Imalah ’s Reviews > Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids > Status Update

But when you talk of not wanting children, it is impossible to avoid sounding defensive, like you’re trying to prove the questionable beauty of a selfish and too-tidy existence. It is hard to come across as anything other than brittle, rigid, controlling, against life itself. Anyway, I resented having to explain myself at all, to open a hatch over my heart because a near stranger asked an impertinent question.

So much of being a grown-up is about managing or quelling desires. For food, for drink, for sex, for good times; if you’re a woman, I maintain, for ambition. You should not want too much. It is strange, then, to be in a position where society demands you should have an appetite for something. And yet here was a rare instance where I was appetite-free, and the world seemed to be saying, “You have to want this thing,