I was born in 1912 and grew up in Portland, Oregon. My coming was a surprise to my parents; I took the place of a brother who had died at six of typhoid fever, some time before I was born. This was perhaps the most difficult thing in my whole life with my parents, because my brother was "the fair haired child." He was a very beautiful, lovely child. And I was not a very beautiful, lovely child. Furthermore, I wasn't a boy. My mother was absolutely devastated by his death because she had let him drink out of a waterfall, so her guilt was horrendous, and she had no way to express that. She became terribly ill. I think she probably had a psychotic episode. I know she spent days in bed and became a very dark, difficult person.

My sister, being 17 years older than I, was as much a parent to me and maybe even more than my mother in my earlier days. My mother was 45 when I was born. She was tired and not well, and my sister took over a lot of the parenting until I was perhaps 6 or 7 when she moved out and had her own life. I have all my life thought of her and treated her more as a parent than as a sister. That made for some odd relationships between us. I revered her so much and wanted to be exactly like her, and I didn't realize what that was doing either to me or to her. I was 23 or 24 when my mother died, so my relationship with my mother had little influence on whether or not I was going to have children. But I'm sure the assumption in those times particularly was, of course, everybody was going to have children. No question about that.

My choice not to have children was both conscious and unconscious. Since I wasn't having children, my friends were standing around waiting for me to have children. They were waiting for my husband and me, and there was also a quality of kidding that went along with that. You know, "It's just too bad that these nice young people are so bright, and they're not having children." I never knew what to do with that. I related to that with embarrassment and confusion. Because it was not acceptable to say , "We do not want children," and I wasn't even sure that I didn't want children. I didn't know how to handle a feeling of not living up to the expectations of my peers. I think I probably showed my embarrassment.

My own reasons for not having children are really not very clear to me. I knew before we were married that my husband felt very strongly about not having children, although before we married, I thought I could change him. I thought, "Well, you know, he'll change," because he liked children. I could see that he liked children. I always have felt that his reasons were rather suspect in that he felt we shouldn't bring more children into the world. He felt there were too many children already. His own childhood was a very unhappy one. I think there was something in that. I was 28 when we were married, so it was already time to have children. The time was flying by fast, but in those early days of our marriage it would have been really difficult for us to have children because we didn't have very much money, and it was during the war. Newell was working in the shipyards, and we had a little tiny house, but there were other people who had the same situations who went ahead and had children anyway. I think I wasn't all that strongly motivated myself, because I really let Newell make this decision. I would have probably have had children. Still, I did have an abortion when was 40 or 41; at that time, people weren't having children so late in their lives.

Of course I could have had a child but my husband was so strongly against having a child. I don't think I even examined what I wanted; in those days, we did what our husbands wanted. I was the professor's wife. I didn't know how to be myself. I also didn't know how to go against him. Even on something so important, it didn't really occur to me very much. But I'm sure that I was not very motivated. I can imagine if I had wanted a child very very much, I would have found some way to do it. But I was not willing to bring up a child on my own. That would have been hard for me. At that time I was very involved with my musical life, and I think that I probably felt that having a child would interfere too much.

As I look at this now, it seems ridiculous. I did see my other friends going ahead and having children and still doing music, but not exactly having careers as I was doing. I was a performing singer and also at that time I taught piano to a lot of children. All the faculty children just kind of fell into my arms. I enjoyed it, and I loved my relationship with these children. It was a pleasure for me, and fun, and I felt that they all were my children. I remember people would say, "Oh, you have such wonderful patience with children. I don't see how you do it." Of course the reason I could do it was that I only saw them for half an hour, and then I could let them go home and do whatever they wanted. They were wonderful when they were with me, and I was wonderful when I was with them. But I knew that would have been hard for me to do for more than that half an hour. I was very aware of that at the time. I don't think I was a particularly wonderful piano teacher, but I gave them a lot of other things. I recognized that most of those children were never going to play the piano for more than two or three years, and that what they needed was not so much to learn a lot of finger exercises, but to have some fun. Mostly, that is what we did. I often wished my early piano teachers knew what I know.

I really enjoyed children who were six and past. I wasn't very interested in babies. Babies didn't seem to have very much to offer me at that time. But these children I really enjoyed. Now it's kind of turned around. I really like babies. I love babies. The children are okay, but it's the babies that I seem to want to get my hands on. I think the change in me is partly age, and it's also that I've been working with Hospice. Somehow, working with Hospice creates a need to be reconfirmed with babies. Seeing the end of life I need to see the beginning of life. I'm also doing a little parenting for people my own age. I have 2 or 3 friends here who are in their late 80's or 90's and I try to spend some time with them, not exactly on a regular basis, but as much as I feel I can. There too, seeing the end of life makes me want to see the beginning of life. I think that is why I want to be around babies.

It's the thing around here in Mendocino to have babies. Lots of good babies. My experience with my friends and their babies is that they are being much better parents than I have witnessed in the past, in the sense that they spend more time with their children. They're not trying to manipulate them very much. I remember the very first time I ever saw a father doing very fine parenting was at Esalen. I had never witnessed that before, and here I was, 50! I had never seen any man doing this. I was standing out on one of the porches, and there was a man with his child walking down below. The child wanted something that didn't seem particularly reasonable, but this father kneeled down and talked to the child. I couldn't hear what the words were. All I could see was the action. The action was that here was a man taking time with a sulky difficult child. He was trying to get on that child's level, to understand it. He was all love and no impatience. This was so apparent without my hearing the words at all; I remember being very moved by that. Because it was a new experience. I feel this even now as I recount it. People had always passed children off in my experience. When they got sulky, it was "You're being sulky. Straighten up. Stop it." That's how I was brought up by my mother, my older sister and my father. My sister was more understanding than my parents, but even so, in those days I was brought up to understand that children were not very important. They should be seen and not heard. It has taken me a long time to change that around in my own relationship to children.

There was a period when my whole perspective on life changed. As I went through my life there at Stanford, I realized that my husband and I tended to make friends with other people who didn't have children. For a while before I went to Esalen, I had a group with several women. We met fairly often, and talked about spiritual matters outside of church. This was in the late 50's. I was doing this quietly on the side, not making too much noise about it. My husband was not sympathetic to it, and I don't think he was very aware of what I was doing in my spiritual life. I had to look for other ways to be and other kinds of people to be with to expand the need I had for some sort of spiritual "sangha," or community.

That was my first look into spiritual matters, and none of these women had children. I was hardly aware of that, but looking back I see that the friends we spent the most time with didn't have kids. Obviously that would happen, because after all, we were not much into talking "parent talk." If you don't have children, you don't know how to do all the talking that goes on. When we did see people with children, mostly the children were not involved. When we went to dinner or cocktail parties there were never any children present, ever. In those times children were certainly not part of any dinner or any cocktail party. I can remember being surprised, and a little horrified, when people started having their children pass around the drinks, and I thought, "Well, this is pretty odd." Then those people started having their children around when they had dinner parties. That also seemed pretty odd to me.

So in the kind of background I grew up in, children were just out of the picture. And certainly not invited. Haven't you heard the expression, "Children are to be seen and not heard?" I didn't have any siblings my age, I didn't have anybody to make noise with, I didn't have anyone to help me out. I grew up in a world of adults and grandmothers. I didn't have much chance to get out of line.

I'll tell you next about some of the interactions I've had with young women coming to me, asking about what it has been like to be childless. The people coming to me are mostly single women who are in their 30's or late 20's, and they're looking at the fact that time is passing by and that if they don't have children pretty quick, it will be too late. They want to know what life is like if you don't have children. What do you miss? What are the advantages? Mostly, I think they have pretty much made up their minds already that they're not going to have children and they're wondering if it's OK. They're looking to me to see if it's alright to do this, to go through life and not have children. I tell them that because they don't have their own children doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of children out there needing some extra parenting. Most of them are aware of that already. They don't need to feel lonely or have regrets.

I can almost tell when this question is coming, because people are sometimes a little embarrased to ask the question in the first place. So I can feel what's going to come, and then they ask, "Do you have any regrets?" My biggest regret, and this is a very big regret, is that I don't have any grandchildren. I'm missing being a grandma. I really don't have any feeling of regret in not being a mother, but being a grandmother I look around at my older friends who are grandmothers and realize that most of them receive a tremendous amount of pleasure, more pleasure being a grandmother than they did being a mother. So that is a true regret. And then there's another. Children are wonderful teachers, and I can see that my friends have had to learn things from their children that I haven't had to learn. With children you have to look at yourself and see who you are, because your children press your buttons, and I feel that my buttons haven't been pressed in that way. Children have a very special way of pressing buttons. They're more honest, asking questions like, "Why do you have so many wrinkles?"

Pushing and nudging each other along is what a true friendship is about. I sometimes feel I don't do that enough for my friends. I do in my teaching relationship, but not enough for my friends. Once in awhile I get reflections of myself from some children if I know them well enough. If they get past being polite. If their mothers are willing to let them get past being polite. Children are wonderful mirrors.

What seems to be needed is a breakdown of the boundaries of what's family and what's not family. We can be family to each other, and that doesn't always mean being "nice." Sometimes it means being challeng-ing. I have students who come for singing, and they sometimes realize that their main interest is the therapy they get. I have one woman who says, "I don't know why I come every week, just to be beaten down this way!" In that way, these people have given me permission to let them see themselves. I don't beat them down, but that was the way she felt it at the time.

Earlier, my singing and piano teaching was a channel for parenting, and now music continues to be my vehicle. I'm also counseling and doing more therapy now. I have several people I see for therapy, and I realize that I'm essentially parenting those people. I hardly see myself as a therapist at all. Those people feel very much like my children, like my grown children, and we love each other deeply.

Sometimes I wonder what my life would have been like if I'd been born 40 or 50 years later, if I hadn't been in so much the old style at the beginning. I think I would have been a wonderful new age person. Maybe I already am, but I had to win it - I am a pioneer. If I'd been born later, I think I would have a mate. I don't know that it would be a husband, necessarily, but I would have a mate. And I probably would have children, but I would expect everybody to help me with those children. I would expect everybody to do a lot of parenting, the way I see it being done here. There is a lot of help, and people who have children help each other together. I see this being done very generously.

I think I take care of some of my mothering instincts by taking care of my plants. And I care for the trees that I walk among and the rocks and the things that are under my feet. I care for the planet desperately, and I want everybody else to care for the planet. (Both my mother and my sister were avid gardners, but I think that I garden partly because I haven't put enough love out to people.) I talk about the planet a lot, whenever I get a chance to. Also I am part of the coalition for saving the coast from oil exploration, spending some time and money and talking to people and writing letters. I feel I'm not doing enough; I feel I should perhaps spend less time gardening and spend more time actually doing this work.

I'm also sort of a godmother of the Alchemy singing group that's going to Russia. Those women certainly do feel like my children. They explored all kinds of music...early music and late music. Then at some point, I think maybe about 8 years ago, they decided that they must not just be singers for entertaining people, but that they wanted to sing a message. They chose to sing socially responsible songs. Some of these they wrote themselves, and others they searched for music that would be interesting to them and that would support their strong beliefs. My role in this transition was to encourage them, and to learn how to help them do this new kind of music. I could only let them choose their own music, and I just went along with whatever they chose to do, and had them do that the very best they could. They have had some criticism for this along the way: people say to me, "Well I get tired of the same old songs about the same old spiritual matters, and socially responsible matters, and I just think you ought to tell them not to sing those songs all the time." But they have not wavered. This has led to the trip to Russia, because they felt that they could learn by going to Russia, and that it would take a message to Russia from us, and that maybe the Russian people would welcome them in a new way. In the beginning they were planning just to do some street singing. They started out that way, but now they have several, maybe six engagements in different cities. I was excited about it from the beginning, and at that time I thought I would go with them. That was 5 years ago, when I had enough energy to go. They plan to rough it pretty much, and to stay in 2nd and 3rd class hotels; they will rent a bus and travel by van much of the time, and I realize that I can't do their kind of travel. In the beginning when we first started talking about it, I was enthusiastic about going. Now, instead, I can support them a little bit with some money and love. I've been doing that when people want me to go and do something. When friends wanted me to go and lobby in Washington for the oil coalition, I said I just can't do that. If I were able to I would. I give the money to someone else who can, and that seems to be a reasonable thing to be doing.

It seems to me that some women want the experience of procreation and motherhood so much that they will overcome any difficulties that stand in their way, and that less motivated women in this respect find their fulfillment in other modes of nurturing. I see it in men too. The caring quality of parenting is universal.

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