EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever stopped to think about yourself and your story? If someone were to write your memoir what would it say? We all seek some level of authenticity but have trouble removing the labels and finding our whole story. Welcome to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. In this program we’ll explore diverse stories on identity to help determine what is truly yours. Now here is your host Diane Dewey.

 

Diane: Hi everybody thank you for dropping in and happy Valentine’s Day. Hope you’re spending some time with ones you love at some point along the way. Today on Dropping In we’re going to ask the question how does a woman’s life resonate for whatever reason choice or inability to conceive it does not include motherhood. This might seem like an odd choice for Valentine’s Day but it’s really about embracing and being empathic to people who have for one reason or another different choices. They’ve created family through selection rather than by blood and what are the personal and professional implications of choosing not to have biological children. It’s a growing population and one that’s been addressed by our guest Kate Kaufmann who’s written a book Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No.

 

She delves into this doing a deep dive well like we love to do on Dropping In and she examines how our culture remains geared toward having kids yet many factors weigh into the decision to not have them economics, infertility issues, impact on population, global issues that our future generations face seemingly intractable problems related to climate change and resource depletion. How does that impact decision making about whether to have a family? There are quality of life questions to take into consideration, professional advancement, if you’re a woman your earning capability may not be as equal if you’re the main caregiver as mother, freedom of time to focus on your own interests, fear of passing on genetic diseases causes people to pause and stop and think.

 

I believe intangible fears such as being a good parent or transmitting family trauma. Will I be worthy as a mother? Those kinds of questions are not often articulated. The question of having kids is much more nuanced and complex than ever before as women explore options that were never before contemplated. These were less acceptable options previously singlehood, communal living, same-sex partnerships and how can we find comfort in our own skin with these decisions when society hasn’t quite caught up yet. Kate Kaufmann author and our guest today will help show us the way. The book Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No is about life, love and the pursuit of happiness but it’s also about myths, idealizations, fear of failure, limitations, women’s inequality and our regrets and dealing with what we cannot have.

 

I’m yet hopeful for the acceptance of non-moms in our culture and I’ve seen it happening myself. As a woman who has not had children of her own mostly because of a procrastinated decision I was self-conscious of this so-called deficit due to the expectations in my own traditional family. I tried for about a decade to manage my parents and to be that person who wanted kids like they wanted me to be. Then when I divorced and moved away from the Philadelphia suburbs and my family to New York City I didn’t experience as much discrimination about childlessness or being single.

 

My professional life in the art world working at the Guggenheim museum was less traditional in the whole environment of art and design, women artists like the color-filled painter Helen Frankenthaler or the pop artist Marjorie Strider lived more extraordinary bohemian lives with multiple husbands and partners. Strider’s days were spent in the studio in lower Manhattan and her nights were spent drinking at the Cedar bar while Frankenthaler entertained intellectuals in the Upper East Side. These were the idealized women I knew of while working at the Guggenheim in addition to female curators, journalists and art dealers. Some of the best art dealers in New York City are women. I knew nothing of their real personal lives but I assumed that there were workaholics like me who loved what they did and had not made room for children. I followed their lead.

 

Since I grew up in the 1960s and 70s when it was a badge of honor to rebel it came as second nature to carve out my own path while in the back of my mind a tiny alarm clock ticked but even in Philadelphia I’d always had very good girlfriends some of whom had not had children themselves but even if they did were always supportive of my being independent. We were philosophical about my raising a potential family. What would be would be. Even though at one point I actually apologized to my parents for not having kids. They understood it in the sense that they reported that they really never thought I’d have any anyway. This was news to me. They understood me better than maybe I did myself.

 

In Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. Jen Hoffman talks about walking the Camino de Santiago, the road of St. James in order to find herself. This struck a chord with me in terms of our subjective at Dropping In identity. Jen reported that “I gave myself permission to leave behind every role I’d had. I’ve always been so other oriented wanting to know what people expect of me so that I can be whatever it is that they expect.” I so related to this and to the letting go albeit I hadn’t yet walked the Camino instead I’d hiked in Vermont for a year.

 

Then there was always the subtext of my adoption and the subliminal message in my mind that as an adopted child adult I wouldn’t really be suited for motherhood, that having lost my own biological mother through no fault of my own and unconsciously wanting to find her I’d remained a child. My biological identity had continued to unspool. I’d become disowned and cut off from my parents for a boyfriend that they didn’t approve of when I was age 18 meanwhile my biological mother had become estranged from her family for having gotten pregnant with me when she was 19. It was a similar time period in our lives. I stayed out of contact with my family for two years or more. After four years and having moved away from Stuttgart, Germany my biological mother eventually left that country altogether to live in the united states with her American soldier husband one state away from where I grew up in Philadelphia. My mother never had any further children and neither did I.

 

Two childhood memories stand out that may have informed my decision even though it was more of a procrastination process or a perfectionistic partner selection not to become a mother. One recollection was with my beloved adoptive father who although he participated in my repressive and over-controlled childhood no dating, no going on the skating rink, no stockings or ankle, only ankle socks, no miniskirts and as an early teenager all of these things were crucial to my survival. My father nonetheless played a role in empowering me. Here this is for you. He said he held out a navy blue book embossed under the leather cover were the words ship’s log. Why would he entrust me with such a thing I wondered? I was only 12 years old but my father had already taught me to read the navigational charts of the Chesapeake Bay where we boated on weekends as a family.

 

We’d perch in the captain’s chair at the helm of the flying bridge together my father and I far atop the deck with me reporting the numbers from the water’s depth finder and wiping his face and eyes with a paper towel. He’d have his binoculars strap slung around his neck tanned and creased over his white t-shirt and dark bathing trunks. He’d peer out to sea searching for land, searching for markers. I could help him with that. My young eyes picked out the cans and the nuns and oddly I could direct my father and our family on our boat. It gave me power.

 

When cruising conditions got stormy my mother would let me ride it out with him on the flying bridge with the bow dipping into the waves and the spray flying. While my mother nursed her sickness below decks her eyes pale, watery and lying on the bunk with her hand to her forehead. She looked so frail, so different from the energy of my father and me. I held my mother’s outstretched hand. I put cold compresses on her skin. I gave her Dramamine but I also felt pride and my own endurance and strength to carry on atop the boat despite the rolling waves. I would call out the channel markers to my dad as a way finder for us. He’d be on the lookout for logs or debris in the water that could put a hole in the hull or sink us or get us wrecked, get wrapped around our propeller and paralyze us.

 

I’d be pointing out the next red can or black nun, the buoys that mark the channels, the safe way ahead and I knew it. With the wind whipping my dad and me would be hit in the face by fans of water, get drenched and soaked by rain. We’d momentarily stagger inhaling seaweed aromas atop the swells we’d breathe in again. A yellow fell weather jacket was all I needed to wear in this kind of downpour because its hem landed at my knees. My father would don both jacket and pants of the rubber suit that puffed out in the wind. Both of us stayed barefoot for a firm grip on the deck. We were twin seafarers, voyagers in an untold even spiritual journey together. Beyond the mundanities of our lives we were charting a course of adventure outside the careful outlines of our daily existence.

 

White gap sometimes spilled over the bow and flooded the gunnels below or other times smashed into the cabin. Still we motor forward blotting out minerally spray from our eyes with a sweatshirt and squinting into the distance. I acted as the navigational help mate to his resolute captaining, a calming focus in the storm that I gotten onto from him and that has stayed with me and helped quill anxieties all my life.

 

Afterwards when we’d pulled into port or dropped anchor somewhere my dad and I would dry off. My mother would be shaking in relief. The dog would be hiding under blankets. My dad would show me the columns to enter the data in the ship’s log, the average RPM speed of the boat, the amount of gas we consumed and the distance we travel. With the pages of the ship logs spread out on the dinette table under the yellow haze of a battery lamp I’d enter everything perfectly with my pencil and then erase it completely before writing it in ink. It was so important to get it. Recording these statistics had vested me in a real job, the responsibility of information gathering that my dad relied upon to get us to the next destination.

 

By the end of that first summer I had filled half the pages that my dad reviewed while humming and nodding in approval. I couldn’t wait for the next spring when who knows what the numbers would add up to. At this point I realized I didn’t want to be like my under deck seasick mother. I wanted to be brave like a man. I distanced from her emotionally viewing her condition and her lack of enthusiasm for risk with great pity. I wanted to be fully in command like my foul weather geared father. The role of the weaker, fairer or tended to sex did not appeal to me but of course she’d not done anything wrong. It’s just that agency, freedom and adventure called to me. I’d gain competency as a navigator. Something the psychologist Albert Bandura deemed essential for gaining self-esteem and anchoring identity.

 

The urge to record and to create a document ultimately led me to writing. Now that I’ve written my own memoir and it’s received numerous awards I hope to help other writers not just tell their stories but prepare them correctly for publishing to a wider audience. Check out our website trunordmedia.com where I help to break down what’s working and editors come along to revise and perfect your vision as a writer. We have a book agent who brings your manuscript to fruition by getting it published. At TruNord Media we’re here to help.

 

There were other experiences from this time of boating on the Chesapeake Bay. We weren’t really wealthy. We just didn’t take the kinds of vacations my classmates talked about in France. We focused on our tight-knit and meshed family of three, my dad, my mom and me traveling only a half an hour by car from Havertown to escape the suburbs and emerge in the wilds of the open bay the Chesapeake in Elkton, Maryland. This story feeds into today’s guest interview because each summer when my parents and I motored our cabin cruisers through the Chesapeake we’d arrive at Theseus Cove not with the question of whether we’d hit the jetty or whether we’d have a storm but whether we could get the Miss America contest on our 12 inch black and white television. This was the highlight of our summer. My dad’s professional job as an engineer came in handy getting the static to dwindle and for the bright blue light to come on our deck.

 

I had a personal stake in the annual contest for my adoptive parents named me after Miss America 1957 Leanne Merriweather. It was the year I came to America from the orphanage in Germany. Now that the Miss America contest was on and answers to the questions told me that you had to be beautiful, you had to be smart and you had to be able to wear a bathing suit in order to succeed in life. I realized that life is a competition and that furthermore there’s only one winner. I felt that it would all come down to one person triumphing over the other. I’d already been engaged in a campaign to gain my parents’ approval so that our family unit would never disappear. I would be beautiful, smart and eventually I hoped voluptuous so that I could get a man, so that I could compete.

 

The binary nature of these choices struck me. There was the idea that women could have it all. Toni Morrison for example but she prioritized her family over business networking events that might have helped her and lumping off hours from sleep Morrison made it work but then she was a superhuman. I had to wonder if having it all as an ideal was pure crap. It might be too that people were more intrusive and nosier in earlier times. They’d ask you questions like when are you getting married, when are you having children.

 

Now I wonder if society is changing. Contests award winners are everyone who participates. Kate Kaufmann may have ignited a debate. Self-check, better boundaries and respectfulness are values that have grown in significance. I wonder if multiple polarities, viewpoints on how to live and who to be and how to identify be it gender, spiritual or ethnic or cultural are more our reality. We’re Dropping In today with Kate Kaufmann and we’re going to take a short break now when we come back you’re going to hear the answers to the questions you might have about Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. We’re going to take a short break but we’ll be right back with Kate Kaufmann, you won’t want to miss this.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: Hi everyone. Welcome to the show. We’re dropping in today with Kate Kaufmann, the international award-winning author of Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. I read this extensive chuck book with awe. Overall there are many enormous themes. It’s about regret. How we deal with regret over not being able to have children and how would we process regret and loss. Does it morph into something else like resilience? How much of regret is freighted from the outside, from our culture? Would our future self-ask us not to waste so much time worrying about what we couldn’t have? It’s about children yes but it’s really more universal too about life choices.

 

To give you some background Kate Kaufmann advocates for better understanding of the childless, child free demographic in person on air and in print. A popular speaker, media guest and conversation starter she is an MFA in creative writing and professional background in human resources and consulting. Kate’s mission is to open doors to frank, respectful conversations between the childless and child free as well as among parents, non-parents and those whose futures are as yet unclear. You can find Kate on her website katekaufmann.com. Welcome to the program Kate. It’s great to have you with us on this Valentine’s Day.

 

Kate: Hello. Thank you Diane and happy valentine’s to you.

 

Diane: Yes, I love our increased, enlarged version of love today. Kate, I just have to say this book it’s a tour de force. You deal with a range of issues that are so in-depth and I just want to launch right into one of them. You talk about in a wonderfully titled chapter use it or lose it. This has to do with reproductive systems. You talk about the diagnosis of for example cancer of the uterus that women often face which preempts their decision about having children. You write directly from children who have faced this. In other words we’re not having a mediated conversation. You’re directly quoting. I will quote one of these women. “when I heard I had cancer I wanted to get it out of me so they took both ovaries even though one was cancerous, only one. Now the option is gone. Emotionally this has been the most difficult part but you’ve survived cancer friends and family say. Yes but I’ve also lost something. I’ve always wanted children”.

 

Kate, I mean this is so beautiful that you pose this to us. When you think about this dilemma that women face, I mean clearly your heart has reached out to them but also you went through your own kind of disparities in the quality of medical attention that you received when you wanted to investigate the health of your own reproductive organs. Can you talk to us a little bit about what goes on in the medical community that contributes to all of these anxieties?

 

Kate: Oh my goodness yes. Using it or losing it. I need to start by saying I was very surprised to learn that when you have not born and given birth to a child you’re at two to three times greater risk for breast, ovarian and uterine cancer. The woman who you quoted from, her story she actually is a nanny. When she learned that she had ovarian cancer she was in her early 40s at the time. It really changed the trajectory of how her life was going to go in the matter of a day or two. Then she was on the operating table and had her reproductive system basically removed. That was surprising to me. I had no idea and I think that’s one of the ways that we interface with the medical community when why is that so? We represent 15 to 20 percent depending on when we were born of the population. You would think there would be more research done on how that comes to be so and what kind of monitoring.

 

I’ve been very surprised when I bring up that increased risk and ask for an additional screening, the pushback that oh no statistically you’re at norm. It’s like hhmm. There’s an opportunity and in fact I would say an obligation for those of us who don’t have kids to really become the best advocates for our own health with whether it be physical health, mental health, psychological health and I expand that beyond the medical world to say how we integrate in our friendships, in our families, in our society at large.

 

Diane: I think this idea of integration is so important. I wonder how much counseling or processing services are available to women who experience the loss of the option of having children through medical preemption. Of course it’s meant to save their lives but it’s also the case that as you say you went through a lot of pushback trying to be vigilant about your own well-being. You write in the book doctors are in the delicate, untenable position of having to weigh risks and do cost benefit analysis of women’s symptomology. Women especially those who haven’t had kids bear the consequences because as you say we’re at greater risk, a very little known fact.

 

I wonder what the role of agency, the idea of choice as to whether to have children. You talk about this in your book but can you kind of articulate from your own experience of talking with dozens and dozens of women. You can tell us how many as to what the importance of having the choice or having the decision made for you how that informs satisfaction later in life with the decision not to have kids.

 

Kate: That’s a wonderful question and it relates to that all-important word integration. I think one of the challenges that comes with approaching the topic of not having kids comes from the fact that there are so many routes by which one comes to be a non-parent. That can be as you mentioned by choosing, by examining your motivations and seeing that perhaps there are other paths that are a better fit for you ranging all the way to like the young woman who had found who she had ovarian cancer, a deep, deep desire to become a mother and was not partnered, did not want to go it alone and then her option to even try was taken away from her.

 

Then to all of the shades of gray between that. You spoke about the decision-making through procrastination and then the women I spoke with that was a very, very common reason why they ended up not having children. It was not so much an affirmative decision to have or not have but it was a kicking the can down the road if you will until the decision was actually made through our biology.

 

What I was interested in is talking, it came from my own personal quest. I tried to have kids. I would say I was ambivalent as I was growing up the eldest of four daughters. I had new opportunity to work with raising my younger sisters though they might push back on that but it was, once I learned that without some pretty severe reproductive assistance from the medical world I was not going to have kids. I was right on that cusp of aging out myself. What I was curious about is how do we go about integrating this role that exists, has always existed in our culture but to find resources to help me be able to better visualize how my life might unfold and how I could integrate the truth of the way my life was going to be based i.e. not as a mother through the rest of the life cycle. I couldn’t find anything about that.

 

I went out and started to talk to women of all ages and I have to say one of my great joys was to talk to women in their 70s and 80s and 90s who I would say to a person regardless of the genesis for their not having children each and every one of those wise, wise women had integrated the reality of their circumstance such that they weren’t expressing regrets because this was the life they led. They crafted their lives to suit their temperaments, their experiences and their opportunities.

 

Diane: And their designs. It goes to this this point of integration and coming to peace, coming to a point of peace with yourself and being comfortable in your skin that these are the decisions that were made. I wonder if we’re better or less equipped in this time when we are maybe less fatalistic and believe so much that we’re in control of things. Then whoops, we’re really not any more than previous generations were in so many ways.

 

The integration, I mean here we’ve got this terminology childlessness. It’s all in opposition. We don’t even have the word, you mentioned this quite eloquently. We don’t even really have a word that that describes being without children but being okay with it. It all is a point of reference of having children but your book has provided a resource of support that we’re not alone in any of these scenarios. That’s the part that I think is really marvelous.

 

Do you feel as though I mean, we’re both I have had the pleasure of meeting Kate while we were walking around out in Scottsdale, Arizona on a conference from our publisher. She writes press. We talked about how your life has evolved now that you have written this book. You’ve come in contact with so many women and you’re in a kind of a different sphere now. I wondered if people are more creatively open-minded towards you, how they receive you in the world. I mean do you feel kind of liberated from the stigmatisms that you might have experienced earlier in your life?

 

Kate: Oh very, very much so and I have a perfect example. Last evening, I was at an event and one of those lovely events when you walk in knowing basically no one. I ended up in a small circle of young women and men. I’d say they were young professionals in their maybe mid-30s to early 40s. They asked me are you still working? I’m in my 60s and they asked me if I’m still working. Yes, I’m like yes, I wrote a book and of course they asked what it was. Being able to say my book is called Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No guarantees that a conversation will ensue because my job is only to make it okay to talk about it. I got to hear from these young men and young men have these fascinating perspectives about being suspect when they walk by playgrounds and approach little children. It’s like oh my god I’ve never thought about that.

 

The young women saying I can talk about the way my work life has been impacted. I can talk about how I’m trying to look at my future but I can’t quite see it because my mom she can’t guide me through that part. Being in really the middle age of not having children, this is our work to do is to open up the topic and make it okay to talk about. It takes no effort at all once you say I don’t and here’s my little snippet of my story. Then there’s the opening for them to talk about the questions they have, the cares that they have and the concerns.

 

I wanted to add one more story because I thought it was so illuminating. I was speaking with a realtor in her mid-40s the other day. It came up that she didn’t have children. It’s like this magnet of not having kids and then people telling the story but she said I’m 45 years old. I’m looking at my life in a way I think your typical 85 year old is looking at it wondering how I’m going to deal with my end of life planning. I have a chapter that speaks directly to that and that is one of the biggest concerns regardless how old people are when they’re even considering life without having kids. How does that end of life part, how does that all resolve itself? We have to figure that out as best we can and keep it front and center. The themes and the approaches that we’re taking are basically the same as parents do. We just know for sure we won’t have a someone who is morally obligated to come and care for us when we need that care.

 

Diane: I found that that chapter on end of life care was super helpful also because as you mentioned this woman, the real estate agent was 45 years old. Seems like wow, that’s early but when you don’t have it in place like you can’t take it for granted. You’re leaving your home, your money, your worldly possessions such as they are to your kids. What are you going to do? It starts to be an issue of yes, paring down, living more simply or just deciding, making decisions.

 

I think in your book you kind of alluded as to how charity is the new children. People make incredibly informed, really contributory decisions about how to leave their money to charities when children are not in the picture. This strikes me as being a way of furthering their voices even beyond individual lives and really even influencing the conversation maybe about this whole framework of traditional family making. I’m also curious that you come in contact with men. That’s super cool to get into the conversation. What kinds of questions, we’ve got a couple minutes here. What kinds of questions do men have when they’re talking about their input into these decisions?

 

Kate: Before I talk about men you mentioned something that I think is really, really important and that’s like the symbiotic nature of our role as non-parents in not only the world that we live in now but projecting into the future because we do play an important role. When you talk about giving to charities, philanthropic giving, the highest predictor of whether or not someone will have a philanthropic output in their estate planning is if they do not have children. That is an area where we have a lot of power and it goes into some of those stigmas.

 

When you don’t have kids it’s predicted. There’s three ways that we get reacted to. If we say we wanted them and didn’t have them we responded to with pity and your arm gets padded. If you say you chose not to have them it’s a combination of envy because after all we get to all this freedom and disdain because after all it’s our moral obligation to take care of doing that. When you talk about men, their stigmas are slightly different in that what I have understood from across the board the men I’ve spoken to it’s that there’s that questioning. It’s like huh, why not or there’s a minimizing it’s like perhaps you do and you just don’t know it.

 

Diane: The man explaining. Well I think that it’s the mansplaining in on one hand but let’s not completely dismiss the role. I think we might have to kind of look at this conversation a little bit more in depth because you mentioned I think a trigger word which is morays which relates to a lot of institutions including church and spirituality and that’s what I’d like to dive into when we come back from our next little break. Men, you’ll have to hold off and join us when we come back. We’ll take a look at what your input really is and how it informs empathically our decisions about whether to have kids. We’ll be right back.

 

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Has your manuscript languished because you can’t find the direction it wants to take or have you lost the motivation to finish and polish it for publication because it can be such a big formidable task? Let Diane Dewey help you resolve your writing issues. Diane’s manuscript coaching offers help with sticking points like the arc of your story and how to flesh it out, finding the inner story and what you want to say, developing your message revelations that become your reader’s takeaways, helping to rally the motivation to finish your project and what to do next. We can analyze, edit and advise you on publishing. Who are the next collaborators on your writing path? If you seek resolution to these and other questions please contact Diane Dewey author of the award-winning memoir Fixing the Fates. Find her at trunordmedia.com. That’s T-R-U-N-O-R-D.com or on her author’s page dianedewey.com. Diane can also be found through social media. Connect with her through the links on the show page.

 

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You are listening to Dropping In with Diane Dewey. We’d love to hear from you if you have a question or comment about the show. Send us an email to ddewey@trunordmedia.com. That’s the letter ddewey@trunordmedia.com. Now back to Dropping In.

 

Diane: Welcome back everyone we’re here with Kate Kaufmann, author of the book Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. We’re engaged in a very interesting conversation here. I want to make one note to counteract our conversation before about aging. You mentioned in the book Kate that nearly one third of millennials do not want to have kids at all either because of keeping their flexibility that’s 34% or not wanting additional responsibilities, that’s 32%.

 

I witnessed this myself with my stepdaughters and I regard their decisions to be private ones. I don’t intrude and I tried to be respectful ever more so having read your book. I want to address the elephant in the room that we just started talking about before the break. That is the rise of spirituality in the wake of religions that have failed to address our individuality and that lack inclusivity. I really think this is an important area. You address it in a chapter called Spirit Moves. You yourself were developing is I noticed the importance perhaps of religions to be rituals and the rituals that they offer us. You talked about mourning and going into the church, the dark, utterly private room beneath the church.

 

You say “I fasted most of the time. I was there walking vaguely familiar path and I journaled lit candles, crafted a death mask.” this is following the death of your father. “Grieving both my father and the child I would never have. There below the sanctuary floor joists I found respite and released the religion that seemed to have left me already. “Then further on you write “yet many of us are called to the sacred and spend lifetimes constructing fulfilling spiritual identities. I’d like to think there’s sufficient space in the realm of the divine to embrace all those identities especially for the marginalized. ”

 

Well here’s to that. I couldn’t I couldn’t agree. I think the role of religions traditionally have been first of all patriarchal. We were talking about men. Can you kind of frame out what was the dichotomy that a lot of women you interviewed went through when they had to examine their say religions of origin and how they evolved?

 

Kate: The chapter on religion was the last one that I wrote because I knew it would be the one that would take me in places I wasn’t expecting to go and that those places would be profound both in my own exploration of my story and in the gathering of other stories. What I found is for those, in this case women but I think it’s the same for men. For those who have the proclivity to look at and to be comforted by the world of the sacred, the ritual, the spiritual. We’re called to craft something that works for us and unfortunately in most of the mainstream religions there is such a strong emphasis on procreating. There’s the miracle stories of having children well women well into their elder years by the grace of God.

 

Imagine that you’re in the midst of infertility treatments and you go to church and that is being preached. That is deeply, deeply painful or supposing that you’re in the same sex couple as is the woman who went on the walk on the Camino de Santiago that you referred to earlier. She was a devout catholic and finding her place in the Catholic Church required a segmentation of certain aspects of her life and to kind of shield them or include them in a veiled kind of a way. There’s again this word integration I think is the theme of our conversation Diane. There’s a need to integrate an understanding that comes from the heart and the soul of the each of us individually that then we put in whatever form into where we find our spiritual comfort.

 

For me it’s become more in the yoga world, in the meditation world. I can go to churches now and find comfort. I try not to go on mother’s day for example which and there are solutions. Once we understand that there are all these people who in whatever way we’re all marginalized in some way. It’s so easy to make just the slightest shift instead of saying all the mothers stand up. We want to give you flowers. Give everybody flowers just to say thank you for the contribution you each make to raising the children in our communities. It’s beautiful. I know the women that I spoke with have raised me to be a better, more inclusive, see the world through better more inclusive eyes because now I know that they see me.

 

Diane: Yes and I think you’re launching on a subject of finding place, finding one’s place and that is an internal and external voyage. I think that now that you’re talking about the inner relationships you cited a beautiful aspect of tribal cultures, Native American cultures where there was considerable support and just a kind of an acceptance of a woman who perhaps had a child that they somehow found they couldn’t care for. That was immediately absorbed into the tribe. It was not judged. It was not judged if a woman needed to do something else, needed to be a gatherer or perform some other role in the tribe. I think that’s all about finding place. You’ve kind of started a fire for us with this book and you’re a facilitator of groups.

 

I wonder about that aspect of your life. That must be rewarding as someone who understands that the concept of giving flowers to everyone, give an award to everyone, give a crown. The opposite of the monopolistic way that we think about things. How’s that experience for you and where are you going with that?

 

Kate: Since we’re talking about spirituality and legacy I have never been one to have a really strong mission and I do now. This is this is my life’s work. If by opening the doors to communication about this topic whether with parents, with non-parents, with those whose as you mentioned destinies are as yet unclear. If we can just shift that needle a little bit more towards the accepting and including the fact of what actually is then my life will have had meaning.

 

You mentioned a little bit earlier about your stepchildren. We don’t want to be invasive and we do have the opportunity to be present in their lives in the way that we actually are. To offer up, it’s one of those things about walking into that space of vulnerability by offering our stories so that those who are younger than we are have a chance to include that in the options that they see for their own lives. That normalizes all the different ways that we are in the world. It’s not young women’s work or young men’s work. It’s middle-aged and better women’s work.

 

Again, I go back to my book. I have never not enjoyed reading my book because there’s always some nuggets that I glean most particularly from the women who are older than I am. The stories matter. They really do.

 

Diane: Yes and they empower us. That is a firm belief. I also, together with my husband I have to say with in terms of male input I feel as though what we do is we offer my stepdaughters, Peter’s daughters I feel that we offer them the gift of space. Space to investigate where they’re going, where they want to go and to not invade that process or project onto that process some crazy thing that we might like playing with grandkids. I mean hello? When is that happening? That’s happening a very small percentage of the time and in the meantime they’re changing the diapers and living their lives with kids. It couldn’t be more personal of a decision and it couldn’t be more tender and kind of to be respected.

 

I think it’s brilliant that you’ve found this mission, this passion late in life but I think you’ve also enjoyed other careers. One in which you learned that there were great disparities for income generation for women who had children. Can you mention a little bit more in our time remaining? I’d love to just touch on that. We’ve got a couple minutes left.

 

Kate: This will speak directly to the men as well. The information, the studies show that for a woman it is more financially lucrative not to have children. It’s better for your career and your earning potential. For a man it’s the opposite. It is much better for them to have the “stability” of a family instead of being a free-floating, free agent if you will in the marketplace. What goes along with that on the women’s side of it is the motherhood penalty in earning. That gets to a whole other topic that I think is so important. We all have really important pieces of the puzzle that we occupy and contribute to.

 

If we can stop segmenting ourselves into these little teeny slices of do you have kids, do you not, how many do you have, did you want them, did you not? We all play a role and so if we can look…

 

Diane: I’m going to stop you there because we’re running out of time but I think that’s great. If we can stop being so segmented and if we can between women and men create more of a balancing act and tolerance for all. As gender roles disintegrate and there’s more multiplicity of values and inclusion of all women in the dialogue. It’s no longer relevant to judge. Love us and we’ll love you. Happy Valentine’s Day and thank you very much Kate Kaufmann, author of Do You Have Kids? Life When the Answer Is No. we’ll see you next week on the radio on Dropping In. Hope you have a great week and enjoy your valentine’s day. Think about the things we’ve said right Kate?

 

Kate: Yes thank you.

 

Diane: Okay. Bye. Be well.

 

Thank you so much for dropping in. please join Diane Dewey again next Friday at 8 AM Pacific Time and 11 AM Eastern Time on the Voice America Variety Channel. We’ll see you then.