Member-only story
Interview with a Circumstantially Childfree Man
(my husband)
My husband is what you’d call “circumstantially childfree.” That is, he has no children because he’s married to a childfree woman.
I’ve always been sure I didn’t want kids, but he’s been more open to the option. In his past relationships he was like many men, assuming there would be kids, someday, and doing the thing that might result in a pregnancy (but in what I like to imagine was a very clinical, very scientific way).
Thankfully, it didn’t happen.
A few years after he and I became a couple — and this was after more than a decade of being very close friends — he had a vasectomy.
Strange and unexpected feelings surfaced in me after the vasectomy as they related to him and the rest of his life — you can read about my grief burst here — but it was a baby dream, the kind that can sometimes make me feel like I might not hate being a mother in some parallel universe, that I wondered what was really going on with him during that time, how he really felt about having the vasectomy.
Knowing he loves answering questions and that he has no fear of being brutally honest, I asked him if he’d be willing to participate in an interview. He said yes, and we walked to a nearby restaurant with outdoor seating. After ordering a beer…
