One of the things that inspired this book was realizing that I actually am grown up, that I am taking responsibility, that I am caring and nurturing, and that these are the things that are all supposed to happen when you have children. I was surprised to be feeling these parent-like feelings without having had children. When I really deeply, not just in my mind or in my heart but in my womb, understood that I would not have children, I was 45 years old. It was at that point that I could look at myself in a balanced way and realize, oh my goodness, some of what I'm doing is parenting! Parenting can find expression in many ways other than through having biological children, ways that are not at all second-rate, just different.

Speaking with a friend of my journey to this positive kind of extended parenthood, I felt the whole world being, in a way, my child. I saw that many of us, alone, had traversed similar paths. I felt inspired to collect the stories of some of these people into this book. The people whom I invited to contribute to the book are childless people who have a spiritual perspective and who embody the parenting qualities of nurturing, challenging, teaching, giving committment, taking responsibility, transmitting culture, and trusting in a positive future.

The general areas that I asked people to speak about were first, their own stories, their evolution toward the choice not to have physical, biological children, both the easy parts and the difficult parts of that journey, and about living childless in a culture that places great value on having children. Second, they discuss ways that at present in their own lives they find themselves parenting, in whatever form, with individual people or in some larger sense. And then finally, they share any overall vision that they have on the whole question of having children and not having children in relation to what's going on in the world. I asked each person to speak of his or her own experience, knowing that we often learn more by hearing another person speak truly and from experience than we do by reading scientific studies of the behavior of people.

The process of choosing childlessnesss can be very pre-verbal or non-verbal, so I asked my friends to allow words to emerge around the edges of the feelings, sensations and images that are associated with their "yes" and their "no" on the issue of having children. I trust that there is something in these stories that resonates directly with something in you, the reader.

My own attitudes toward children were pointed out to me through the interviews I did. While several of the childless people have always liked children, I felt I was still avoiding children, though I did live with a family in San Francisco while they went from having one to three children. Living there and being at the home births had made me much more at home with children than I used to be.

It is really painful for me to watch how so many people mistreat their children. It reminds me why I didn't want to have children. I was always afraid I would lose my temper if I had screaming kids. When alone with children, I have had some good experiences. It is in relation to the rest of culture, represented by the parents, that I felt fear and anger. There was hurt underneath the anger. It was anger at having been mistreated as a child. I don't blame my parents; they are in this culture. It is the oppression of children that I haven't wanted to perpetuate. I didn't want to be one of the oppressors. I had a feeling of a whole ancestral pattern snowballing, and I said, "No more." There is so much that I was not willing to pass on . It was too painful.

I wondered about doing this book with the attitudes I had. Then I realized that doing the book is part of my own healing. It is an opportunity to get many perspectives, to listen to people for whom the decision not to have children was so uncomplicated it would never occur to them to bother to write the book. It took someone like me, for whom it has been very complicated, to have enough interest in it to write a book. I also wondered if I was avoiding the issue by writing about it instead of actually having children. Now I see that this book is a tool I can use either to avoid or to heal.

As I worked on the book, I felt again how it is to open up and let something come through me. Somehow I've volunteered to give birth to this book. It very much wants to happen; many people are talking about this topic. I think this is something like parenting. It's like a conception, having an idea then allowing it to be born, and then releasing it into the world. This sense of conception, labor, birth, nurturing and releasing has been a part of the process of all the books I have written or illustrated with my photographs.

So rather than giving a great deal to one or two humans, as biological children, I get to do a little bit with a lot of people. With my previous book, one on being born caesarean, I feel in a caretaking, nurturing role with all the little ones who are being born caesarean today. I want to help them to avoid some of the pitfalls of having a different native culture, native in the most literal sense of the word. With these books I touch many different lives, and I'll never know just how. But that's like parenting too. Parents don't always know the effects of their parenting.

When I was young, it was just assumed that I would have children and carry on family traditions. While in graduate school my parents con-stantly inquired, "When are you going to get your Ph.D. and when are you going to settle down and have a family?" At that time these felt like conflicting expectations. Even recently I have felt it is not quite OK that I have chosen not to have children. I was clear in the choice, but not in my judgement of it. There was a sense of failure, of not having been able to have children, not physically incapable, but psychologically.

I come from a strong maternal lineage, so the family name changed every generation, but there was a certain quality of "old New England farm people" that was carried on from woman to woman. I felt guilty for a long while about not carrying this on, but now I see that I am indeed carrying it on, in forms other than biological family.

Many of us are experiencing the emergence of the positive parent within ourselves. The question is, can this manifest without a biological child? Are there ways in which we can be that parent, or be that energy, or allow that energy to come through us without a physical child? So many people assume that the only way to parent is to have one, two, or five kids. But parenting is a natural drive, and many of us are choosing to experience this in ways other than biological parenting.

One way is to work on our own healing, giving birth more fully to ourselves, and really becoming adults. The word "adult" often has negative connotations because what people are really pointing at is a truncated human being. We tell kids to grow up and act their age, and usually there's a negative repression. One of the connotations the words "adult," "grownup," and "mature" carry is stuckness, or fixity. I think we're transforming that in our own lives, refining what it is to be an adult.

In a true sense, "adult" doesn't deny the inner child. "Adult" includes playfulness and childlike delight as well as parental wisdom and discipline. Working on the healing of oneself is really important, even though it can be looked at as being selfish (from an external point of view). This sheds a new perspective of the whole question of selfishness, which has come up consistently with people who have chosen not to have children. They are accused of being selfish. When you heal yourself, in the process you offer something back to the world. So it is not selfish. At an even deeper level, you are part of the world, so by healing yourself, you are healing the world very literally. In parenting yourself, you are also parenting the world.

Another form of extended parenting is with children outside our biological families. Many of us were brought up with the idea that there's "family," and then there's "not family." We behave very differently towards relatives and family than we do towards other people. Though there is certain unconditional support that can be given to family members, we can be a little stingy with people outside the family, community or nation. But now the lines between "family" and "not family" are getting blurred. In extending our support into a much larger sphere, there is a breakdown in the definition of what family is.

We are being aunts and uncles and also, whatever our ages, grand-parents. A lot of people move around so much that often the children aren't near their grandparents, and they need the support of an extended family. For those of us who don't have biological children our parenting is not genderbound. We can all, regardless of our gender, engage in both mothering and fathering. The fathering, I think, comes in challenging, in giving people a push.

A third form of extended parenting is parenting people who are themselves parents. In talking to people about parenting the parents, I have the sense that some people are incarnating with a clear decision not to have children in order to transform what parenting is all about. Because parenting has gotten so off track, it's the parents who need parenting in many cases.

One of the things that many people I have interviewed have said is that part of their choosing not to have children was not wanting to pass on certain patterns of childraising and parenting. We have two possiblities. One is simply to say no, to have no children, and not pass on the old ways. The other is to actively work on transmuting them. So many of us who've chosen to be childless have seen that the old patterns don't work, but for us the transition to a more enlightened kind of parenting didn't come soon enough, didn't come when we were young enough to carry the new energy and visions into the act of biological parenting. So we are perhaps midwives of the transition; we can help parents and support the transition without actually biologically having children. For myself it is clear that there isn't a possibility of transmuting in terms of an actual biological lineage. I have, at 46, clearly chosen not to have a child. But I wouldn't be doing this book if I didn't think there is a possibility of transmutation on another scale. People like myself can begin the transformation. We can help parents to heal themselves and do a better job of parenting, revision what it is to have children, revision what it is to be a parent.

As long as I talked just with childless people, I couldn't really know abut the question of if we are just avoiding the issue, whether we are just weaving pie in the sky with our talk. Are we really parenting, or are we running away from it? This question can only be answered in the place where the childless people and the parents intermingle. Obviously, there is need for parenthood.There is need for new bodies for the incarnation of souls, and unless what other childless people and I are doing supports what parents are doing, it's a dead end. It is a risk not to have children, because you could be headed up a dead end. But one can be on a dead end spiritually even with children. Whatever we do has to keep regenerating.

There are many other forms of extended parenting, parenting the Earth, parenting humankind, and even the process of giving birth to a new culture. Giving with no expectation of being paid for it or getting return on a material level is one of the qualities of parenting. And being of service is one of the qualities that I have found in the childless people that I have interviewed. We sometimes question why we are working and not being paid for it. When I compared it to parents working and not being paid for it, I realized that service is a natural thing to do. I thought of a quote that I've heard from Heidigger, " A person is not a thing or a process but an opening through which the absolute can manifest." I saw that that is exactly the case both with parents and with some childless people. It is not just giving and being selfless and being of service, just a giving out; it is being an open channel and letting life flow through. What comes through may be physical children, or it may be creative work. It may look like one is being of service, but really it is just opening and receiving abundantly, and letting it on through. Physical children can be one manifestation of the process.

Each person that I spoke with showed me a different facet of the same jewel, particular ways in which they manifest this idea of extended parenting. The hairstylist I've talked with does it with touch. The homesteaders help people understand their connection to the Earth, the cook does it through food, and so on. Everyone does it in a different way.

Many of the people whom I interviewed are people who always thought they'd have lots of children, or who liked children, babysat, and have always been involved with children. And it came to them as a shock that they ended up with no children. I expected to find more people who didn't like children, but that is not the case. Many of these are delightful people who are great with children. They are taking this quality and using it in a different way.

I chose not to go far afield in choosing the people who have contri-buted to the book. All are either my friends or friends of friends. Each person's chapter was edited from an interview I did with them, so the style is conversational, spoken rather than written. I kept this informal tone intentionally, allowing for incomplete sentences and the like, in order to let you, the reader, experience my friends more directly as unique, living human beings.

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