childfree

Hello, I am a young CF man of thirty years. I want to hear from my elders CFs. How they were living in their thirties.

Crosspost from: https://lemmy.world/c/humor [email protected]

TL;DR at the bottom.

I (24f) am going through the legal elements of a divorce but have been separated for a few months now. I loved my ex husband, but before marrying I made it clear I didn't want kids and didn't want him to wait or hope for me to change my mind. He agreed and told me he would be happy with me even if I never wanted kids.

Just under a year ago he sat me down and told me he had been realizing more and more that he changed his mind and thinks he does want kids. I asked how long this had been happening, he said about a year. I already knew where this was headed, but thought I owed it to us to at least try. Months of therapy and thinking and talking and waiting for him to come to the same conclusion I had brought up to him and accepted pretty early on and we finally decided mutually that we would have to divorce. I didn't want him to stay with me and risk having any resentment towards me and feel unfulfilled, and I dont want kids. I don't know if I'll want them in the future, I don't think I will, but he wanted them ASAP so it was irrelevant anyways.

At least the separation/divorce has been amicable, but it was (and sometimes still is) incredible difficult emotionally. I'm grateful that his family didn't guilt me when they learned of the reason for the divorce, though the reason he gave for me being childfree was medical reasons which is only kind of true. Still, at least I didn't get any flak for it from anybody.

The guy I'm talking to now is vehemently childfree and it's great being able to freely make faces about or feel annoyed by children, not want to go to baby showers or baby birthday parties, and all other things that I used to feel alone in with my ex husband (and made me wonder for a while if he was truly childfree like me). Not to say you have to dislike children to be childfree, but I would often get a weird look about my attitude and discomfort around children.

I was never active on the subreddit but I'm making more of an effort to be active in the communities on Lemmy, so I guess hi everyone! How are you? Anybody here with a similar story?

TL;DR My husband changed his mind and I didn't so now I'm a 24 year old divorcée introducing myself and my story being childfree :)

First of all, I find this picture hilarious regardless of whatever. It was in a healthcare textbook, baby reflexes.

Also, sorry I didn't know how to rotate. Is it something easy on this app, Jerboa? I'm clueless

Anyway, thought it could be good material for one of those "what people think child free is vs what it really is".

Listening to a book..."Sapiens". Author talked about how dependent kids are. How compared to other animals, our babies need alot of support in the early stages of life.

Like alot of you I'm sure, I've got a fair amount of kids in my life...none of "mine" but some kind of are. I guess my point is we may not have kids, but really, they are all our kids, as supported by evolutionary biology, it takes a village.

Edit: Going a bit deeper...the author explains that for millions of years, while we were tribal, nomadic gatherer/hunters. We didn't know who's kids were who's, obviously the mother was primary caretaker, but, circling back, we evolved to raise kids as a community, not so much of the "traditional" mom/dad/child dynamic popular today.

I don't plan on "having kids" but still, I think it's all our responsibility (hopefully a partially enjoyable one) to help. Hard to argue anything more beneficial for our societys future than having well developed youth.

Going to a parent friend's birthday with many of our friends who have kids, so there'll be a gang of young, screaming kids...

A bit of a rant, pre-sorry but so sad and annoyed right now.

Went to my favorite barber shop today. It's built on being nice, upscale, and men's haircuts. They do the works, good cuts, beard trimming/shaping, hot towel, the whole thing, and it's built to be man's place, they have a pool table, they have a couple of kegerators, they'll pour you a whiskey while you wait. Very nice.

(Note I say man's but really if you're a woman/any other gender and you like that sort of thing, then awesome. I mean man in the masculine sense)

Until recently this was my favorite place, but apparently it's gotten on the mom groups online and now the last few times I've gone it's just filled with children and moms. Where I could go and get a whiskey while I wait and find someone to shoot pool with, now kids are literally running around and as for the pool table they're just throwing the balls around. Meanwhile the moms are either talking with each other or hovering over Bradley getting his hair cut and how cute it is.

On top of it all, because there was a group of them instead of my normal 20 min wait it was almost a 2 hours wait. I just walked out.

I'm just so tired of it, this place obviously was built for adults but god forbid we have any adult places that aren't "actually meant for children". I mean obviously it was built for children, there's 2 kegs and a shelf of nice scotch but yes, bring all of your children here.

How come every place that used to be for adults is now a child zone? My favorite breweries used to be great places to let off steam after work and now I have kids playing tag in the middle of them. I flat out don't go to movies anymore because even the super late showings are just dumping grounds for inattentive parents to leave their kids. And god forbid you ever mention outside a community like this that you want to drink a beer without a kid running around or you're literally the devil who should be shunned.

Anyway, this isn't going anywhere specifically, I'm just really sad, and I didn't get my haircut today.

I am a 52 y/o child free man (reddit refugee), married to a 42 y/o child free woman. We are retiring in the next 3-4 years.

Happy to talk to any other child free people or answer questions about a child free lifestyle.

Let's build up this community. ☺

...feedback welcome! 🙃

Feel free to post all your off-topic questions, issues, achievement and other stuff here - go wild!

In addition to teaching lots of private lessons and directing three teenage performance groups, I also direct an adult band, which currently has eight people between about 30 and 70 in it. I'm 28 and my codirector is in his 30s, but this week, he was out, so the school owner guy, who's in his 40s, subbed for him, making me the youngest person in the room by a margin of at least ten years.

In past iterations of this adult band, we've had some non-parent members, but right now, everyone in the band is a parent, and the owner guy also is, so this past week, I was also the only non-parent in the room, so naturally, everybody was passing around Father's Day well-wishes. And inevitably, one of the moms asked me, "what about you, teuast? Do you have any kids?" So of course I said no, and she said "Oh, not yet."

Not yet. Lol. I have a vasectomy and a girlfriend with a bisalp.

I did tell my girlfriend about it and she was suitably derisive, but in the moment I just let it slide off me. Nothing to be gained from explaining what's going on with my balls to a bunch of geezers at my work who I'm not sleeping with. And it's not going to come up again for at least another year, because, again, at work.

I’m pretty close with this person outside of work and we used to have good non-work conversations but now I feel all I get is stories and photos of her children. We work in a tight knit team so I can’t really avoid them.

I got no less than 3 updates this weekend about a sports event with her kids including photos; more photos and another update about said event this morning; another photo of another child; updates about what her toddler was doing, and updates about how her kid made the track and field team and she absolutely needs to take time off work to go.

I don’t ask for this and I don’t really respond when she does it. I prefer to talk about other things. We used to talk about other things and now it’s kids 99% of the time to the point where it feels really one-sided. I tried to talk about a concert I went to this weekend and got really lukewarm reception.

I’m thinking I need to tone it down and say goodbye to the relationship/chit chat for a while? I feel if I tell her bluntly I’m tired of hearing about her children it will hurt her feelings. Any ideas?

This is a small thing, but I'll take any workplace win.

During our Friday morning meeting, my manager wished a Happy Father's Day to all of the dads - and specifically included all pet owners as dads.

Almost everyone in my department has human kids, yet no one complained about the inclusion.

One of these choices has a sliiiiightly higher impact than the others 🤔

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My pregnant coworker (whom I don't see very often anyway and was in the process of moving to another city in the next couple months) sort of just disappeared.

Turns out she got a really bad infection and had no amniotic fluid. They ended up having to induce her very early and place the infant in the NICU. She is okay and the baby is okay, but apparently they induced her and then it was too late to get an epidural and she had a retained placenta so they were trying to pull it out. Only after screaming in pain for a bit did they decide to sedate her and address the issue.

I don't know anything about giving birth and even less about dealing with emergency situations, but the whole thing seems off to me. Epidural aside why wait to sedate her if the baby is already been delivered?

My heart goes out to her and her infant but man am I glad to be sterile.

It says "subscribe pending". Would love to join but I can't.

While we are figuring things out, please be nice to one another.