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On learning that my why is systemic — and why that’s both harder and easier than I expected
After everything I laid out in the last post I expected to be confident in my decision. I thought that naming my why and all the details of it would feel like an exhale.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
What I arrived at instead was something more complicated, and honestly more unsettling: the realization that my Big Why isn’t moral or some deep fundamental truth about who I am at my core. Instead, it’s systemic, and circumstantial, and situational. Which means it’s malleable.
What I mean by that is I am not choosing a child-free life because I believe motherhood is wrong, or because I have no capacity for that kind of love, or because children don’t belong in my vision of a meaningful life. I’m choosing it because of the specific conditions under which motherhood currently exists. The standards are impossible, there is a structural absence of support, and the whole thing is set up to slowly hollow you out while calling it devotion.
Which means that under different circumstances such as a different system, in a more supported environment, in a world that was actually built to hold mothers without consuming them, I might choose differently.
I’m not gonna lie. That realization sat…. sits uncomfortably with me still.
Because it means the door isn’t fully closed and that my why has an asterisk. It also means I’m not making a declaration so much as a very considered and very clear-eyed assessment of the world I actually live in and what I am and am not willing to do inside of it. And for someone who wanted an airtight answer that’s a frustrating place to land.
But here’s the other side of it — the relief part.
Finding out that my why is systemic also meant I wasn’t broken. It meant there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me for not wanting motherhood. It wasn’t some deep character flaw or a failure of love or an inability to imagine beyond myself. It was a rational, researched, emotionally honest response to a system that is genuinely asking too much; or maybe just more than I am willing to give.
That realization was quieter than I expected. Not a revelation so much as a slow exhale.
I’m not weird, cold, selfish, or missing something that everyone else has. I simply looked at what’s being asked, I weighed it honestly against who I am and what I need to stay whole, and I said: I can’t do motherhood like this.
I won’t pretend I’ve arrived anywhere final. The questions still come up during therapy, in quiet moments, in conversations with my husband, my friends, strangers. The “what ifs” still surface sometimes. And I think that’s okay, and actually part of what it means to make a decision that matters.
And if you’re somewhere in the middle of holding the tension and sitting with the question, I hope something in this series offered you a little company. It’s unlikely it offered answers, but I hope the reassurance that the complexity you’re feeling isn’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong, but simply that you’re doing it honestly and authentically.