I used to wonder if not having children meant going against the natural order of things.
My mother had children. So did her mother. For generations, people had lived this way. It seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And by choosing a different path, I sometimes wondered if I was stepping outside something essential to being human.
I found it hard to relate to people who spoke of raising children as life’s greatest achievement. I never believed that parenthood alone gave life its meaning. Yet I couldn’t deny that they knew something I might never know. And that left me with a strange sense of defeat.
It wasn’t that I necessarily wanted what they had. It was that they belonged to something I stood outside of.
I carried that feeling for years.
Then, during this trip, something occurred to me.
If having children is a way of carrying life forward, perhaps what I do is a way of carrying the human spirit forward.
We pass on more than life. We pass on ideas, art, music, and memory. We inherit what others have left behind, make sense of it in our own time, and keep it alive for those who come after us.
One is not greater than the other. They are simply different ways of taking part in something larger than ourselves.
For years, I thought about what I wasn’t passing on.
Now I find myself thinking about what I am.