My Dear Hard Drive

Today at the supermarket a woman caught my eye. She was pushing her toddler in the stroller, but I didn’t notice her because of that. I did notice her look though, as she was looking at me expecting to see the reaction “awww, what a cute baby”. I reacted to her look though, probably with a look of curiosity or confusion, because she quickly looked away.

I’ve seen that look before, when I fail to react to the children at the supermarkets as their proud mothers expect me to. It is the look of a woman, who thinks she has everything anyone could ever want, something that all women who don’t have what she has envies of her. Not all mothers think quite that way, even though they felt they had achieved the greatest thing a woman could achieve, some, even most of them still understand that we’re all different. But it is this type of mothers that I find curious, because of their expectation of admiration and hero-treatment for the achievement of reproduction.

Don’t get me wrong though. I understand it isn’t always easy, and I cry as much as the next person when I see a television tear jerker about a mother who finally gives birth to a baby she was never supposed to have. I cry for the same reason I cry when I see an adopted child find their parents, or when an animal rescue group does a successful rescue of a frog or a bat… Or when a volley ball athlete wins gold, even though I´m not sporty and I plan never to win gold at anything and I absolutely hate volley ball. That doesn’t prevent me from seeing the sense of achievement, pride and joy the athlete is feeling. However, if I saw that athlete swinging that gold medal around expecting me to looke at it in awe and amazement, he’s going to be sorely disapointed.

Sometimes when I read articles about what horrible or weird, unnatural people child free people are, I wonder what makes these women so angry at us. The best explanation I’ve come up with is that they are disappointed that they can’t amaze everyone and that someone might actually say that “I don’t want to have children, even though I could any time I wanted to (as far as I know).” That means that their achievement isn’t something that everyone wants, it is not the ultimate ego booster they expected. There are still women who won’t look up to them after they fulfilled the most important task any woman could fulfill. Imagine you had been thinking that way all your life, that you’ll have to do this thing that will completely validate you, make you whole, give you a meaning and a stance in the society… And then someone looks at it and turns her nose at it. “No, I wouldn’t swap places with you even if you paid me.” It can make you angry, don’t you think?

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