your body was for.
That part was already decided.
When that system disappears, you don’t land in freedom the way people describe it.
You land in something quieter.
A kind of internal blank space where the answers used to be.
And underneath that—
there’s still a reaction.
Guilt that doesn’t quite make sense anymore.
Hesitation that shows up before you even know what you’re deciding.
A low-level suspicion that wanting something for yourself might still be wrong.
So when people talk about choice, it can feel like you’re missing a step.
Like everyone else got handed a question
and you got handed a script.
And now the script is gone, but the ability to answer the question hasn’t fully come online yet.
A lot of the women I work with are in that in-between.
Not trying to optimize their lives.
Not trying to take a stance.
Just trying to become someone who can actually choose.
That doesn’t happen all at once.
It’s slower than that.
Less like a decision.
More like noticing.
What feels good.
What doesn’t.
What’s yours.
What isn’t.
If this feels familiar, you’re not behind.
You’re in the part no one talks about.
The part where the system is gone,
but your own voice isn’t fully steady yet.
And that’s where we start.
Not with big decisions.
Just with the question:
What do I owe myself, now?
There’s a version of this conversation happening right now about whether women owe the world children.
I’ve been reading those arguments and noticing something.
They assume a person who got to have a relationship to wanting in the first place.
I didn’t.
A lot of us didn’t.
I wrote more about that and where this framing breaks. Coming tomorrow.
If this question feels familiar—
What do I owe myself, now?
I’m hosting a small live session where we stay with that a little longer
and map what actually comes up when you try to answer it.
You don’t need a plan.
You don’t need answers.
Yep yep yep! And this applies to so many areas of life - marriage, sexuality, careers ...
Most fundamentalist Christian parents don’t teach their kids comprehensive sex education, or allow them to be taught it at school, either. I had already had a child when I learned how to notice when I was fertile during my cycle.
I have four beautiful children that I love dearly, but if I could do things over, I would choose to finish college and establish something of a career before having kids that I could fall back on when needed, and be more intentional about when I had children.
Here I am in my 40’s trying to figure out how to listen to and make decisions for myself, as 1) my family needs me to go to work due to financial strain, and 2) existing to support my husband’s goals and career and caretake and homeschool my kids because that’s what I was told was my role as a woman and the only way to please God, has not proven to be as blessed or as satisfying as I was promised. My children are also at normal childhood developmental stages of differentiation. They don’t need or want me in the same ways, and I’m grappling with how our relationships should be as I learn more about child development and emotional health and have discarded Christian fundamentalist parenting methods and have come face to face with religious trauma and abuse from my own childhood.
I didn’t lose my identity when I became a mother. There was not much to lose, because I wasn’t allowed to have a truly autonomous identity before I became a wife and mother. My feelings about things were continuously dismissed and invalidated by my Christian mother. I wasn’t allowed to have and express opinions. I was raised to survive, to do what others wanted me to do, because we lived in poverty and isolation and my dad was mentally ill and abusive. I loved to learn, but could not decide what I should do with my life because I wasn’t allowed to have feelings and opinions about things. So I waited and prayed, and waited and prayed, begging God to show me what his difficult to discern, perfect will and ultimate destiny was for my life. I wasn’t taught I could want things and plan for them, that I could listen to myself and make decisions. Many of my life choices were not intentional choices, they were by default, or by doing what I was told I should do. My husband is a wonderful man, but there was a part of me that in choosing to get married was resigning myself to the idea that if God didn’t divinely reveal to me his hidden plan for my life, that my purpose must be what the church told me: get married, support and submit to my husband, have babies, homeschool, then teach younger women to do the same things. The fruit of those teachings has been bitter, not sweet.