Childless Collective Summit

Portraits of Childfree Wealth Sting a Little

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Image shows book cover, Portraits of Childfree Wealth, to accompany review and commentary on how couples without children handle money.

Portraits of Childfree Wealth: 26 Stories about How Being Childfree Impacts Your Life, Wealth and Finances by Jay Zigmont, PhD, CFP, 2022

If I were unbiased . . .

No, I can’t be. I’m childless not by choice, and I hate all these young pups who proudly proclaim that having lots of money and time to do whatever they want whenever they want is more important than having children. If they meet up with a romantic partner who is set on procreating, adios, they’re moving on. They’d rather travel or play video games. They see children as annoying time-sucks, not as future adults who will carry on their legacies.

Whew, got that out of my system. These are not my people. Period. That said, maybe there are some lessons we can learn from this book by financial planner Jay Zigmont, who was one of the speakers at the recent Childless Collective Summit. After all, if we never have children, by choice or by chance, the effect on our finances is the same as if we never wanted them in the first place. Except for the fortune we might have spent on fertility treatments.

Zigmont himself is childfree, which he defines as “not having children and not planning on having children.” He interviewed people at various stages of life from 20-something recent college grads trying to find their way to 40-somethings who already have over a million dollars and are planning to retire young. Throughout the book, he repeats several principles:

  • The key to financial freedom is to stay out of debt and invest all you can in retirement. It’s a simple concept, but not so simple to do. The couples in this book who are financially successful have put all their efforts into making sure they have no outstanding bills, whether it’s credit card debt, student loans, or a mortgage. They have taken full advantage of 401ks and investment opportunities to pave the way for their future. They have also had the good fortune to have well-paying jobs and no financial disasters.
  • Zigmont talks about FIRE (financial independence, retire early) and FILE (financial independence, live early), essentially saving it all for later or living it up now. For example, spend it on traveling all over the world or stash it for when you’re older? Which would you choose?
  • He suggests couples behave as “the gardener and the rose.” One partner, the gardener, takes responsibility for the bulk of their income while the other, the rose, is freed up to pursue his or her passions—starting a business, working in the arts, going back to school . . . After a while, they switch places. That’s something to discuss with your partner.
  • Throughout the book, we see that because they don’t have the responsibility of providing stable lives for children, the interviewees feel free to change jobs, change plans, change locations, and sometimes to fail and start over.

There’s no reason we can’t try some of these ideas. The “gardener and the rose” resonates with me because my husband did give me the time and support to pursue my writing and music while he worked full-time. I had some income but not nearly enough to make a big impact on our day-to-day living. He was supportive, but I also had this mantra: If I don’t get babies, I’m damned well going to write my books. And I did. I also earned my master’s degree at an age when we might otherwise have been paying our children’s college tuition instead of mine. Fred, who was older than I was and always worried about money, insisted we meet with a financial planner, and that was one of the goals we set, along with moving to Oregon and buying an RV.

I did not love this book. In addition to a strong strain of selfishness from the interviewees, I don’t think Zigmont paid much attention to couples who are struggling just to buy groceries and can’t even imagine the lives of freedom described here. But it does suggest some possibilities.

If you are not having children, maybe it’s time to sit down together and make a financial plan. If you’re not spending your income on baby food and braces, what will you do with it? How do you see your future as you age and consider retirement? Are you on the same page about how long you want to work and what you will do when you’re older?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

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With Childlessness, the Related Losses Multiply

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When you don’t have children, what else do you lose?

A lot, according to Tanya Hubbard, one of the speakers at last weekend’s online Childless Collective Summit. Hubbard, a counselor from Vancouver, Canada, specializes in working with people who are childless not by choice, a group that includes most of us here at Childless by Marriage.

She spoke about secondary losses, the often unacknowledged losses that come along with a primary loss. If someone you love dies, for example, you grieve the loss of that person, but there are other losses that come with it. After my father died, his house was sold. The new owners tore it down, ripped out everything in the yard, and built a new, much larger, house. One might say it was just a house, but it broke my heart. For 67 years, it was home to me.

For people who have dreamed of having children and now realize they never will, there are many secondary losses. Your identity in the world and your role in the family change. You lose friendships, the pleasure of giving your parents grandchildren, your sense of creating the next branch on the family tree, someone to inherit your memories and prized possessions, and someone to care for you in old age. At church, at work, and wherever you go, you will be different from most people. If you struggled with infertility, there are physical losses, such as hysterectomies, scars and trauma from IVF failures and miscarriages, financial losses, and a feeling that you can’t trust your body to do what it’s supposed to do.

However you end up childless, your dream of what your life was going to be goes out the window. Sure, you can dream a new dream. It’s possible to have a terrific life without children, but there are losses. As with everything in life, when you come to a fork in the road, you have to choose one way or the other. You can’t have both.

Hubbard suggested we draw a diagram shaped like a daisy. Write “childlessness” in the middle and then fill in the petals with other things you lose because you don’t have children. Some of us are going to need more petals. When you finish with that, I suggest you draw a second daisy, write “me” in the center and fill in the petals with everything else you are besides childless. I hope you need more petals for that, too.

We need to acknowledge and give ourselves permission to grieve our losses. Other people, particularly parents, may not understand, but the losses are real and you have a right to be sad. It’s okay to talk about it and to even seek therapy if you can’t manage it on your own. Some therapists will question what you’re so upset about. Find another one.

If you are childless by marriage, I pray that your partner acknowledges what you are giving up by choosing him or her and then helps you create a new life plan that will work for both of you.

You can find Hubbard on Instagram at @tanyahubbardcounseling.

I welcome your comments.

Would He Divorce You If You Got Pregnant?

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Newsweek: “Woman Accepts Divorce after Twelve Years over Unexpected Pregnancy”

Twelve years ago, this couple agreed they would not have children. Neither of them wanted kids. They were happy being just the two of them, and that’s the end of that discussion. Except that the 40-year-old wife somehow got pregnant in spite of his vasectomy.

Surgical error? Immaculate Conception? Was she cheating on him? We don’t know. She says, “It’s like a miracle.” She wants to keep the baby. The husband has declared that he will divorce her. When he said he didn’t want kids, he meant it. In general, she doesn’t like kids either, but she wants this baby, even if she has to raise it alone.

The article goes on to talk about the impact having children has on a marriage, how things change dramatically and how couples with children are more likely to divorce than couples without. I don’t know how much truth is in this piece, which is annoying to read with its overdose of ads and pop-ups, but what do you think?

Can having a baby ruin a marriage? Is that one of the reasons you’re not pushing to get pregnant? Is the guy in the article a jerk for rejecting his wife when she gets pregnant despite efforts to prevent it? Or is he sticking to what he has always said, that he absolutely does not want to be a father?

The article quotes smartmarriages.com, which says one factor more likely to lead to divorce is the situation where a woman wants a child more than her spouse. “Couples who do not agree on how much they do or don’t want to have children are twice as likely to end their marriage.”

So I ask, because disagreement about having children is the essence of being childless by marriage, if both parties are not 100 percent sure they are not going to have children, no matter what happens, is the possibility of divorce always hanging over their heads?

What do you think? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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Katy Seppi’s online Childless Collective Summit starts tomorrow morning at 8:30 PST, 11:30 EST, and runs July 14-17. It includes four days of talks, stories, workshops, and networking with others who are childless. Registration is free. Your anonymity is guaranteed. All sessions are recorded and available for free for 24 hours. By purchasing a Pace Yourself Pass, you can watch them at your convenience. Click here for more information or to register.

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Nomo Book Club offers ‘safe’ books for childless readers

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Tired of books where everyone seems to have children? Like the book I just read in which one of the female leads has two children, 8 and 14, and the other has a one-year-old and a baby on the way?

So was Lisa Ann Kissane, one of the speakers at the recent Childless Collective Summit. Childless herself, she was weary of childless characters having miracle babies, successful fertility treatments, or being given babies to raise. Bam, you’re a mother, problem solved. So she founded the “Nomo Book Club,” nomo being short for “not mother.”

Lisa Ann reads constantly, looking for books that won’t be upsetting to women who don’t have children for whatever reason. She rates them with a “trigger warning level” from red–don’t read this–to orange–proceed with caution–to green–no worries here. The green ones are hard to find. Male heroes are often childless, but the heroines not so much.

Certain genres, like romance, seem to require that the women end up married with children or at least the promise that that’s coming. But we all know that happy ending doesn’t always happen in real life. Lisa Ann looks for stories that represent how it really is. She warns there is just as much of a danger of creating stereotypes of childless women as there is of women who have children. The hard-hearted career woman, for example.

When I wrote my novel Up Beaver Creek, I wasn’t really thinking about it as representing childlessness, but I guess it reflects my own reality. The heroine, P.D., was unable to have children, and none of the main characters are raising children. A couple of twin boys make a cameo appearance, but generally this is a childfree book. Is P.D. going to wind up with children? No. She has moved on.

As for my previous novel Azorean Dreams, I’m pretty sure the protagonist, Chelsea, will soon be a mother. I wrote it more than 20 years ago and went with the cliché.

Lots of book titles were tossed around during the Summit discussion with Lisa Ann. Among her recent favorites are Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Confessions of a Forty-Something F##k Up by Alexandra Potter, Sourdough by Robin Sloan, and Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. See her latest recommendations at Kissane’s website, https://lisaannkissane.tumblr.com.

The featured book for March was Eudora Honeysett is Quite Well, Thank You by Annie Lyons. In April, she offers a book of poems, The Princess Saves Herself in This One by Amanda Lovelace. Don’t you love the title?

If you like to read, I highly recommend joining the Nomo Book Club. Have you read some books that you found encouraging for childless readers? Are there others that made you feel bad because they were all about babies? Please share.

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Do You Have to Read This Blog in Secret?

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Photo by Ekaterina Bolovtsova on Pexels.com

Last week on a whim, I asked whether Childless by Marriage readers felt they needed to hide their participation in the blog, Facebook page, books, etc. I had just had a vision of a spouse looking at the computer and asking, “Why are you reading this crap?” or “Aren’t you over that yet?”

It turns out some of the folks here do have to hide their participation in Childless by Marriage and anything else related to their childlessness. Anon S said it’s her “dirty secret.” Jo, another frequent commenter, said she shares a laptop computer with her husband and can only read Childless by Marriage when he’s not around. She can’t join the Facebook page without him knowing about it.

Holy cow. I don’t know why it took me 738 posts to think of this. I guess I have had the luxury of a private office for so long I forgot that most people don’t have that. I am so sorry.

I have always had my own computer, and my late husband Fred took little interest in what I was doing on it. If I wanted to share something, I called him in or handed him a printed copy. I didn’t start the blog until he was well into Alzheimer’s, so he had no idea. But I’m sure I was journaling and reading about childlessness throughout our marriage. My annual Mother’s Day tantrums were not invisible. I remember him saying “Oh, babe.” That’s all. No further discussion. But I hid most of my tears from him. I didn’t talk much about it with anyone. What good would it do?

Anon S, featured quite a bit in the Love or Children book made from the blog, said she was worried about being found out. She won’t be. Even I don’t know her name or where she lives. With the exception of a few friends from other parts of my life, I don’t know who anybody here really is. All I know is what you tell me, and that’s fine. I want this to be a safe space.

Last week, I attended the first Childless Collective Summit. Most of the speakers talked about infertility. Our main focus here is on our problems with partners who can’t or won’t make babies with us. I feel bad for those with both kinds of problems. I can’t imagine your pain.

Some aspects of childlessness are common to us all—grief, feeling left out, dealing with rude questions, worrying about our future, etc. I wonder how many women attending the Summit, which lasted for four whole days, felt they had to hide what they were doing. If so, it took real courage just to be there, even on Zoom. And God bless Katy Seppi of Chasing Creation who organized the whole thing.

I hate that some (many?) of you have to join us in secret. If we’re ever going to find peace, we need to be able to talk about our situations, admit to our grief and claim our efforts to make sense of life without children. To put it in psych talk, we need to “own our stories.”

In Jody Day’s keynote speech at the Summit, she said that 10 percent of people without children are childless by choice, 10 percent by infertility, and 80 percent by circumstance. That’s us. We need to be free to talk about it and to support each other. Childlessness for whatever reason should not be seen as a dirty secret we need to hide under the mattress like porn magazines. 

Relationships are difficult, especially when you disagree about children. In addition to your partner, you may have stepchildren looking over your shoulder. I can hear them saying, “You’re not childless; you have me.” We all know that’s not the same. We also have parents, siblings, co-workers and friends who just don’t get it. But we have every right to say, “This is my situation. I’m trying to deal with it. I hope someday you will understand.”

It makes me sad to realize you have to hide your reading about childlessness. I pray you can all find space and your own computers, tablets or phones to read whatever you want and the courage to declare, “This is important to me, so I’m going to read it.”

How is it for you? Do you feel free to read and comment or is this something you need to hide? What can we do to change the situation? I look forward to your comments.

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