Yikes Questions: "How will you fill your time?"
Having zero kids and zero regrets can elicit all manner of questions that make you think, "Yikes!" when people — many people, a shocking number of shameless people, so many rude people! — ask you about your choices.
One of the questions that never ceases to amaze me is: "But how will you fill your time without children?"
I recently read this anecdote about that very question:
A beauty technician in Sephora, who happened to be a mother of three, waxed and dyed my eyebrows recently. Making small talk as she hovered inches from my face, she asked me if I had kids. When I said that no, life with kids is not for me, she said: “Oh, no! I hope you have enough to fill your life with, because life is long!”
I found this a strange thing to say, even though I understand how a mother of three kids might feel like the world would be an empty void without them. Life doesn’t feel that long to me, and plus, having things to fill my days is not a problem for me at all. Yesterday I spent five hours writing a new novel in my garden, going for an outdoor swim at my local community pool, making a new recipe, and calling a friend. There are so many things to see, do, read! Time flies, honestly.
I feel the same way. I love having loads of unstructured and unscheduled time to do precisely what it is that I want to do. Which, honestly, sometimes is: absolutely nothing.
One thing I've noticed about myself and my friends who are childfree by choice is that none of us particularly loves a schedule and none of us are easily bored. We can seemingly find endless ways to amuse ourselves and fill our days with all kinds of creative and interesting pursuits. We're also content when we have nothing specific to do.
Not everyone is like that. Some people love nothing more than to have their days chock full of rigidly scheduled activities and find themselves at a loss without an agenda. Some people would rather overcommit themselves to an impossible list of obligations just to avoid the possibility of nowhere to be and nothing to do but sit alone with their thoughts.
Neither is right or wrong — but it's easy to see why the latter group may be more disposed toward parenting and may find it more difficult to imagine how people in the former group fill our time.
Within the question might, then, be a disclosure about what type of person you are. So I try not to take it personally when I'm asked.
It does still give me a case of the yikes, though — because the question implicitly suggests, even if unintentionally, that the ways in which I do fill my time are meaningless. Or at least not as rich with purpose as parenting.
We all fill our time as much as we can in the ways that we choose. That's good enough. No judgment warranted and no questions required.
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