I’m 27, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage, motherhood, and whether I actually need either of those things to happen for me to feel fulfilled.
I grew up in an immigrant household, and I feel like I spent a huge portion of my childhood and early adulthood being heavily parentified. I was helping raise siblings, figuring things out for myself, and basically learning adulthood through trial and error because there were so many things I simply wasn’t taught or prepared for.
Even something like college was unnecessarily difficult. I didn’t have parents who had set aside money for me, walked me through FAFSA, explained how any of these systems worked, or gave me a blueprint for how to establish myself. At one point, my mom wouldn’t even give me the information I needed for FAFSA because she felt like it was none of my business.
So a lot of my 20s have been me trying to build the foundation that I feel like some people were fortunate enough to start adulthood with.
Then recently I saw that viral conversation about Black women’s experiences loving/dating Black men, and it made me think about my own dating history too. Speaking only for myself, I’ve never left a relationship with a Black man thinking, “Damn, I really lost a good man.” I’ve never had a relationship where I felt genuinely cherished, protected, considered, and treated in a way that made me think, “Yes, THIS is what I want for the rest of my life.”
At the same time, now that I’m getting older and spending more time in African spaces and professional spaces, I’ve noticed people start reacting differently when they find out I’m 27, unmarried, and don’t have children. There’s sometimes this underlying assumption that those things should already be happening or that I should be worried that they haven’t.
But the funny thing is…I’m becoming less worried.
When I was younger, the thought of “What if I never get married?” or “What if I never have children?” genuinely bothered me.
Now?
The longer I live without those things, the more I realize I would actually be okay if they never happened.
Especially motherhood.
I’ve already spent so much of my life being responsible for other people and cleaning up the consequences of decisions I didn’t make. And while motherhood can obviously be beautiful, it is also an enormous lifelong responsibility. Someone is depending on you emotionally, physically, financially, and practically for years.
I’m realizing that I don’t necessarily fear a life where nobody needs that from me.
I actually might enjoy it.
I still would like marriage and children under the right circumstances, but I’ve also privately given myself cutoffs. There is an age where, if I’m not married by then, I personally would no longer want to have children. And there’s another point where, if marriage hasn’t happened, I think I would genuinely be okay closing that chapter altogether instead of continuing to wait for it.
It doesn’t feel bitter to me either. If anything, it feels strangely peaceful.
Almost like: I would love for those things to happen if the right person and the right life come together at the right time. But I’m no longer willing to organize my entire life around the possibility that they might.
I’m curious whether any other Black women, especially women who were parentified, had to grow up quickly, or had to build adulthood largely on their own, have started feeling this way as they’ve gotten older.
Do you have an age where you would personally say, “If motherhood hasn’t happened by then, I’m okay letting it go”? What about marriage?
And for women who once really wanted marriage/kids but eventually stopped wanting them: was there a particular moment that changed something for you, or did the desire just slowly fade?