Of Chosen Family and “Childless Cat Ladies”

As an only child I have always extended my concept of family to chosen family as well as the tiny nuclear family I was born into. All over the world I have beloved friends who are not related to me by blood but who call me “sister.” From Los Angeles to London, Afghanistan to Africa and Alaska, Canada to the Kalash tribe of northern Pakistan, I am welcomed as family. And of course I reciprocate. More than once someone has called from an airport saying “I’m in town.”

All this went by the wayside during the world COVID-19 lockdown. During a pandemic, borders do not recognize chosen family, where ties are of love and history rather than blood or marriage. It was hard to miss weddings when limited gatherings of only locals initially began to be allowed, and harder still to attend memorials on Zoom.

But these mutually chosen friends-who-are-like-family are still fiercely family in every other sense of the word. I have had happy reunions with many, though not yet all. Some are still separated by distance, cost, and living in war torn and/or authoritarian countries.

Like many of my friends, female and male, straight or gay, I did not have biological children in this incarnation. Some friends made a conscious choice not to have children, for financial, emotional, or environmental reasons. Most of these had a somewhat privileged life economically and educationally, with a high degree of choice, and grew up in Western cultures in North America and Europe. For others it was just circumstance, the way their lives evolved. They never met the right partner to have a child with and didn’t want to be a single parent.

For me it was a hybrid reason. If I were a young person now, I don’t think that I would have the hope and faith to have even one child, what with a climate emergency and the biodiversity loss of the looming Sixth Extinction hanging over our heads like twin Swords of Damocles. But I support the right of others to make that choice. I always thought I would meet the right male partner at the right time of my life to actually choose whether we wanted one biological child. I had always planned that my partner and I could adopt if we wanted more children and felt we had the emotional and financial wherewithal to give them good lives.

Which is why I don’t really like either the term “childless” or “childfree.” One implies some sort of lack, the other a sense of relief that I did not feel as I aged beyond my childbearing years.

Proud “Childless Cat Ladies” Unite

So I don’t know whether to be deeply offended or laugh at comments that the current Republican Vice Presidential nominee made in recent years that label people like me and dozens of my friends throughout the world as “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable.” Weirder still, he has said that people—but especially women—who didn’t reproduce are more likely to become “sociopathic” and “deranged.” There is a certain irony to this given his running mate.

I swing between amusement and outrage at these resurfaced remarks. I think of friends who had devastating miscarriages and eventually adopted, or not. Straight and gay couples who tried IVF, some with success, like Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz and his wife, and some not. People who had a child who died at a young age. Are we all to be considered useless for our failure to reproduce and raise a child to adulthood?

The attacks on those who didn’t have biological children—from happy stepmother Vice President Kamala Harris to AOC to, oddly, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, who adopted two children with his husband Chasten—remind me of nothing so much as a Medieval fear of women in power, or other marginalized groups in power. It’s a modern iteration of the proverbial witch hunt, the fear of the widow or single woman in the glen who gives out herbs and weaves for the village. It’s the fear of the feminine power of healing, and of women and others who won’t “obey” and subjugate themselves. Well, rather like cats when you come to think of it.

So I’ve decided to embrace being a Proud Childless Cat Lady. Like philanthropic entertainers Taylor Swift, Dolly Parton, and the late Betty White, to name a few, I actually do have cats and yes, I do consider them to be like children. And we are in pretty good company with artists Frida Kahlo and Georgia O’Keefe, and astronaut Sally Ride. Acclaimed journalist Amy Goodman of Democracy Now has dogs, as do many of my female friends who didn’t have human children. Some have both, and/or horses, birds, or other non-human animal companions. Some just care deeply about the Earth and its inhabitants.

Apparently JD Vance thinks that none of us should even be able to vote! He thinks we don’t have a stake in the future, despite the fact that these famous philanthropists, scientists, astronauts, writers, artists, and millions in other walks of life, have spent their lives in service to the world and do care about the future. Even if we don’t have our own descendants, we care as much as friends and family members who did have children, by choice or not, through giving birth, adoption or marriage into a blended family.

Maybe we should all claim the honorific “childless cat lady”—whatever your gender, sexual orientation, or age, whether you have cats, dogs, other companion animals, or just love wildlife and the Earth, and whether or not you have raised children and/or grandchildren.

We Are all mother sentient beings

The Tibetan Buddhists and Bon-pos say that “we are all mother sentient beings.” This means that in the infinity of incarnation on Earth and in other realms, all of us have at one time been each other’s mother, and we should behave as such. I interpret this as we are all mothers to all others and to the Earth herself. And I have endeavored to live my life accordingly, fighting to raise awareness of climate change and other environmental disasters that the rightwing “pro-family” folks deny exist, and to mitigate them. I continue to fight for a “just transition” to renewable energy, to expose and oppose environmental and systemic racism, to fight for justice, equality, and diversity, and to be a healing presence in the world.

To me these are all Bodhisattva actions and reflect the vow that I have consciously taken in this life—and almost certainly in previous lives—to be mindful and motivated by altruism, and to remain in incarnation until all sentient beings attain enlightenment.

And yet people like JD Vance dismiss us all in a few “sarcastic” words, and with the even more outlandish proposal that children should have votes that would be decided by their parents. Even the worst and scariest dystopian fiction has not come up with that one.

Unlike most people born in the 50s, I was born to parents who consciously decided to have only one child. From an early age, when I wondered why I was an only child, my parents explained that they had agreed when they got married that they would have only one child. They were worried about overpopulation and its effect on the planet, a concern almost unheard of in the 50s. They were also being practical. Both had grown up in extreme poverty during the Great Depression, and felt that they could give one child, girl or boy, the advantages of education, cultural enrichment, economic freedom, and attention, that they had not had.

My mom believed so strongly in her choice that as a practicing Catholic she attended Sunday Mass but did not take the sacraments. She was not about to make a false confession of regret or guilt for using birth control so she could take Communion. And she was not about to stop using birth control. When I was received First Communion at age seven, I asked her why she didn’t. She gently explained that she didn’t believe in that particular teaching of the church and used something called birth control so she wouldn’t have more children.

My mom was a woman of faith all of her life, a one-child cat lady who cared deeply about me and about the future of life on the planet. She took me traveling—including to totalitarian societies like the then-Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—in the late 60s and 70s when I was a teen. She firmly believed that all humans had the same hearts and the same wishes, fears, and desires, regardless of the systems they lived under, what religions they practiced, if any, and what cultures they grew up in.

Because of my travels, I came to see myself as part of a world family of choice. I would pore over photos in National Geographic, as well as the book of the 1955 Museum of Modern Art photo exhibition of The Family of Man (now an outdated title). I would see myself in the face of an old man in Indonesia, a child in Biafra, a woman in Turkey or Afghanistan. I came to recognize the power of photography to show that we are all one and was inspired to become a photographer myself, always waiting with respect for permission. I have begun the process of posting some of my work in the Lost Worlds Archive of the Global Diversity Film Project.

Tara the “childless cat lady” who helps save the planet

And for you readers of my cli-fi novel Weather Menders, the character of Tara Concha-Garcia MacFarlane is the ultimate “childless cat lady.” Like Vice President Kamala Harris, she becomes a stepmom later in life. Tara then became a grandmother through her stepdaughter. And that’s how she ends up traversing a ravaged, flooded, post-pandemic Britain in 2050 as a very old woman in her 90s with her loving and loyal teen-aged “step” great-granddaughter, Leona. They, along with the brave gray cat Georgie and Leona’s partner Janus, will join time travelers from 300 years in the future in their efforts to change the Timeline so that climate change was stopped in its tracks decades long before it got to the Climate Emergency we are living through.

I kind of think JD Vance, who apparently likes his wife even though she’s “obviously not white”—Usha Vance is of South Asian descent—and other leaders of the current Republican party wouldn’t much like Tara. After all, she’s mixed race—Indigenous from Taos Pueblo, Hispanic, and what we in New Mexico call Anglo, or white European descent—and she’s a brilliant independent woman who didn’t find the love of her life and marry till her 60s. And then she marries Xander, who is Scottish-Afghan, and becomes stepmom to Joy, whose mom was Zulu. Joy marries a Tibetan, so her daughter Leona is a joyful mixture of cultures and ancestries. And need I point out that Tara has loved cats all her life, long before she and Leona found Georgie as a tiny kitten amidst the stones of Stonehenge?

I don’t expect Republican leaders to read climate change fiction. For starters, they don’t even believe that human-caused climate change is real. They also don’t appear to live in the world of chosen diversity that I do. I wrote those characters because they remind me of real-world friends who have loved and married across ethnic, religious, and racial differences, some easily bridged and some challenging in various times and places. Even though I grew up white middle class in L.A., I soon expanded my circles, especially at Hollywood High School, which was amazingly diverse in the 70s, with some 57 languages spoken by the student body. So I have never lived in the homogenous male-dominated Christian nationalist and white supremacist world that they apparently inhabit and favor.

I can’t really wrap my head around their mindset, as it’s so alien both to the way I was raised and the way I have lived my life. I gave up on Catholicism being the “one true religion” in my teens. My mom remained a woman of faith, praying to Jesus, Mary, and the saints every night of her life. Her rosary and prayer book were next to her bed when I got to her house a few days after her sudden passing of a heart attack in a hospital. I know she never regretted her choices—to have one child, to love me fiercely and unconditionally, and to go against the teachings of the church by using birth control. In her obituary I wrote that she “walked fearlessly into the Light” just as she had walked fearlessly in her lifelong travels through the Soviet Union, trekking in Nepal, and through China, occupied Tibet, and many countries in Africa, Asia, and South America.

“Childless cat ladies” care about everyone’s future

People choose to have children or not for a variety of reasons. For some choice was taken away. Some desperately wanted a family but couldn’t conceive or couldn’t carry a baby to term. Others never met the right partner and didn’t want to raise a child alone. Some adopted—alone or with a partner, at least initially—and some never had the financial, emotional, or family support resources to go through the adoption process, in their own countries or abroad.

All of us have been motherly at some point in our lives. Maybe we volunteered to help children at risk improve their reading skills at the local Boys and Girls Club. Maybe we were Scout leaders. Maybe we were godparents, aunties and uncles to our siblings’ children, or honorary aunties, uncles, or grandparents to the children of friends and community. Maybe we spent our whole lives working for peace and justice, or had careers as nurses, psychotherapists, teachers, or healers. Maybe we have been activists from an early age working for environmental healing and climate healing, consciously caring about seven generations into the future.

Ironically, I don’t see many “pro-family” Republican candidates supporting policies that actually help children like paid family leave—the US is the only nation among 41 developed nations without government-mandated paid parental leave—and subsidized affordable childcare. And they are the ones who want to further decimate the US public education system by getting rid of Head Start and providing vouchers for private, usually ultra-religious, “education” that may not teach evolution or other science, and certainly not climate science. Oh, and by the way, aren’t they the ones who ripped small children and babies away from their mothers at the border for the crime of their parents’ trying to claim asylum as they fled from violence and/or climate disasters?

I’m pretty sure most Americans have no desire to live in a theocracy. Even most Christians I know don’t want to live in one.

We have to do everything possible to make sure that particular “Timeline” does not become a reality.

So let’s celebrate the “childless cat ladies.” Let’s wear the moniker as a badge of honor. And let’s include the childless cat guys, dog ladies, dog guys, horse lovers and wildlife lovers of all genders. Because in the end, whether we have physical human children or not, stepchildren or adopted children, or non-human animal companion children, we are all mothers to the Earth. The current Republican party world view does not seem to recognize that we on Earth are all in this together, either sinking in rising waters or reversing the losses and choosing love, choosing to envision a future far different from the fear-based culture of domination, hierarchy, and patriarchy that today’s Republican party promotes.

Let’s co-create a world where we see ourselves in every human heart and every sentient being, and have endless empathy for each other. Let’s work together to have a loving chance of actually mitigating climate breakdown, or even eventually reversing it and rebalancing the climate for future generations.

Debra Denker is the author of  Weather Menders, a cli-fi time travel novel for the hopeful.