“I do not want to be a mother. Ever!” Damaris Muga announces without hesitation. The 38-year-old former runway model is one of few Kenyan women who have boldly come out to say that they do not want (biological) children, in a society that reveres motherhood.
Born in Suba, Homa Bay County, to a father who was a reverend and a mother who was a teacher, Damaris grew up the third born among four siblings, and later four step-siblings, who all have children of their own. Apart from her step-sister who is in Standard Four, Damaris is the only one in her family without children.
At the age of 20, Damaris moved to Europe after signing a modelling contract with a Europe-based agency an opportunity she got as a finalist at the Face of Africa modelling contest. She lived there, mostly in Germany for over 10 years, got married, got divorced, taught herself web design and learnt fluent German, before coming back to Kenya in 2010. Asked if her stint in Europe, and especially in Germany which has one of the lowest birth rates in the world, had anything to do with her decision to remain childless, she says:
“It could be partly the reason … I can’t really place my finger on the point at which I decided I didn’t want to have children. It wasn’t something I sat back and thought about and decided ‘okay, I don’t want kids’. In any case all my (black) friends in Europe had kids, but I never felt the desire nor the pressure to have children of my own.”
NURTURING WOMAN
At her house in Ongata Rongai in the outskirts of Nairobi, Damaris comes across as nurturing, telling her guests that there are no rules in her space – “You eat whenever and however you want as long as there is food.”
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During this interview, she is quick to point out that she doesn’t hate children.
“I am actually really good with children. I have babysat for my friends, who live their kids with me even for days. There is a time a friend went to India leaving her baby behind and when her baby fell sick, I dropped everything to take the baby to hospital where we were admitted for three days. I just wanted the best for the baby; I prayed for its survival and quick recovery,” she explains.
However, Damaris adds, she is as fast to tire of babies as she is to offer to care for them (for a while).
“I can’t stand a crying baby, especially when the crying goes on for long. I have no patience for babies who break things or for the messes children make. When it gets to that point, I call the parents to come pick their child,” she says with a laugh, and adds: “After a few days of childminding, I have to retreat to recoup my strength, especially when the childminding experience is not so nice.”
Damaris’ confession is a deep contrast of the society she lives in and the large family she was brought up in. She lives in a society where women face violence for failing to conceive and to complete a family with children, and where some men discourage their wives from using birth control, for instance in Ongata Nado in Narok,where the county government’s health department had a hard time convincing men to allow their wives to use contraceptives.
“Discussions about motherhood edit out the misery that comes with being a mother, troubles that some women are ill-equipped for,” she says of the pressure heaped upon women to bear children.
“When my friends were busy planning for a future with children to call their own and getting very excited about it and the possibility of pregnancy, I don’t remember ever feeling sentimental about motherhood. I have had opportunities to have children and supportive partner(s), but I have balked at the thought of being a mother every time it came up,” she adds.
“I know it is a mean thing to say, but having a baby now, even at my ‘advanced’ age when I am obviously mature, would be crap, and you know motherhood is not like buying a dress; I can’t just return it where I got it (the baby) if I do not like it.”
Noticing we are taken aback by her brutal honesty, she explains: “Go online now, or talk to mothers and see them try to explain how much they love their children and the way the description of that love comes out as an unending litany of woes … then it ends with a statement like ‘but all is worth it when I leave in the morning and they hug me’… should I pretend to like that? I mean, is there no option that I may not be maternal at all?”
As far as Damaris’ family is concerned, she says that apart from the disagreements that come from difference in opinion, her family has learnt not to go beyond the general casual talk about children.
“People do not question my decision not to have children. I do not see people start the ‘children are awesome and lovely’ story around me,” she tells Saturday Magazine.
Damaris can also not remember ever having that conversation with her parents.
“It was left undiscussed and I chose not to mention the taboo subject of not wanting to have children,” she says.
MOTHERHOOD FEARS
In her conversations, her fears about motherhood surface.
“People say that motherhood will turn my life upside down in a good way, but there is also a chance that it might also be in a bad way and I cannot take that risk,” says Damaris who describes herself as a linear-minded person who weighs risk, puts effort and energy into her endeavours and expects a predictable return, something that might not work when children come into the picture.
The web developer is also certain that she would not be capable of raising a child on her own, because of the complexities that come with being a single parent.
“Look, we label women without partners as having ‘singlehandedly raised their children’,” she says raising her hands to stress the singlehandedly, “but there is a house help behind there when the mother has to work from eight to five and I wonder that as my baby grows, will it know that the person who was mum was a servant and perhaps be more attached to her than to me?”
Despite her aversion to motherhood, Damaris has opinions on parenting, which are often dismissed by people who wonder what she would know about children, seeing as she has none of her own to draw experience from.
“People keep saying something like: ‘you would not know because you do not have a child’ and even the women with children would tell other mothers: ‘you would not know about boys because you have daughters’,” she notes and adds sarcastically, “Does a doctor need to have suffered from HIV to know how you feel when you seek treatment?”
The negativity with which those around her attach to her decision not to have children doesn’t occur in a vacuum. A study by Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist from the London school of Economics, revealed that maternal urges drop by 25 per cent with every extra 15 IQ points a woman garners.
In his book The Intelligence Paradox, there is a chapter titled “Why intelligent people are the ultimate losers in life.”
The opening statement of the aforementioned chapter groups women who decide not to have children with ignoramuses.
He writes: If any value is deeply evolutionarily familiar, it is reproductive success. If any value is truly unnatural, if there is one thing that humans (and all other species in nature) are decisively not designed for, it is voluntary childlessness. All living organisms in nature, including humans, are evolutionarily designed to reproduce. Reproductive success is the ultimate end of all biological existence.”
Dr Joachim Osur, a gynaecologist and marriage counsellor, challenges this view, saying that the decision to actually bear a child or not is often complex.
“Women are usually thinking of the need to have a stable partner and a good means of providing for the child, before they feel ready for motherhood, but often women get pregnant before they’ve figured it all out, and most of the time, they accept it, carry the pregnancy to term and bear a child, and sometimes they decide not to accept the pregnancy and they abort.”
The medic says that half of the human population is an accident because “very few women planned to have a child but when they got pregnant they carried the baby to term, because a baby is believed to cement a relationship.”
‘CIRCUMSTANTIAL’ REFUSAL
However, Dr Osur says that he has met many women whose refusal to have a child is “circumstantial”, a testimony that Kenya may not be ready for the ambivalence some women have about motherhood.
Women who choose not to have children, often have Bibles wielded at them to discredit their choice, but Pastor Joseph Wambua sees no problem with the decision to remain childless.
“There is no scriptural reference that dictates that a woman must have a child. If both partners agree that they don’t want children, their choice should be respected,” he says.
Admitting that he has not counselled any couple that has chosen to be childfree, he says that a woman may have been raised in a way that she never learnt to have an attachment to a child.
He adds another possibility: “maybe they are so committed to a career path that they feel a child would derail them from that pursuit”
His third example, explains Wangari Ngigi’s situation.
Pastor Wambua says that after so many disappointments, some women feel they may not want to expose children to the horrors of this world or they may be not be capable of loving and taking care of them as they feel the baby ought to be cared for.
Wangari, 30, is a public relations officer who says that she has come to terms with the possibility that she may not have a child.
She has a minor gynaecological problem that doctors have told her may be sorted out but the fear of how she was brought up haunts her.
“I was raised by a single mother, who struggled to feed the three of us and I really do not want to see a child go through that”, she shares.
However, Damaris points out that experts don’t have to try to find justifications for women who don’t have children. She says: “It is like someone sat down and put this standard on us that even with a career, money and education you are still not enough and must have a child., and if you don’t, they try to find an explanation for it. It is as if a woman can’t decide that she doesn’t want a child, period. No justification necessary.”
-nation.co.ke
