Do I Have To Be A Mother?: A Memoir Of Love And Searching For Female Identity

By Karin Rahbek

She never wanted children. Will love change her mind?

Karin has always known that she doesn't want to become a mother. The man she loves had a vasectomy, so her fear of an unwanted pregnancy is gone forever. Finally, living the life of her dreams, she's completely unaware that her emotional world is going to turn upside down.

One day Karin finds herself confronted with a strong feeling of strange uncertainty, and after a while, she surprisingly discovers that in fact, she's on the fence about motherhood.

Now, Karin realizes that she must make a decision that has the power of changing everything: Will she regret not having children with her perfect partner? Or will she have to leave him to have children with another man?

In this book, you will discover:
•Why making a personal decision doesn't mean that you will never again deal with the choice of having children or not,
•The challenges of focusing on the woman you are when dealing with societal expectations, myths, and prejudices,
•How uncertainty makes you highly inclined to pay attention to what other people think about your lifestyle, rather than making your own confident decision,
•To find your true calling, you have to acknowledge that femininity and motherhood are two separate concepts that do not necessarily go together, and
•What matters the most is being on the same page as a couple.

Do I Have To Be A Mother? is a memoir about feelings of love, unspoken thoughts on motherhood, and considerations on what it means to be a woman. If you like reading about women who have found their own way in this world, you will love the author's crucial search for her female identity in this book.

Ready to discover the life-changing magic of making the choice that is right for you?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karin Rahbek
• Release date: Aug 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9788799905621

Karin Rahbek

Karin Rahbek is author of Do I Have To Be A Mother? – A Memoir Of Love And Searching For Female Identity, which tell her childfree life story of dealing with the emotions that we experience when other people don't understand that femininity and motherhood are two separate concepts, and they do not necessarily go together. She is featured as an Unclassified Woman. In Denmark the book has been featured in many of the country's newspapers and magazines. Karin has participated on several tv programs. The Danish publisher encouraged Karin to have the book translated into English. Karin Rahbek is a well-known spokeswoman for childfree women and the founder of a social network and dating site for childfree people. She was born in 1975 and currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark with her husband and their two spoiled feline queens. Visit her website at www.NoKidsWorld.com and on Twitter @NoKidsWorld. Read book reviews: https://www.goodreads.com/KarinRahbek

Book preview

CHAPTER 1: THE CHILDFREE DECISION

"No matter what others say or think about your life,

you will have to find the answer inside yourself."

Relationships are more important than children

Are you sure you don't want to have children? Kasper asks with a mixture of hope and gravity in his voice, while he holds my eyes captive with his gentle, loving gaze.

Shouldn’t I have had the urge by now? I reply quickly in the usual serene tone of voice I use when others ask about my plans to have children. But I notice that it still feels different this time.

I am certain that I have met the man of my life, even if we have only known each other for five months. The talk about children is inevitable. Before, my world was education and music, and I had stopped believing that the love I had always dreamed of would ever show up. But suddenly he was there and wanted me, and my heart decided that he was the answer to my dreams. The heart wants what it wants; even the most rational brain cannot stop it. My inner picture of Prince Charming was quickly adjusted into a mirror image of Kasper: a pipe-smoking man 20 years my elder with two children, 12 and 14 years old.

You might want to sometime later, continues Kasper. But I’m not that interested in having more children, he adds, sounding a bit apologetic.

I've never wanted to have children, I stress, while being fully aware that I am in the first flush of love, and need to entertain some more reasoned reflection on my future need to have children.

Although I have never really had the dream of becoming a mother or associated happiness with having children, meeting Kasper has put a whole new slant on the question of having children, despite my long-standing feeling of having settled it. All my caution about getting involved in a relationship has recently been thrown overboard. The fear of being pregnant is gone for good, since the man who has found his way to my heart has had a vasectomy! So really, everything is now on a whole other level. So why don’t I feel completely certain about the issue of wanting to have children? A phrase I’ve heard from so many mouths through the years has begun to haunt me: You’ll want to have children when you meet the right man. If that is true, then how can I promise Kasper that I will not have children? And if the desire arises, what then?

Even when I was very little, I didn't trundle around with a doll carriage, playing mother. My Christmas list was filled with boys' toys. As a teenager I thought that kids were utterly uninteresting. I never toyed with the idea of how I would look like pregnant, or how it would be to be a mother. No desire to subject my body to pregnancy or a painful childbirth ever came up, so if I thought at all about children, they were adopted children, whom you can wait to have until they are out of diapers. When I was with kids and babies, I felt awkward and clumsy. My parents never talked about love, sex and children being an important part of life. Maybe they took for granted that their daughters would start families. Everyone does, right?

The neighbors did not know how I felt about children, so they proposed I become a babysitter for their two little boys. Deep inside, I mostly felt like saying no, thanks, but that did not feel like an option. Both my parents and the neighbors tacitly assumed that it was something for me. I chose to see it as a job - a way to make money. But I would rather have made money at a part-time job in a shop or an office. Despite my inner aversion, I was nonetheless aware of my responsibilities the first night that I was supposed to babysit. I kept an eye on them, gave them food and put them to bed. But the little boy, barely a year old, would not sleep. He started to cry every time I left his room, over and over. I did not know that this was quite normal for an infant, and nearly went into a panic. How could I get the kid to sleep? Finally, I took him down into the living room and lay on the couch with him on my stomach. The evening felt like an eternity. Finally, the boy calmed down, and we fell asleep together on the couch. I woke up only when his mother was coming in through the front door. On the way home, I had no doubt: that was my last job as a babysitter.

In my teenage years I noted my parents' focus on my getting a good education, and I can still hear my grandmother's loving, wise voice adding: marriage is no life insurance. Thus, I was always in a rush to become an adult, and did not give myself time to be young and carefree. Getting a good education, finding the right job and succeeding in a career could not happen soon enough. Afterwards I would search for love, but children were not part of my life plan.

There were several nice, cute men in my life whom I did not want to be with in the long term, even though they wanted me. The fear of ending up with a house, a Volvo station wagon and two kids before I finished my education put me into a panic. I turned into a porcupine whose quills stood up if I felt that a relationship was becoming too serious. And whenever I got the feeling that a man might have been thinking about eventually having children, I took off, even if he had not mentioned kids and we had not even talked about moving in together. Later several of the men I knew told me that their sex life had more or less ground to a halt when they had children. The men's frustrated accounts of feeling overlooked and taken for granted when having to sleep in the kids’ beds, while the mother and children shared the double bed, gave me the impression that children ruin one’s sex life and kill the love. Their tales not only convinced me that I would never have children, they also inspired a fear of getting pregnant. So for a great many years I was always extra vigilant around ovulation time. I didn’t understand when other women spoke of their menstrual periods as the curse. For me, menstruation was always a sign that I was not pregnant, and I breathed a sigh of relief whenever my period came.

In the time right after I met Kasper, I was feeling the full effect of my longstanding dread of relationships and motherhood, both of which admittedly present interesting opportunities for personal growth. However, I had seen so many who fell short in the face of that combination, and I simply had no doubt: the combination was not anything for me; the love for my man was more important than children. But I was thinking long and hard about it in that period, as my previous relationships had taught me a lot about my own needs – what I needed and what I absolutely could not tolerate in a man. My list of my dream man's personal qualities was long, but fortunately Kasper won my heart before I had time to judge whether he met the requirements. My rational brain would have immediately said, No way; he’s a smoker! I had always been totally dismissive of tobacco smoking, tattoos and unpleasant body odors in men. Our age difference and his having two children weren’t exactly on my wish list, either.

While I was buried in university anatomy texts, I let myself be lured onto thin ice anyway. Kasper was very sweet and loving and unabashed in his wooing of me. He would phone me while I sat and read about cell membranes, which are the body's protection against potentially useless or plainly harmful substances. I struggled to keep Kasper on the right side of my heart membrane. But it was hard for me to concentrate on my chiropractic studies, which I had begun three months prior. It was also my dream subject. But Kasper was a threat, and I did my best to ignore the infatuation by imagining that it was a virus attack that my immune system could fight… It didn’t work.

Do you think that you know me well enough to dare move in with me, my two teenagers and all my junk? Kasper gently asked one day.

I’m gonna have to think that one over a little, I answered, with a smile.

Now that you’ve been living alone for ten years, are you maybe a little difficult to live with? he continued.

The words do you think I'm completely impossible to live with? came out of me even before I could set my arms akimbo in defiance.

What I've seen and gotten a taste of so far hasn’t worried me, he laughed.

He was very honest about his past, and so was I. We were two people in love, talking about moving in together. In fact, our questions were a sign that we both wanted our expectations to match. It was wise, but not particularly romantic.

Can you live with two teenagers? Kasper then asked more seriously.

There is certainly a lot I’ll have to learn about having children, I replied seriously, recalling my own teenage years as a means of trying to get an idea of what awaited me.

Doesn’t it scare you that you can’t have kids with me? Kasper asked again. We both know that it’s important that we agree on whether or not to have children."

The statement: I’m not very enthusiastic about babies, so I think it will be fine with two teenagers. The feelings you awaken in me give me the courage to jump into a life with you came out of my mouth.

It felt strange to say to a man that I didn't want children, while saying yes to living together with his kids. In a way, it was a relief that he had children and did not want more. But at the same time, I also felt considerably uncertain over having to be part of a family scene.

Children are a choice

Has it been easy for you to find men who don’t want to have kids? asks Diana. She is 35 years old, single and one of the four women I am having brunch with.

No, it hasn’t been easy. Before I found my boyfriend online, I doubted I could find a man who didn’t want to have kids, answers 32-year-old Alice.

All the men I meet are total breeders! They think that I will get the urge to have kids when I get to know them, Diana says with resignation. A couple of years ago I was in a relationship with a wonderful man who felt he couldn’t live without children, so we had to split up. I don’t want to go through that again.

Throughout the past two years, I have been meeting with a small group of women who either do not welcome a visit from the stork or are in doubt about how badly they want to be mothers. We found each other on Selvvalgt Barnefrie [Childfree-by-Choice], an online network for people who do not wish to have children. Most of the time we talk about everything other than children and motherhood, but kids are a key issue in all relationships, so we often get around to talking about them in one way or another anyway. Likewise, others' expectations that we will be mothers tend to sneak into the conversation when we meet.

Let the man play the kid card first. Men who want to have children ask relatively early on whether you want to have kids,