Q&A: Choosing to be child-free with Keltie Maguire

Keltie shares her personal journey to deciding parenthood wasn't for her.

This week, I want to try something new with the newsletter and share an interview with someone else about how they’ve refamulated. I’m so excited that the first conversation I get to share is this conversation with Keltie Maguire, a clarity coach who helps people decide if they want to have kids or not. I first heard Keltie on Katie Bryan’s podcast (our guest from episode 14 about being a solo mom by choice), where she was talking about her process of deciding whether or not to have kids.

I am in my mid-30s and have been on the fence about having kids ever since I met my now fiancé a few years ago (maybe I’ll write more about this later, but you can hear Julia and I talking a little about it in Episode 8 of Refamulating).

Hearing Keltie talk about her own choice made me feel less alone, and definitely more confident to keep questioning this choice that so many people seem to make so easily. Since then, I’ve been listening to her podcast, Kids or Child-Free, and the conversations there have helped me sort through a lot of my own feelings. Keltie also does individual coaching and group workshops to help people decide. She has a lot of other resources on her website if you’re on the fence yourself, but for now enjoy this conversation with Keltie!

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photo via Keltie Maguire.

Claire McInerny: So tell me a little bit about your personal experience. Tell me where you started and your indecision on whether to have kids or not.

Keltie Maguire: I was on the fence for about a decade. My journey started with a feeling of not now, later. So it wasn't so much that I was indecisive about having kids, it just felt like a later problem.

In my 20s, so many of my friends talked about motherhood as something they'd always thought about, something they desired, something they were excited about. And for me, I didn't have any of those feelings really. Likewise, I didn’t have a huge distaste. It just felt like something I would do later when I was older, when I was a grownup, when I was done enjoying life and having fun.

It's not a correct belief, but I think I always had this sense that I'll have kids when this enjoyable part of my life is over.I always saw it as something, I don't want to say dread, but I realize now in hindsight the way I looked at the decision was trying to keep it at arm's length.

I was not brought up in a family where it was talked about as a “when you have kids”, I think kids in a sense felt optional to me. And yet I had no examples of women who had opted out of this path. And so as I was getting closer to my mid thirties I recognized I actually can decide not to have kids. And yet the idea of doing that totally freaked me out because it felt very definitive to decide not to do something that maybe my future self would later wish I'd done. I thought I might regret it. I worried that I would be making the wrong decision, that I would be lonely when I became older. A lot of the concerns were really future tripping, but those things kept me super, super stuck. So I was waiting for this feeling to “just know” to show up. You'll “just know” when the timing's right. You'll “just know” if you want kids.

I realize that for some people, they do have a very profound life experience or this sense of my clock is ticking, my ovaries are aching. That wasn't the case for me. Moving to Germany in 2018, I was 35 or 36. I recognized that I was going to have to actively make a decision, that it wasn't just something that was going to happen to me.And I had a lot of shame around it. And so that's really when it was like pedal to the metal, Keltie you have to make a decision.

Claire McInerny: You mentioned your family briefly, but tell me about the external forces or narratives that made you feel ashamed or made you feel strange because your ovaries didn't ache or whatever.

Keltie Maguire: I remember feeling like I was unfeminine because I didn't desire or want a child. I felt all the shame like I'm broken. Maybe my hormones are out of balance that I'm not fully realizing or actualizing myself as a woman if I don't have kids. I grew up in a pretty small city, and looking at immediate and extended family, friends, and older adults, I didn't have examples [of child-free people]. So when I see that being a woman is having kids, I internalized these ideas and really weaponized them against myself.

Claire McInerny: So tell me, when you finally got to 35 and were like, Oh shoot, I'm gonna make a choice. The ache is not coming. What did that process look like for you? What questions were you asking?

Keltie Maguire: I had a former product based business designing jewelry, but I had shifted to doing what I call clarity coaching, which is really helping people figure out what do I want? Getting clarity in life.

And although a lot of it pertained to business and professional fronts, I recognize that a lot of the questions I had both asked myself through that career business transition, as well as the ones I was asking my clients, were actually very applicable to this. Questions like how do I want to feel? What's ultimately important to me? What kind of life am I building?

Just thinking from this perspective of what would I choose if it was solely up to me if I didn't have these external voices or wishes or pressures. My partner was, I would say truly ambivalent and was happy either way. You know, that's the kind of pressure [I felt]. Okay, this is in my hands now. Eldest daughter, at that point, no grandkids in the family.

And I think at a certain point after conversations with my partner, doing journaling, doing the self discovery, doing coaching sessions, talking about it in therapy, I almost just felt I reached a point where I was like, I'm over it. I had gotten close enough to making the child free choice that even though I didn't have definitive 100 percent certainty, I couldn't see myself at that point going back down the path of motherhood.

Claire McInerny: That's powerful because I think I'm waiting. I'm still like waiting for the ‘aha’. And I hear that you have to trust yourself to just choose. Let me ask then, what were some of the factors in your head that made you start veering towards child free?

Keltie Maguire: I think for me, I felt very, um, joyful and fulfilled in the life that I had created. And again, I'm always mindful of how I frame this because some people feel really joyful in the life they have with a child. It doesn't necessarily have to be better or worse.

But for me, it was this feeling of I've created this life that feels really good to me and I don't necessarily want it to change. However, I have, and continue to have a lot of strong concerns over the current and imagined future state of the world that I didn't personally have a huge degree of comfort with having a child.

It's very personal to have that kind of discernment to say how it's not even about having confidence. It's about that greater sort of philosophical belief of, what makes life worth living? Do I feel like my child will have a good enough life that it's worth bringing them into this world?

Mental health was a big consideration of mine. I've struggled with my mental health, specifically anxiety and depression for basically the entirety of my adult life. And while I feel like it's well managed right now, it also feels very tenuous. Such that it was hard for me to imagine making a choice that I felt either could make my mental health feel more precarious and or that could ultimately be harmful to my child.

I looked at the fact that I love my solitude. I love flexibility. I love freedom. I love spending a lot of time on my own. And if there had been a desire to potentially override those things, I do think I could have found happiness and satisfaction as a parent, but I feel like that more natural fit for me based on the choices I've made and the person I've become was to not have kids.

Claire McInerny: So you made the choice, but it wasn't some lightning bolt moment. Tell me what life has looked like that made in those years that makes you feel like, right, I'd made the right choice. I'm still very happy.

Keltie Maguire: I think it starts with the decision of saying, I'm not going to live my life continuously looking over my shoulder. If we ask that from a place of curiosity, I think that's fine, right? Oh, my husband and I, well, what would it be like if we had a child? We were joking the other day. How do you think our dog would be with a child?

But when we are constantly looking in the rear view mirror thinking, what if I decided different, have I made the right choice or future tripping? What's the future going to look like? Oh no, everything's going to be terrible. Being rooted in this present moment has been key to me feeling confident about my choice.

People get so fixated on making the right or wrong choice and what could have been. But that's always the case in our lives. There are always going to be a million paths. We couldn't choose a million decisions, and most of us aren't even aware of that. But for me, it's about saying, what do I have? How can I cultivate the experiences and the feelings, the relationships that I want in my life based on the choice I've made.

That being said, I think it's important to honor and not necessarily dismiss feelings of doubt or insecurities that we have come up. And so for me, it's like, if I have a moment of wistfulness and thinking, gosh, you know, I'm holding this beautiful newborn baby, that's an experience I won't have as far as having my own child or I am maybe one of few women who find like the birth experience to be like potentially quite transformative magical to just be able to sit in that and be like, there's a sadness there. I can have a moment. I can cry if I want, but not to get stuck there. Like allowing those emotions as they come up, but not allowing that to become my story of living in wistfulness and regret because that doesn't serve anything.

 The other thing I would say was having some compassion and empathy for myself for feeling the way I felt. We're learning to drop the judgment and saying, what if you feel anxious around kids? What if you don't like when sticky little hands hold your hands? What if you can be okay with feeling the way you do and having curiosity about maybe what's shaped you to be that way, but not becoming obsessive where it's like, I have to point the finger and figure out why I am this way, why I don't want kids. Just learning to have some compassion and to drop that judgment was huge in allowing myself to connect with what it was I really wanted or didn't want.