I Am Childless By Choice
I never really liked children. As an only child, I have no experiance with them. I never went babysitting as a teen. I never felt the pressure to reproduce. Especially when I see how many unwanted children there are in this world (I was one of them). My mother was very abusive to me because I was her "Big mistake". She told me stories about how she had asked people for money for an abortion but could'nt get it.
Because of lots of stuff that happened to me as a child, I have trouble identifying with both my "inner child" and with traditional female gender-based roles. Childhood was absolutely the worst time of my life....one unending period of escapeless torture. I left home (for college, fortunately) at 16. My contact with my mother, until she died last year, was extremely minimal.
I'm sure I could never bond with a child.
One of the reasons that I married who I did was because he was a much older man, with a child he had no contact with-she's only a few years younger than I. He did'nt want to play the "second-marriage-new-little-baby" game, and I don't blame him. It's real cute to have a new baby when you're 55, and real hell to have a teen when you're 65 and wanna retire and be selfish. I know, my mother had me at 46, and my father was in his 50's. I was the only kid in school whose father was "retired" instead of being an accountant, or a doctor, or a coal-miner!
Most people thought I'd "come to my senses" when I was younger, and wanna be a mommy. Boy, that was wrong. The ironic thing is, now I am a "mommy". My husband has Alzheimer's.
