There was a five year period about 15 years ago when I did live with a woman who had two children, so I have had a little bit of parenting. After living with her for three or four years, I got a vasectomy. At that point I felt that this was plenty of family - I didn't need to have kids of "my own." I have always been turned off by the notion that someone has kids in order to keep the family line or the race going. I remember that as a kid, six years old or so, I heard about keeping the line going and reacted negatively. I thought about adopting kids. I had a sister who was adopted, and maybe I was thinking that this attitude wasn't fair to her. The importance of "pure blood" might make her feel bad. I just never did like that idea. That may have had a role in my decision to get a vasectomy when I was about 30.

One thing I like about childlessness is the resulting freedom of time and money. Without having a family I had time to do what interested me, which has mostly been political, social change work. Starting in college, in the early 60s, I went to "sit ins" and was jailed for such civil rights activity. Then when I got out of college I went straight into a Summerhill school in upstate New York, and lived and taught there for three years. They had a strong philosophy of free, respectful childrearing. I obviously loved nurturing and kids. Then I went New York City and started a free university there, then started a publishing company, and then moved out here to California to a communal situation. I got very involved with environmental and local politics. I started an environment center, public affairs programs on radio, and then a few years ago I went to Africa for two years. I worked for a new independent socialist country, Zimbabwe, helping to publish new history books about black culture. Now my latest project is with Alchemy, a local womens' singing group planning a peace tour to the Soviet Union, on which I am going along. Also we are having Russians come here to Mendocino in six weeks, and I am on the committee that is welcoming and housing them. I have a commitment to peace work. In between there has been a lot of work against nuclear power, the war in Nicaragua, and of course, way back, against the Vietnam war. So childlessness has allowed me the freedom to make political work the main thing in my life, the freedom to just get up and go live in Africa, or to go to jail. I have been in jail several times, for up to 10 days at a time. I wouldn't feel that I would be able to do that as well if I had a family. I think I have more energy to do it because I don't get the burn-out from the responsibility of a family. I have been able to choose a simple, very modest lifestyle. I live in a one room cabin and live on very little money. Throughout my whole life I have never had to worry about providing for a whole family, a steady home, a flush toilet and college educations. So that has really given me the freedom to make "world nurturing" projects my main focus.

When you have your own kids, you can get kind of burned-out with it, because you have got them all the time. I have been able to live at a Summerhill boarding school, or live in a commune where we help co-parent with the kids who are born here. I can volunteer to do lunches at the Whale School because I like to be around the kids. Also I like to be with older people. Two old brothers owned the land next to us. They died a couple of years ago, in their late 80s, and I was the person who was closest to them in their last few years. I would visit them every week, and take them out on boats, and do different things like that. So I have some nurturing energy for other people that maybe some people who are swamped in their own homes don't have.

Sometimes I am accused of being selfish. One woman had seen me with kids, and had seen that I am good with them, and said that we need to have more children raised with such nurturing fathers. She thought I would be one of the best fathers, and I am depriving future kids of that. That was her point of view. She'd rather see more kids brought into the world by the likes of me.

I feel very strongly about an overpopulated Earth. Sometimes I have anger in me when I see people around me having their 7th child, or even their 3rd. I just think of all the material those kids are going to consume, especially Americans, the fuel and steel, millions of pounds of garbage, and the millions of toilet flushes. I feel strongly about that. I'd like to have a world with about 1/3 as many people as we have right now. It's not going to happen if people keep producing so many kids.

I chose my name when I wanted to consciously develop the feminine side of me. I was living in New York City, and had been running a free university there. Very active, leader, male. But, due to the women's movement and a couple men's consciousness raising groups I was in, I wanted to make a change. At first I changed it from Tom Wodetzki to Moonshadow, both words - moon and shadow - indicating a more passive, feminine aspect. That's what I was into then, a rather extreme emphasis on developing my female side. After a few years of this, I changed my name from Moonshadow to Moonlight, which is the Moon, feminine, and the light, being more active, male, and therefore more balanced. I feel a lot of nurturing in my relationship with a woman friend, and towards the Earth. I do feel a strong nurturance, and yet when I go out and start environment centers, or organizations, I feel my male energy out in the world.

A main goal for my new nursery business is to bring living plants into peoples' lives. Taking care of plants is a nurturing thing that feels good to me. About 12 years ago a friend and I raised about 40,000 redwood seedlings that were later planted out in the forest. I remember the meditative work of just sitting and working on these little babies for hours and hours at a time. There was a meditative and a spiritual part. Doing this new business with two wonderful women is a positive part of it, too. I've always liked doing things collectively and communally rather than doing them on my own.

Women have a biological cut off of menopause, a very clear sense of no children. Men with no vasectomies have a sense of, "Well, someday still, you never can tell." But I can speak very definitely and clearly about it. There has been a decision on my part. The vasectomy comes up sometimes. People ask, "Has it been a loss to your vitality?" I clearly feel that has not been the case. I feel good about the choice, and the woman partners that I have been with have felt good about it, too. On the shadow side there is nothing too strong, but there is a little bit . I grew up in a small midwestern town. We had family reunions of 60 to 80 people at Thanksgiving and then usually another gathering in the summer, and that has definitely gone. It used to be that everyone that grew up in the hometown stayed. But now they are strung all over the country. That kind of family cohesion doesn't happen anymore. My brother and sister both have kids. They both live in the town where I was raised, so that took any pressure off me. My family wasn't into that kind of pressure anyhow. The other thing on the shadow side may be in old age, not having family to comfort me. But I have these two step kids. I went to Poland and Hungary last year with my 22 year old step-daughter. In a way it is better, because I can't just depend on, "Oh 'my' kids will take care of me." I have to work a little bit, to create a living family today that is a chosen one instead of the obligatory one.

Back to the Table of Contents
Back to the main Childlessness Transformed page