Reflections on My Unbelonging—Views on Womanhood from a Childless Thirty-Something
- Annalise Grueter
- 12 minutes ago
- 5 min read
By Annalise Grueter:
When I thought about my mid-thirties, I always imagined life being defined by little feet. Bright eyes in small rosy faces, dirty hands, and inimitable high voices by turns loud, demanding and soft, impossibly sweet. I thought days would be a carousel of pre- and elementary-school pickups and drop-offs, tiny dancers and soccer cleats, aggressive snuggles and small bodies caught in maelstroms of emotion, the bedside passing forward of lullabies from my own youth.
It never occurred to me I might still be behind, still the perpetual late bloomer, living a dramatically different version of life than friends who had and friends who hadn't dreamed of that whole motherhood thing.
I open the small screen, that wormhole of dopamine and distraction. The “For You” page isn’t just current events, conversations around democracy and institutions, silly memes about my caught-in-between generation. The shifting collage of brightly lit squares is heavily peppered by images and videos of another type. I click one and watch. A small boy implores his device-holding mother, “Mama, Stopp! Warte! Es ist rot!” and points emphatically at the red pedestrian light; it is not time for them to cross the road.
I swipe up. A new video flashes onto the screen. This one of a game before bed, a ball being bounced off a living room wall, tiny feet pattering in and out of frame, giggles and squeals of glee punctuating the overlaid music. Parents tiring out their little ones before sleep. My lips curve up; I tap the white arrow. Select a few names, friends scattered across the country, women with preschool-age children.
Nobody warned me about this, the chasm between phases of life in this decade. That if I didn’t keep pace with the crowd by partnering and reproducing in my late twenties, I’d become so far separated from longtime friends. The loud, unspoken thoughts. You don’t get it. You’re not part of the club. Nobody mentioned the inadvertent teams that form.
These days, I’m not supposed to feel this way. The social messaging is that I should be thrilled with where I am. That because I don’t currently have children, it must be what I want, that I am one of the radical feminists, unburdened, Child-Free. I don’t feel like that. I feel Child-Less.
It is hard to share life updates when I see certain friends. Because I know it’s being received as She’s so lucky, she doesn’t have to plan weeks and months in advance. She doesn’t have to wipe bottoms or negotiate a few bites of food or getting dressed. She doesn’t have to confront the alien experience of the look and feel of a dramatically transformed body. She has the luxury of sleeping through the night, of pursuing seemingly endless side-quests. I smile and listen to anecdotes and their cajoling of tiny humans, have my own exchanges with those brilliant corporeal lights.
Afterward, as I’ve learned to schedule, I change my clothes and drive to a trailhead. I follow dirt paths with wet cheeks and a deep ache between my ribs. Gasping, keening out the minor scale chords of pain. Held safe by the air and surrounding trees as I outlet the amorphism of this grief, the grim iron clouds of this unbelonging.
My mother, perhaps, could have warned me. Herself a late bloomer. Herself married in her thirties to a man objectively old for that rite of passage when it happened, days shy of 50, with teenage sons from his previous marriage. She didn’t know then it would take years to get me, that the tiny crack remaining in her own window was inching inexorably closed. She felt this agony too, as wilder friends had children before her, as others struggled and strived and ultimately failed to get pregnant.
Why would she, though? What parent wishes for their child to endure an iteration of their own experiential torment, dreams that they might need to prepare their baby for those pains? So she didn’t. As she tells it now, the long-delayed joy did much to erase the years before of helpless wanting. She delighted in the mundanities of parenthood, of which her on-time friends had complained.
It is an insane time to want children in this country. When the number one cause of childhood mortality is firearms, above even car accidents, a statistic not true for any other nation.
When the cost of childbirth in the U.S. is nearly $20,000, more than the total cost of my graduate degree. That bill is ten times higher than the same event in many other wealthy countries (in Germany, birth costs range between 0 and 2,000 euros) and significantly riskier. The U.S. has the highest maternal mortality rate of all high-income nations, almost three times higher than South Korea, seven times higher than Germany, a whopping twenty times higher than Switzerland.
Those are just introductory costs. They don’t account for the price of daycare or diapers for a little family member who needs regular medical visits in a society lacking universal or affordable health care. They don’t account for non-existent federally guaranteed maternity leave, which means that the potential choice to have a child alone becomes both a financial gamble and a financial sacrifice.
I have seen the frozen fears. New mothers airlifted to larger hospitals for early labor, frightened for their lives, trying valiantly not to think about the infinite, excruciating potential outcomes. I have visited a friend in the region’s award-winning children’s hospital and met her newborn in the room’s rectangular plexiglass cradle. The little girl, adorned with pink tubes and blue wires and an infant-sized cannula, stretching blindly toward her mother’s touch, peachy skin dry from leaving the sea of the womb early. She would spend another four months in the beeping white room before being cleared to go home.
Why would you want that? Runs the argument of my voluntarily child-free friends. The ones who relish their ability to plan an adventure vacation two weeks out on a whim. The ones who, like me, still love the occasional night out, dancing in dark, hot rooms of thudding music and flashing lights and neon.
Why would you want this? Ask the young parents in hushed tones when walls separate from their deeply loved and cherished children. You can have as much alone time as you want. They have their perks and pleasures, but this is HARD.
Yet I do. I want the discomfort of pregnancy, a toiling body building a new human out of my own bones and calories. I want the suffering and strain of birth, that deeply animal threshold-crossing. I long for the sweet coos and stinky diapers of my own baby, the bell-like giggles and technicolor chaos of those prayed-for children. I know I’ll get there someday.
Annalise Grueter is a freelance journalist and opinion writer. Her work is regularly published in The Sopris Sun and Aspen Daily News, with over 185 articles and columns published since April 2024. Her short essay “Visiting Dad” was published in the Winter 2025 “Undergrowth” issue of Camas Magazine. She participated in the 2025 Aspen Summer Words juried memoir workshop led by Joshua Mohr. Her first book, Colorado Alpine Trail Runs, was published by the Colorado Mountain Club Press and Mountaineers Books in June 2022. She currently lives in Colorado. Instagram: wild.spirit.22
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