Member-only story
Scare Tactics & Lies: Part I of II
How women are lured into making babies
“I shouldn’t say never but I’m dreading motherhood.”
I saw that tweet years ago and haven’t been able to forget it. It sticks with me because I used to feel that way. In my first post-high school relationship, as a girlfriend to the guy who’d become my first husband before I turned 20, I sensed “motherhood” lurking in my future, threatening me with the life I’d see coming through the commissary every day where I bagged groceries: woman, full shopping cart, straggling kids.
The idea that parenthood was any way to spend a life was something I so mistrusted that I started asking cashiers, after the military mother-and-kids whose groceries I’d just bagged were out of earshot, “If you could go back in time and have kids again, would you?”
Most of them — 8 out of 10 (I still remember) — said no.
I didn’t know, yet, that I could get out of parenthood. As far as I knew at that age, it would always be out there. Waiting.
The tweet also stuck with me because, as someone who escaped what I’d thought would be an inevitable life, I hate to…
