More than just physically? — Yesterday I asked Ian, my husband, how he’d feel if we were traveling somewhere and I offered to put his carry-on into an airplane’s overhead bin for him. Would he let me do it? No, he said, he would not. I asked why. “Because I can do it myself,” he…

Two days ago, I was looking at my Facebook profile picture very, very closely. Someone I’d known in high school had left this comment below the picture: “Seeing those eyes again after 30 years…” I wondered, why mention “eyes” and not “face”? Were they trying to be nice by not…

And not a day sooner — A few years ago my 48 year-old husband got the job he’d always wanted at one of the best companies he could work for. I’m happy he achieved his dream, but I also feel bad for him. I feel bad for most people who realize their Big Dream and still…

Especially if you’re a writer — Imagine a painter. She stands at her easel under a skylight, a cup of brushes on a nearby table. The drop cloth under her feet is dotted and smeared with color. An abstract arrangement of shapes covers the canvas in front of her. …

Because judgment hasn’t changed in a decade — Remarking on that one famous childfree cover story in TIME magazine’s Aug. 2013 issue — When Having It All Means Not Having Children — Yahoo! Shine writer (and mother) Beth Greenfield writes, What does “having it all” mean? Not having kids, according to the latest sure-to-be-controversial issue of Time magazine. …

They’ll “come to terms with it after a while” — Years ago, I wrote a childfree blog under the name Sylvia D. Lucas, and as I was looking just now at an old post of “hers” I came across a string of comments underneath that old post that illustrate how males are impacted by pronatalism. It’s probably true that females…

You ask questions — A woman whose childfree writing and tweets (Xes?) I’ve been following for a few years has written/posted things recently that have caught my attention. Though childfree, myself, what she was expressing didn’t resonate with me. It didn’t need to — not everything must be relatable or resonate — but it…

That’s the fantasy. — The myth that women are “made” to want and have children is probably the hardest one to pulverize. Possibly because folded up inside of it is the convenient (for the patriarchal types) belief/insistence that we’re natural nurturers. “Maternal.” A word that should be stricken from dictionaries and everyday vocabulary because…

do it do it do it do it — Pronatalism, or the promotion of procreation, as an ideology emphasizes creating new humans. Its insidious propaganda machine conditions people to believe they won’t be complete, won’t be fulfilled, won’t know love, or won’t be truly happy unless they have a child. “It’s easy! It’s fun! …