The adventures and complications of a child-free life in Maria Coffey's 'Instead'

More Americans are saying they don’t want to have children. But what does life without children really look like?

"My husband and I have created this very adventurous life," author Maria Coffey says. "We’ve traveled around the world and have gone on really wild expeditions."

Coffey says she's been able to travel, explore and lead a fulfilling life. In part, because she long ago chose never to have children.

But she says it wasn’t a selfish decision.

"This is something that you have to decide for yourself," she says. "You can’t make the decision because of somebody else’s desires. I think that’s a huge mistake."

Today, On Point: The adventures and complications of a child-free life in Maria Coffey's 'Instead.'

Stay with us.

Maria Coffey, author of the book "Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life."

Excerpt from "Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life" by Maria Coffey. All rights reserved. Not to be republished without permission of the publisher.

Part I

GAVIN LARSEN: In my family I have become defined as the single childless person. And I'm fine with that.

JOSH LOY: It's allowed us some freedom and some flexibility. She's been able to change careers. We've been able to move. Finally making that decision just felt like a huge relief.

KATHRYN KOZAK: Life is really rich. I've achieved many of the goals I envisioned earlier on. I earned a PhD. I ran the Boston Marathon. And I'm leaving this message from my home in Germany, where I dreamed about living for a long time.

BECKY SANCHEZ: I believe I would be a good mother. I just don't want to put somebody else's needs and wants in front of my own.

ELLEN: Those who have consciously chosen not to have children are the minority of the childless. Often, it's not a choice, such as those who are physically unable to have children. Many others, like myself, just didn't find a suitable partner and didn't want to raise a child alone.

COLEEN HANNA: I did get married. I do have stepchildren and step grandchildren, which I really enjoy a lot, but I'm not responsible for them. I didn't raise them. So I feel like I really have the best of both worlds.

ANNA PORTER: I'm 30 years old and I still don't know what I want to do. Sometimes I think, absolutely not. And sometimes I think, I could do that.

STEPHEN CAMPBELL: I really didn't want to be a parent. Honestly, I didn't believe that I would be a good one. And after 30 years, I can say that I I think I made the right choice.

LINDA BESSE: I would say that being months shy of our 40th wedding anniversary hardly a week goes by that we are not grateful for our decision.

MARY: I have no kids. I never wanted kids. I am blissfully happy without the responsibility.

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: So Maria, does any of that sound familiar to you?

MARIA COFFEY: It certainly does.

CHAKRABARTI: And why?

COFFEY: There are a whole load of different responses there from trying to make a decision at 30 and to being very happy later in life, knowing that you've made the right decision. I think that's the spectrum for me, that I never really wanted children, for a number of reasons, but then I fell in love with a man who did want a child.

So then we had to negotiate that. So, and then through my 40s, there were a lot of different pressures on me in different ways, as I was coming to the end of my childbearing, possible childbearing years.

And now, of course, later in life, I'm looking back at that decision. So yeah, I could definitely relate to all of those.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) For folks who don't already know, this is On Point, I’m Meghna Chakrabarti. And you're listening today to Maria Coffey. She's a world traveler and adventurer and has just published a new book called “Instead: Navigating the Adventures of a Childfree Life."

And Maria, those voices that we featured just a moment ago are but a drop in the ocean of responses from listeners that we got when we said that we were going to be talking to you and wanted to hear stories about their decisions not to have children, if that indeed was a decision they made. Some of those listeners included, I should just honor them by telling us their names.

They are Mary, Linda Besse, Stephen Campbell, Anna Porter, Coleen Hanna, Ellen, Becky Sanchez, Kathryn Kozak, Josh Loy, and Gavin Larsen from Oregon, Washington, South Carolina, North Carolina, Georgia, New York, Germany and Canada. And we will hear from many more people as the hour progresses.

But before we get to the decisions or the instances in your life that led you to the road of not having children, can you tell me, Maria, what are one or two of the things that you have been able to do in the decades and years past that sort of you look back and say, "Yes, it was worth not having children because I got to do that instead."

COFFEY: I don't know how long you've got.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

COFFEY: I've had a very full life. So let's just say I always wanted a very adventurous life, an unconventional life. I wanted to travel the world. I wanted a life full of surprises. And that's what I've done with my husband, Doug. We became a writer-photographer team.

We went on long expeditions on our own, taking a double kayak with us, a folding double kayak. We explored wild parts of the world. We kayaked down the River Ganges. We spent months in the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific. We paddle the length of Lake Malawi. When Vietnam opened up to tourism in the early, in the mid-nineties, we explored its whole coastline by local boats and on old bikes that we bought there.

We Founded an adventure travel company to feed our addiction to travel. My husband's a veterinarian and we ended up doing a lot of work with elephants on elephant welfare and elephant conservation, all of it, Asia and Africa. So yeah, we've been very free and light on our feet and able to move and make decisions quickly and change direction when a new opportunity comes up.

So I think if we'd had children, that would have been, we wouldn't have been able to do a fraction of those things.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So hold that thought, Maria, because I want to come back to it and maybe gently nudge you to tell me more, to convince me that you couldn't have done those things if you had children.

COFFEY: (LAUGHS) Okay I can do that.

CHAKRABARTI: But again, as I said, so many people called in. Because I think we, it's not often heard in American society, let alone the media, about the affirmative decision that people make when they choose not to have children. So the flood of people who wanted to talk about it was quite impressive.

So here's a few more. This is Linda Besse from Mead, Washington. And here's what she said.

LINDA: While dating, my husband and I discussed that neither of us were interested in having kids. We married in 1984. Our parents were okay with our decision. It was our peers that were more disapproving, and I would say that being months shy of our 40th wedding anniversary, hardly a week goes by that we are not grateful for our decision.

We adore our nieces and nephews and enjoy traveling with them. But being childless has kept us able to travel, take more chances with work, and I've traveled to over 45 countries and was able to turn a very favorite hobby into a profession.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Linda Besse. Very interesting to hear her say that not having children has allowed her to take more chances with work.

Oh, I want to come back to that too. Here's Allison Jones from Portland, Oregon. And she says she loves her life without children and just with her partner. Travel comes up so often, Maria, in these comments. She also says she gets to eat out more, buy nicer furniture. I can relate to that, Allison. I have two offsprings myself, and we're still surviving with our IKEA sofa. (LAUGHS)

But Allison also said this.

ALLISON: I guess the one downfall of it would be that a lot of folks my age, now that I'm in my 40s, have kids, so it does limit the friend pool a bit in terms of activities, like mutually shared activities. But I don't know if I would be happy going to playdates of small children.

I guess it's one cost that I'm okay with, is not a few friends or extended network of friends, have the life that I want to live.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, what comes up often is people saying, or they told us, here's the life that I've lived. And then I look at my friends and I can see some of the positives of being a parent, but I see a lot of what they consider to be drawbacks.

Did you have that same experience with your circle of friends and acquaintances?

COFFEY: Not so much, but I think we were traveling so much. We, our pattern was we have a base in Canada, and we would be traveling the world on our expeditions or running trips once we had our travel company.

And we would parachute back into our base and have great big parties and invite all our friends. They'd come over for several days and they'd bring their kids. The kids were small then. And I think, so, that kind of all just melded in, I think if we'd, I think if we'd had a more settled life, as the listener said, and it maybe would have felt a little bit more difficult to maintain friendships.

But as it was, we were just these people that kind of, as I said, parachuted in and had big parties and get togethers. But of course, I wasn't around for most of those kids growing up as well.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Okay. What I'd love to understand more deeply, when we come to the next segment, we're going to hear your story about how you came to this decision.

But before we do that, you hinted that part of the reason why you wrote this book is because you wanted to look back and do an honest assessment of the decisions that you'd made. What triggered you to want to look back in that way?

COFFEY: I actually started to write a book about getting old, getting older.

I'm 71 now. And I started writing this a few years ago when I was 68. 68, 69. And I think not having children allows you to forget, in my case, forget that you're getting older, because you don't have children to mark the passage of time. And it hit me really hard when I was about 66 that people were starting to see me as elderly.

I decided to start writing about that and look back into my past to see if I could find lessons when I'd faced other difficult situations, how would I get through those? How would I navigate, how would I navigate difficult terrain in the past? And how would I navigate this emotional terrain heading into old age?

And I found, as I started writing, that I was constantly writing about my decision to be child-free. And that's what the book became. Looking back, I've always written, I've always written to make sense of my life, I think. Make sense of different parts of my life. And this was very interesting because I hadn't really thought about this so deeply. About why I decided not to have children, how it impacted me, my relationship with my mother.

I think that was really what caused me to really delve deep into this subject.

CHAKRABARTI: It's so interesting because from what I hear you saying, it sounds like even though you hadn't thought about it, there's something about that decision that since you kept coming back to him, you felt must have defined you, or continues to define you.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, these are a couple of more listeners who wanted to share their stories about the same decisions they've made.

Interesting, we heard from mostly women. Let me just put that out there. And we can talk about why in a moment, but Gavin Larsen from Asheville, North Carolina. Sorry, no, not Gavin. Yes, Gavin Larsen, though, we're going to play two. Stephen's the guy, we'll hear from him in a second. But Gavin Larsen is in Asheville, North Carolina, and is 49, she's single, and doesn't have any children.

GAVIN LARSEN: In my family, I have become defined as the single, childless person. And I'm fine with that. I can't say there haven't been times when I felt slightly embarrassed about it, but only momentarily. And only because I realized then that it was other people making me feel that way. I wasn't embarrassed about myself.

I was embarrassed for them. I was embarrassed for them to feel that something was amiss in seeing a woman independent and successful and happy without being a mother.

CHAKRABARTI: And here's Stephen Campbell, and I apologize for confusing the names earlier, I got my pieces of paper mixed up, but Stephen Campbell lives in Summerville, South Carolina, and he said he never wanted to have children, and his wife was okay with that.

STEPHEN CAMPBELL: She was an obstetrician. And she loved delivering babies. And we talked about it off and on over the years. And I continued to not want children, and she was okay with that choice. Now that she's gone, I do wonder if we had children, if that would give me one more thing to remember her with. But I can say I'm happy with the choice that I made.

I honestly do not believe that I would have been a good father.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, obviously people have shared with us many reasons medical, economic, just not wanting the responsibility for their decisions not to have children, but yours are very specific to events that took place in your life in your twenties.

Can you share what those events are?

COFFEY: There were two defining events in my twenties, and the first was when I was 21 and I was caught in a rip current in Morocco when I was traveling there. I was taken out. I wasn't a good swimmer at the time. I didn't know how to deal with a rip current and I panicked and almost drowned.

I lost consciousness. I was dragged ashore by somebody luckily and resuscitated on the beach. And I woke up surprised, because I had thought when I was out there in the waves that I was dying. So that experience at a very young age gave me a real insight into the fragility of life and it made me determined to follow my dreams.

And then, nine years later, I lost the man that I loved. He was a, excuse me, he was a mountaineer and he died on Everest. Excuse me. He died on Everest. We'd been together for about three years. I was very much in love with him, and he was lost without trace. And that blew my life apart at the age of 30 and it gave me an intense fear of loss.

I thought if it's so terrible to lose a partner, what would it be like to lose a child? And I think that really for me was the big, one of the big reasons why I felt I just, as well as wanting to pursue my dreams and being determined to do that, I also felt that if I had a child, I would become very anxious, always worried about the child's safety.

I'd become a very needy mother. And also, because I wanted to go traveling and do really adventurous things. And I'd met this man who shared my dreams. I felt I just couldn't merge the two, even though my husband felt that we could.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I want to ask you about that just in a second. But, in listening to you, Maria, first of all, again, I'm obviously coming to this conversation as a parent. But I can deeply relate to the fear that you said about, "What, how much would it blast apart my life if I lost a child?" That's a very rational fear, right? Like when I even dare to contemplate it, I simply cannot, my mind cannot move forward from that moment. And that's just even thinking about the possibility, let alone it happening.

So I strongly relate to that. But what's fascinating to me is that I hear, and I read in your story, this really contradictory undercurrent of self-doubt that you had, because you said you were worried about being an anxious mother. And yet, you are, you've proven by the life that you've lived in the decades since, that you're actually a very bold and brave person who welcomes uncertainty and even thrives in it.

Did you ever wonder about why your self assessment about your ability to raise a child was so different than, at least, how I see how you've actually lived your life.

COFFEY: I think, I also, and I guess here's the part people would say is selfish. I wanted; I didn't feel that I could do the things that I really wanted to do.

If I had a child, I felt that if I became a mother, I'd have to have, I'd have to have a much more settled, secure life. At the time when, my husband and I were starting to build our life together, we'd moved to a little island off the west coast of Canada. We'd built ourselves a little house.

We commuted to the nearest town by kayak. Even our day-to-day life was exciting and adventurous. And I was thinking if we had a child, wouldn't we need to move to town, have a bigger house, be near, settle somewhere near to a school. And I just didn't want that path.

That's not how I wanted my life to pan out. And I didn't feel, I knew that I wasn't the kind of woman that could sling a baby on her back and head into the wilds. I just knew that just flooded me with anxiety.

CHAKRABARTI: Interesting. Because a lot of the places that you've traveled to around the world, that is exactly what we see, right?

Because there are so many cultures that due to cultural norms and the fact of privation, after women have babies, they do exactly that, right? They sling the child onto their back or carrier in the front, and they go right back out to doing what they were doing before. I wonder how that, when you visited those places, like how did they both react to you, and you reacted to them?

COFFEY: Everywhere we went, let's say for example in India, going down the river Ganges or Lake Malawi in the Solomon Islands, the first question was always, "Where are your children?" And I'm a very truthful person. I just couldn't lie about it. I would say, "I don't have any children." And I would, it was always greeted with horror and pity.

These were societies where the child-free choice was and probably still is unfathomable. And so I could never bring myself to admit that I'd chosen not to have children. And people just felt very sorry for me. They presumed that I was barren. In the Solomon Islands they said, "Why don't your relatives give you one of their children?"

In India, I was always taken off to the temple and people did pujas, praying to various goddesses that I'd be given a child. I think the hardest reaction for me to deal with was in Africa. We spent quite a long time kayaking the length of Lake Malawi and it was in the early '90s. There was beginning of a drought, AIDS was starting to hit, and malaria was rife.

Every village we stopped at there were funerals, often for children who died of malaria. And I was invited one day by a woman to go to that, to a house where a child had died the night before. And there was some mourning going on and she invited me to come and join in with that. And we were sitting on the step of the house, little house and inside was the mother who'd already lost two other children to malaria.

And this was her third and he was going to be buried that day under a big baobab tree. And I could hear her keening inside. And the woman sitting next to me, I was sitting there thinking, "How terrible, these women can't stop having babies. They can't stop, their babies dying.

They're trapped by poverty." And the woman who'd invited me leaned over to me and said, "How many children do you have?" And I said, "I don't have any." And her face just clouded. And she said, "Oh, I'm so sorry for you." And it was a really, it was a really profound moment because, to be pitied like that. And it made me really reflect a lot.

Am I doing the right thing? Why am I going around the world in a double kayak? Should I be home making my mother happy by having children? So I did go, that was the period, I think, of traveling through those other cultures where children are so important that I started to really reflect and wonder if I was making the right decision.

CHAKRABARTI: Did that woman tell you why she looked upon you with pity?

COFFEY: She didn't, but I knew. It's because in cultures like that, children are an insurance, they're everything. They're the most important thing in life. They're insurance for the future, people have so little, but they have their children and they put everything into their children.

All they want to do is give their children a good education, which of course, my mother did. Came from a very difficult background and she felt the same, but I think in such societies that the concept of not being able to have children is terrible.

Which of course is, as the societies move forward, it must be very hard for women there now making the decision to be child-free, even higher up in sort of economic levels.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I'm thinking you mentioned your mother, and I know you have a story to tell about her, but you're also writing this book as an adult child of a parent, right?

And it seems to me that one thing that parents don't often talk about when we're having public, when there are public discussions about the decisions whether or not to have children, and by the way, I should say in any way, shape, or form, this doesn't have to just be biological, right?

COFFEY: Yes.

CHAKRABARTI: Many people come into parenthood in different ways, but it's not often spoken about how, and this is just my view, Maria, that after my children were born, I experienced and continue to experience a kind of love that I have never experienced before with any other human being. It's complex love.

And it totally defines me, in terms of its complexity. As just as people who do not have children, that's a choice that defines them. And I say that judgment free because people have the right to live their individual lives, but this decision defines me. I will always forever be the parent of these children, even as they grow into fierce independents and don't want anything to do with me.

And the reason why I point that out is because that complex bond remained between you and your mother, but in the book, you write about how it emerged in a way that filled you with guilt, which is really heartbreaking to hear. Can you tell me about that?

COFFEY: Sorry, you mean the guilt, my guilt towards my mother for not having children?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. That's one of the things. And then I'd love to hear more about your relationship with her more broadly.

COFFEY: Just to circle back there, there is, I do say, write this in the book, that I knew when I made my decision not to have children that giving birth was probably one of the most profound experiences anyone could have.

And I knew that, and I knew that I was choosing not to do that, and it was, because I'm always, like you said, I'm a person who wants big experiences, and challenging experiences, and I knew that I was passing on that to have other kinds of experiences, and also the kind of love that parents describe for the children.

I knew that I would never experience that. It's, I very much acknowledge, as a child-free person that there are things that you give up and things that you gain. But the question about my mother. My mother was Irish Catholic who'd moved to Britain before World War II and met my father, who was also Irish there.

And they both come from very difficult backgrounds, and all they wanted for their children, especially after living through the war, was security, peace and everything that they'd never had in their lives, good education, good jobs. And I grew up with my mother telling me her dreams of me having a big white wedding, getting married, having a teaching career and settling down close to her. So that my children could run in and out of her house, and she could babysit them for me while I went to work.

So this was her dream. I was the third child and the only daughter and the longed-for daughter. And she'd also said that from the moment I was born, she looked forward to the time when I would have a child. I knew with my decision not to have children that I was breaking my mum's heart. And it was again, and she was a woman who, she was a real matriarch.

She was a wonderful woman, very powerful, but she wielded guilt like a weapon. (LAUGHS) And she made me feel very guilty about this at times. And I did all the things to hurt her, I didn't have children. I moved across the world, embarked on these very worrying adventures that worried her terribly.

And, but, I think it was only when I was older, when she was dying, actually, and I was, by that time, in my 50s, that I really began to understand her, we'd reached a place of peace.

And by then, we'd had quite a fractious relationship and then the older I got, the more I came to understand her and maybe that would have happened earlier if I'd had a child, but it was when she was dying that it occurred to me that the one thing that would have really made her happy was for me to have a child.

I think that I realized that would have been the completion of a circle of life for her. And I never, she asked me just the week before she died, if I'd ever regretted not having children. And of course, I said, "No, I'm happy with my life."

And she was really relieved. She said, "I've always worried about that." But what I didn't say to her, because it occurred to me right at that moment, I did regret not being able to give her that completion that I know she would have really loved, to have had a grandchild. And so I don't regret it at all for myself, but I realize, oh, it's really sad that I wasn't able to give her that.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, Maria I so profoundly relate, it's that like same child-like innocent desire, profound desire to please your parents, no matter how old you are. We never outgrow that.

COFFEY: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: But, oh gosh, I have so many stories of my own about that actual parent child relationship.

I will save you and listeners from that. But of course, on the other, on the flip side, having a child in order to satisfy someone else's wishes is the worst reason, right? To have a child. But it sounds like that conversation, though, between you and her in her final days, meant a lot to you.

COFFEY: It did. It did. And to her as well, I think. Because she said, "I'd always worried about that." And she closed her eyes and went to sleep.

CHAKRABARTI: And at least she went to sleep worry free, which is, it's a great gift that you gave her in that moment.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, there's lots more listeners for us to get to. So let's first start with Ellen, who says that many people may choose not to have children for reasons of the kind of life they want to live, but for her, that was not the case.

ELLEN: Often, it's not a choice, such as those who are physically unable to have children.

And don't choose to engage in the complicated and expensive process of adopting, or when your choices are limited, such as when finances or housing are unstable, or you have ongoing mental or physical health issues. Many others, like myself, just didn't find a suitable partner and didn't want to raise a child alone.

Also, like myself, there's those of us who grew up with poor parenting and have had to spend a lot of our lives learning to parent ourselves.

CHAKRABARTI: Very important point, Ellen. Thank you for making that. This is Karen Einstein from Lexington, Massachusetts, and she's one of the several people who called in to tell us how children can come into your life in different ways.

Karen was a high school English teacher for decades.

KAREN: I never had to deal with what parents have to deal with. I never had to deal with kids coming home drunk, or I never had to deal with finding a vape in my kid's bedroom. I never had to deal with worrying about knowing who my child really was, and watching them get sucked into destructive relationships.

So I think being a teacher is a lot easier.

CHAKRABARTI: Karen, I would say I think teaching, being a parent, can be sometimes a lot easier because we don't have to deal with 15, 20, 25, or 30 kids at one time, so my hat's off to you as a teacher. Here's another one. This is another teacher, Bruce Ratcliffe. He's been a high school teacher for 48 years in Fresno, California.

BRUCE: After having taught this long, I think I've gained some skills at helping kids grow and build a life worth living. But it's tremendously satisfying. And if I had kids, or other commitments, like a wife, then I would not be able to give myself 100%, which means 7 days a week working in my classroom.

Which turns out to be as satisfying as I can imagine any life would be.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, you write in the book that children did come into your life in different ways. Including one child who calls you mom.

COFFEY: Yes, that's Agnes, who is a Samburu woman. We met her, we were doing work in Kenya.

We were doing work with elephant conservation, and we were leading treks, fundraising treks, raising funds for work against elephant poaching. And this trek led us into a village. We'd already been doing some work with the women in the village there to help them set up a little community.

They were actually making elephant paper from elephant dung and beading it. And so we raised some funds to build a house for them to work in. So we'd taken a group into this village on one of our treks and the schoolteacher who we knew there took us to one side and said that his star pupil had now left school and should be on her way to university.

But her father and the elders of the village had refused to give her the support she needed because she had taken a stance against undergoing female genital mutilation, female circumcision since the time that she was 12 and she was now 19. And he said, "Is there any way that you could help her?" So we agreed to meet her.

We didn't tell her why, but we asked her to share her story and she was a very impressive young woman. And along with our group, it was a group of 10 people and us, we pledged that we would raise the funds between us to send her to university which is what we did. This is with the support of her mother.

And so Agnes months later started at Nairobi University and scroll on some years, she's now a barrister.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

COFFEY: She has two children of her own and Doug and I took over her support at one point. And so I'd visited, I visited her whenever I was in Kenya, and we were in contact a lot, usually by WhatsApp and I was supposed to go to Kenya and do one of the treks with her. And it was going to be a very special trek. It was going to be her and her first child, who was then seven years old. And we're going to be walking into her village together and celebrating with her mother and the women of the village and her father, actually, they're now reconciled.

But of course, COVID got in the way. And we weren't able to go. And Christmas day 2020, she contacted me by WhatsApp, we were having a long WhatsApp conversation, and she said there was something that she had hoped to say to me or ask me when we were on our trek, and she wanted to ask me now.

I said, "What's that?" And she said, "I want your permission to call you mother." Which is a huge honor in Samburu society. And of course, I said, "Yes." So now I get texts every other day from Agnes calling me mama. And I know her real mother, I know her biological mother, but it's lovely to have her in my life.

And I've really enjoyed following her progress as she's become a lawyer and then a barrister and then her children. And she's not, obviously she's not close to me physically, but it's lovely to have somebody in my life like that who thinks of me all the time, and thinks of me as another mother in her life.

CHAKRABARTI: So this is an example in the way that these decisions and the implications of them are never static, right? As we grow from young adulthood into middle adulthood and then elder status, life changes. Decisions can change, or at least their impacts can. Take me back. You had mentioned earlier that in the beginning of your relationship with Doug, right?

Was there a difference in the desires between the two of you regarding whether or not to have children?

COFFEY: Oh, there's a huge difference. He's five years younger than me and we met when I guess, he was 29 when we met, and I was 34. And he told me he wanted an adventurous life as well, but he said his plan had always been to have a lot of adventures and then to have a big family, starting when he was 40, and maybe have five kids.

Of course, the math didn't work out, as I said before, at the time. But it was right in the early days of our relationship. But as it developed, and as we fell in love, and decided to marry and build this life together, he still expressed the idea that maybe we should have a child.

But his feeling was that we could involve this child in our adventures. And we were planning some pretty radical things. And I, as I said before, I just had, I was flooded with anxiety at the idea of taking a child into the wilds. And we had one actually epic argument. We'd been kayaking in in the sea of Cortez, Baja, California, and we'd been pinned down by for days on end.

We were running out of food and water. We were stuck on this tiny islet. We were blasted by a sandstorm, and we were about to miss our flight if we didn't get over to the mainland. And we eventually made a break for it and we're kayaking, across the Sea of Cortez fighting, getting there as fast as we could before the wind came up again.

And from behind me, waves sloshing over our decks and behind me, Doug suddenly said, "I've been thinking we could definitely have a kid along on a trip like this." And we actually had a big argument about it during that hour or so of really battling against the wind, because at that point he really felt that was possible.

And in my mind, it was completely impossible. I could not imagine having a child in those circumstances or bringing a child along in those circumstances. So it took, he did eventually come around to my way of thinking. We went off for a year, traveling the world with a folding kayak in some very wild places.

And I think during that year he started to realize that it would be very difficult to meld, to join these two pathways together of child and big adventures.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm only grinning here because I frequently drag my offsprings into the woods, but it's never a situation in which, "Oh, let's take a child on this trip where it's entirely possible that we might die." (LAUGHS)

Like it's just a different story there. I completely hear you.

COFFEY: I think what also made a difference for him is when he met up with friends of ours who had shared his idea that you could, that children wouldn't change your life in any way. And that you could have big adventures even with children, and these were friends that then went on to have children and all their plans evaporated.

They were no longer going to spend months hiking across the Himalayas with their children. Yeah, that was out of the window until they were older.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So there's something about the rigidity with which everybody thinks the impact of having or not having a child will be, and I'm going to circle back around to that.

But in terms of continuing this exploration of how one's view might change we've got two more listeners here who shared some really notable thoughts. This is Kathryn Kozak. She's lived what she says is a very rich life without children. She just turned 37. Thank you, Kathryn. But says something has changed.

KATHRYN: A few months ago, my younger sister shared that she's pregnant. It's the first baby in my family and the news absolutely overjoyed me. It also stirred up a longing for motherhood that I can only describe as primal. Whereas before my inklings toward having a child were more intellectual, I now experience it in my body.

CHAKRABARTI: Kathryn also said, though, that she still feels secure about her decision not to have children, but is thinking about one day welcoming them into her life in another way, perhaps through becoming foster parents. Now, this is Laurie Lamountain of Denmark, Maine, and she doesn't have any children, along with her husband.

LAURIE: My 92-year-old mother, I'm her only daughter. I do a lot of her care, and she will say to me often, "What would I do without my daughter?" And I have to say, I don't always know how to respond to her.

CHAKRABARTI: Maria, given that you began writing this book in your late 60s, and now you're into your early 70s, does that thought ever cross your mind?

COFFEY: Oh, yes, it does. It's something I think about more and more. And I don't have an answer. I know the thing is, I have friends, obviously, who have children and grandchildren and they're close to them. And I think that's lovely. The comfort that might give them, but I also have friends with children.

And the children are on the other side of the world, or they've died sadly, or they've become very ill. I don't think there's any guarantee, having a child doesn't guarantee that child will be there with you at the end of your life. So sometimes I feel, I do have, I don't talk about regret, but I talk about curiosity.

Sometimes I think, "I wonder what it would be like if I had a child. Would I feel more secure and comfortable now heading into this territory of old age?" And I don't know. But what I do know is that I've had a really fabulous life. I'm still having a fabulous life. And I look back and I think, "Wow, it's amazing what we've done."

And it's been made possible by not having children. So even if I hit some hard times ahead, it'll have been worth it.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. How I felt coming away from reading your book is twofold. One is that it was quite inspiring to read your bravely honest look back on your life.

And that you come through it, being truthful about the difficult times, vis-a-vis your mother, that came from the decision not to have children, but also all the wonderful times. And I don't think we have enough of that sort of in the public discourse. But I also felt a little bit of sorrow, not for you, but for the circumstances as a society that we've set up for people, and particularly for women, that either there's this judgment of, "Okay I don't want to have children because doing so would make me give up everything that I value in my life." That's an absolutist point of view, which we heard a lot from listeners.

But then the flip side to that is, "Why aren't you having children?" Because children give you innumerable joys and enrichment and the kind of love and life that you couldn't even have imagined before they were around. But that, too, is equally rigid and harsh. And it seems very unfair to all of us to not be able to be more fluid in how we see the decisions that people make.

COFFEY: Exactly.

CHAKRABARTI: And I just wonder if part of your reason to write this was to maybe encourage more of that fluidity.

COFFEY: I just wanted to give an example of how, obviously, I don't think everybody should go off and do the madcap adventures that we've done.

Because they haven't got children. I think it's perfectly okay to decide not to have children and have a much simpler life. It's your decision. It's your path and you'll know if it's the right one.