I had a really strong reaction to a conversation I just had on a dating site. I’ve been sitting with it, and I like to just write things out sometimes to parse my thoughts.
I have a kid. I adore her. I don’t want anymore kids right now, and I know I will never give birth again. I broke my pubic bone at some point during the birth, and it caused chronic pain and difficulty walking up until my daughter turned three and a half. Three years it hurt to walk, pick up my baby, even just to exist. Giving birth is dangerous for women. Many women, especially black women in the US, die giving birth. Many more women, like me, suffer complications and problems that can continue throughout their lives. I’m grateful I was able to heal, but three years is a long time to have difficulty doing such a basic activity as walking.
So when I date, I make it clear that I already have a kid, and for people who want kids, I let them know that me giving birth just is not in the cards. (For what I hope are obvious reasons.)
This week I matched with someone who seemed interesting, we chatted for a minute, and then I let them know what I was looking for. They had said specifically in their profile that they were interested in having kids, so I let them know that I wasn’t going to do the birth thing again and if that was a deal breaker, no biggie, let’s figure that out now and not waste each others’ time. (I promise I can be romantic, but when you have to sift through dozens, hundreds of profiles of random people, it’s easier and kinder just to be straightforward.) He said he wanted to have kids of his own so it probably wasn’t going to work out. No problem. We wished each other good hunting and that was it.
And now I’m sitting here and I just can’t stop thinking about his future partner that he’s asking, for her to risk her life, safety, health, and body to do this thing that he wants. I know there are tons of women who want to have children. I don’t think he’s going to have a problem finding a partner who wants the same thing he does and they’re going to have a bunch of cute kids and a happy family. Amazing for them.
I think I’m just trying to grapple with this idea of a man wanting that and putting nothing on the line to get it. When I say ’nothing on the line,’ I’m talking about the physical (and potentially very dangerous) aspects of pregnancy and birth. (Everything that comes along with raising children is a whole other topic, which I have a lot to say about as a single mum.)
This random guy from a dating app doesn’t know me at all, and doesn’t mean me ill. He’s probably a great person. But I also felt very deeply the violence of this wish he has and the cost he will never have to pay for it. He doesn’t intend it as violence, but I consider pregnancy to be extremely violent—there’s pain and blood, sometimes the cutting open of your entire abdomen when you give birth. And he wants that specifically—‘kids of his own.’
I think most people want children ‘of their own,’ but as a society, we treat pregnancy and birth so lightly, as ’natural.’ For many women, it’s the most traumatic experience of their life. For me, the surgery that it took to finally recover was the most traumatic experience of my life—the unanesthetized scraping of scar tissue from around my healed bone. I won’t ever forget that day. I won’t ever forget that pain. I’ll never forget that song playing in the background of the surgery room. This guy is asking someone to risk that for him, and he probably has no concept of what he’s really asking.