Why I'm Never Having Kids

People are fond of telling me that I’d make a great mother. I am fond of replying that I hate children. Neither is entirely true. I do enjoy playing with kids, and they never cease to amaze me, but after ten years of being a babysitter, camp counselor, and nanny, I’ve had my fill. I’m just tired, plain and simple. Little Billy is climbing on the rain gutters? Eh, whatever. Kids bounce.

What makes me tired? Let me give you an example to illustrate my decline from Patient Nurturing Earth Mother to Woman Who Doesn’t Give a Rat’s Arse.

Michael was five. His parents wore Birkenstocks with socks, practiced some sort of quasi-Buddhism, and had studied psychology in college. They asked me to baby-sit after hearing glowing recommendations from other mothers who discovered I was a sort of Walking Human Ritalin for their children. I have a calming effect on people, or so I’m told.

“Michael is self-actualizing,” his mother said to me when she answered the door. “We let him make his own decisions after explaining to him his options and the consequences each option would bring. It gives him a sense of empowerment to have a stake in his own development.”

On this particular day, Michael was self-actualizing by wearing his bright yellow raincoat with green frogs. It was not raining. He was not even outdoors.

“He’s very creative,” she said, pointing to a pile of toys in the living room that reached chest height. “He’s creating an art sculpture here out of his possessions.”

Huh. Well, Picasso, that’s very impressive. You’ve managed to make a huge mess with all your toys, and get out of cleaning up, all in the pursuit of art. That is creative.

“Never tell him ‘no,’” his mother continued as he catapulted himself across the living room. “You can suggest to him what you’d like him to do, but we don’t use ‘no’ in this house.”

Oh really? I would never have noticed.

For dinner that night we had chicken noodle soup, which if you’ll read the nutrition information label, you’ll discover has roughly four day’s worth of the USDA’s recommended intake of sodium. I therefore ‘suggested’ that he may want to taste it before adding half the salt shaker into his bowl. He decided to ‘self-actualize’ by adding all the salt, anyway, making the soup totally inedible. Seriously, it was so saturated, half the salt didn’t even dissolve. So I gave him my bowl. This was back when I was still nice.

The rest of the evening passed uneventfully, with my suggesting things and his doing whatever the heck he wanted. When bath time arrived, I suggested to him that he stank, and that he should take a bath.

“I want to read this book,” he announced. Lucky for me, I’d heard that he loved books, so I brought an armload of my own to share with him. Negotiating tools. “I’ll take a bath after I read all these books. Will you read to me?”

In reply, I went upstairs and drew his bathwater. He followed me up the stairs, puzzled that I was not empowering him.

“What are you doing?” he asked. “I said I’m not taking a bath now. I’m going to read first, and then I’m going to take a bath. That’s my decision.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “But I’m drawing your bathwater now, it’s going to get cold, and I’m not drawing it again. That’s my decision.”

We stared at each other for a minute as the tub filled up. While I tossed into the water the few toys that did not make it into his art sculpture downstairs, he weighed his options – warm bath now, cold bath later – and decided to hop in the tub. I don’t know what I would have done if he’d decided not to take a bath at all. I spent the rest of the night reading to him, and he fell asleep before his bedtime.

His parents were flabbergasted.