Article on childlessness by choice - the "anti mom" speaks

Here's an article that was posted to my wonderful "vintage moms" web group by an Australian friend of mine. She, like all of us on the group, busted her butt to have a child and only succeeded in her late thirties and forties. She's an awesome mom and very happy. Here's the article Not much to say about the article, other than the fact that it makes me laugh, with a wry twist to my mouth. It's written by a competent, happy woman in her late forties who is a successful writer with no children (they would mess up her flat.) She has friends who also don't want children. I find this article hilarious because it's written by a Brit, who essays into topics like ... um, her friends are more concerned with good quality of life than in being good, and that people want to have a nice life experience now, as opposed to being buffeted by life. Yeah. Right. Well, as someone who was raised in the Foothills of the Northern California mountains during the late seventies, I have one phrase. "Culture of Selfishness, dude!" Come on over! Join us in lovely California! Heck, that's what most of our mystique is about! Are you going to yoga? Want to come over next week? We're having a dinner party and Jon's going to unveil this awesome Montipulciano that he and Gerda hand-carried back from their Villa trip to Italy. Do you like the new power room walls? We had the guy hand rub in this wonderful special paste that I matched to my favorite purse made by Prada in 1998 - such a wonderful patina - and the color! Oh yes, that orchid matches it perfectly. I'm sorry. It's very serious stuff, I know. The brits aren't making babies, and, gosh darn it, all of those people from Niger and China are making up the difference. (Read the article if this puzzles you.) However, we did go through this in California with the boomers, and a lot of them didn't have babies, and now they're about 60 and nobody's really listening to them any more. Instead, the children of the people who DID have babies have discovered that you can be narcissistic AND have children! That you can take yoga classes through pregnancy, and that you can have just as much fun shopping for your children (and matching clothing for you) as you did just shopping for yourself! So the self-focused semi-existential angst from a group of aging "don't want kids" types sounds exactly like people I know. Sort of. Hmmn. Except, now that I think about it, the people I'm thinking of here in California *did* have children, and just chose to give them up in divorces and such so that they (the people, not the children) could 'heal.' Yeah. Forgot about that twist. At any rate, the article made me chuckle. For one thing, I'm a mom. I just am *so* not interested in people's self-analysis of why they didn't have kids. Since I managed to *have* one, (I would have adopted if I couldn't,), I learned the secret. It's not about me any more. How refreshing!