I Struggled With Not Wanting Kids—When My Husband Died, the Decision Was Made for Me

Though our writer loves children, she did not want any of her own. But would she have had them for her late husband?

I am pushing my friend’s son on his backyard swing when he asks me where my kids are. I have known this sweet, eyeglass-wearing five-year-old since birth—his mom and I have been friends since we were teenagers. 

“You know I don’t have kids,” I laugh. “Have you ever seen any kids when you’ve come to my house?”

“But you’re a lady,” he answered.

And there it is. 

Even at the tender age of five, we are conditioned to believe that all “ladies” are destined to be moms—want to be moms. I was both amused and flattered by the fact that a child who knew me so well could believe I was up for the challenge of motherhood. 

When I was a little girl, before I knew anything about how reproduction worked, I thought females were born with little seeds inside of them, and when we decided to become mothers, one of the seeds would begin to grow into a baby. I had no idea what made this seed eventually start sprouting into a little human. I thought maybe it was some sort of command women spoke aloud when the time came.

In my child mind, a woman made the decision to have a baby and her husband became a father. (As a young girl, families with moms and dads were my only frame of reference.) 

If you were a young Catholic girl in the seventies, it is very possible that your mom never had the sex talk with you (aside from the single statement, “Don’t do it until you’re married”) and instead left brochures from the public health unit on your bedroom dresser. I definitely preferred reading about sex to having that awkward conversation with my mom.

Babies and children seem to have always been a part of my life. My younger brother came along when I was four and though I was, at first, wholly unimpressed with his constant crying and the speed at which he unseated me as the apple of everyone’s eye, I quickly grew to love him as much as everyone else did. At 12, I began babysitting for relatives and neighbors. Aside from the time my little cousin hid in the dryer during hide and seek, and I began to panic because it was taking me an alarming amount of time to find her, I was a fun and responsible caretaker.

When my nieces and nephews were born and my friends’ children came along, I was happy to spend time with these kiddos. I will climb the jungle gym at the playground and build gingerbread houses; I even chaperoned a first-grade field trip once. I say once because though I was absolutely thrilled that my niece wanted me to accompany her and her classmates, I am not skilled in the exhaustive level of cat-herding that was required at that apple orchard. 

I relish the joy of having relationships with children, but not the hard work of it; not figuring out what to do about bullies at school, staying up all night with a vomiting child, or waking at five on Sunday mornings for hockey practice. In other words: parenting.

This is not to say that I back away from any type of conflict or difficulty with the children in my life; my door, and my heart, are always open to them. I have supported my nieces and nephews in any way I can, and I always will. But I do this knowing that I am a back-up, knowing that their parents bear 99 percent of any of the challenges and heartache their children face. 

I like kids, so, truly, I always assumed that when the time was right (when I had become mature and responsible enough), I would want to have children, my clock would start ticking, I would command my seed to grow. But there was no ticking and no commanding—I’ve never wanted to be a mother.

I used to wonder why, unlike all my girlfriends, I didn’t feel the pull of motherhood. I wondered why, also unlike my friends, I experienced such paralyzing fear at the thought of being a parent. As in, an unreasonable amount of fear. I was afraid I’d have a child and they’d get their driver’s license when they turned 16 and get killed in a car accident. I was afraid I would have a child and they would get cancer, or grow up to die from drug addiction; there were countless scenarios in my mind. But like someone who is terrified of sharks but doesn’t like to swim, I eventually realized this fear wasn’t a problem that needed solving. 

I wasn’t only afraid of losing a child, though. I was also afraid of not losing them. I was afraid of having a child and losing my freedom, of having to be responsible for another human for many, many years. I feared I would resent them for needing me—which, of course, is naturally what children do. My fears about having kids are so strong, in fact, that I have never—not once, not ever in my life—had sex without using some form of birth control.

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I was 24 and head-over-heels in love when I married Mike. When we were first together, he was in the military. I told him I wouldn’t want to have kids while he was a soldier; I wasn’t someone cut out for solo parenting while he was away for months at a time. He happily agreed. When Mike left the military a few years later, we both thought the urge to start a family would come. He and I would have a check-in a couple of times a year, asking each other if we had any “stirrings,” our word for the urge to have kids.

One mid-spring morning when leaves had begun to fill out the trees in our Calgary neighborhood, we set out on a walk down the hill to get coffee. (Our walks were our favorite time to catch up with each other free from distraction.) The patches of snow had finally disappeared, and we’d packed away our parkas. We got our coffees to go and I tied my fleece around my waist for the walk back home, enjoying the sunshine.

Mike asked if I’d had any stirrings and, as always, I told him I had not. I posed the question back to him, expecting the same answer as mine, the reply I’d been hearing for a decade.

But instead: “Well, yes, actually. I think I want to be a dad. I think we should have kids.”

I was shocked into silence.

“I know you’re surprised; I know you need time to wrap your head around this,” he said. 

After recovering, my first instinct was to try to talk him out of it. I reminded Mike that parenting with me would be a 50/50 proposition. I would not be the type of mom who would want to stay home with the kids, or be happy to do the lion’s share of parenting. Was he prepared for that? I wouldn’t be the one always taking the kids to doctor’s appointments and piano lessons. 

Sensing my rising panic at the thought of motherhood, my husband reminded me that we would be parents together; I wouldn’t be doing this alone. I reminded him that he would be going to Afghanistan in less than a year. After missing military life, he had recently joined the army reserves as a medic.

Between living in different cities when we met and Mike being in the army, we spent the first few years of our relationship away from each other for weeks or months at a time. I didn’t love being separated, but it was familiar territory for us, and I knew how important putting his medic skills to use in Afghanistan was to him. Mike said his eight-month deployment would give me plenty of time to think about becoming parents, and we could make a decision when he returned. 

I agreed to take the time until his return from overseas to contemplate starting a family. At 34, I knew I couldn’t put the decision off much longer.

Mike thought I would consider the question of whether or not I would want to be a mother while he was away, but that’s not what I was struggling with. I knew in my heart that the desire wouldn’t burgeon; I knew I would never feel the yearning for motherhood that so many women do. The question I turned over and over in my mind was whether I would do it anyway. Would I do it for Mike, because I loved him with all my heart and did not want to deprive him of the opportunity to be a father? Would I do it for Mike because he somehow thought I would be a good mother, or so he wouldn’t grow to resent me later?

I hoped he would change his mind while he was deployed.

There were days when the thought of being a mother left me cold with fear. I know this seems like an exaggeration. I know there are women who desperately want a baby and cannot have one (and for that, I am deeply sorry), but it’s the truth. I have never felt equipped with the patience, instinct, skills, or desire to raise a helpless little human. 

For months, I contemplated his ask, an ask that was so normal in most marriages, so routine. But I’ll never know what my decision would have been, because I didn’t have to make it.

Three months after Mike landed in Afghanistan, three army officers met me at work to tell me that he had been shot and killed by the Taliban. The world fell away around me that day. Being with him made me a better person. Mike’s confidence was infectious. He excelled at whatever he did, and helped others excel too, but he never took himself too seriously. My husband was kind and charming and had a razor-sharp wit. We loved being goofy together and making up silly songs and games. I felt unmoored without him.

Had my Mike survived, could I have told him that I didn’t want to be the mother of his children? I don’t think so. I don’t think I could have lived happily, knowing I had withheld the opportunity for him to be a father. Unlike me, Mike would have been a wonderful parent. He was a natural caregiver—it’s part of what made him such a skilled medic. Maybe I would have chosen to have a family with Mike, despite my fear, and been pleasantly surprised at my ability to be a good mother. 

Before Mike died, I sometimes wondered why I had never felt the longing to have a child. Now I think I never nurtured the idea of motherhood because I know myself. Maybe the urge never came because the universe knew that without Mike by my side, I would have struggled and failed to thrive as a mother.

Within seven months of my husband’s death, a few of my girlfriends gave birth. Among the things that provided the greatest solace when I was grappling with intense grief was cradling their newborns. I spent hours sinking into the couch in my friend’s living room. She and I were both adjusting to our new lives—hers as a mother and mine as a widow. Sometimes we talked a lot, other times we just sat together. I would always hold her tiny son in my arms. The soft warmth and weight of him sleeping steadied me.

Almost everyone looked at me with concern in their eyes, as if trying to gauge my fragility. They did this with so much love, just wanting me to be okay, but it often made me doubt my strength. The babies I held didn’t worry about me at all; they trusted me to keep them safe. They were a reassurance that I was getting through—that I was going to be okay.

My girlfriends and their tiny sons (all three had boys, and one was named for Mike) cleared a path for me through a forest of thorns. I wanted to hold their babies, and sometimes my friends wanted to be untethered from their charges.

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