Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Phonomic Day's podcast. I'm your host, Jennifer Pallick. And today, I'm joined by a fellow Austin native. Well, I shouldn't say native, but fellow austenite Veronica.

Yes, hi. Hi, Jenna. Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited to have this chat with you.

I'm super excited to. We have been DMing back and forth for the past couple of months, and we finally got time on the calendar that a lot of us.

So before today's episode, as you can obviously read in the title description, we are talking about having a child free life and kind of like going a less traditional route of not wanting to have children and not having that pressure from society to be forced to have a family.

So I did a quick Google search and it says 63% of women actually don't want they don't have any desire to have children.

So as many of my listeners are, you know, you're in college right now or you're in your 30s and I have some older listeners too. I think a lot of us are starting to feel that pressure of like getting engaged, settling down, having a family. And today I wanted to talk to Veronica and share her story.

And hopefully resonate with some of you out there who don't really feel like that is your path.

Yeah, absolutely. I'm excited to to definitely share on how I landed in this way.

It was definitely and a long process for me at least.

Some people tend to from the time they're super young, they know they don't have kids. They don't they know that they don't want to have kids. And that's that old. The book is close on that.

Some people don't have that much clarity on it. And then there's other women who have known from just as young of an age that they have to be moms, right.

So there's two ends of the spectrum. And then the middle is a lot, a lot of women who aren't really sure who don't really know what they truly want for themselves.

And maybe confused because they've always been told this is what you have to do. And maybe they haven't been presented with the choice of you don't need to do this unless you want to.

So it gets really complicated, especially when you reach your late 20s early 30s when the questions and the pressure really start.

And when did you feel like that started for you?

It started to me in my late 20s. I got married in my late 20s. And as soon as you get married, people want to know when the baby's coming like as soon as like I've had so many people DM me and they're like, during my wedding, as I'm going around talking to people, they want to know when the baby's coming. So it really gets you immediately.

And so that's when it all really starts and people actually really want to know when when is the day when you're starting. They're so excited for you.

So it feels like, okay, you checked off this life box of marriage. And now you have to check off this box of becoming a parent.

And it doesn't give you a lot of time to process the information, like to process about what you really want to do. I grew up Catholic. And it was just having kids is just something that you do, right? Like you just raise your family with the religious belief that you're there to procreate and to grow your family.

So I wasn't really fully aware that there was a choice. I really wasn't. I knew that I wasn't. I didn't have a true desire to have children, but I also had my moments where I would see a mom and a baby or a mom and a kid. And I would feel very strange about it. Like, oh, maybe I do want that.

And then people start to tell you you're going to miss out who's going to take care of you when you're older. This is the best. This is the only time type of love that you'll that will be real to you. You're not going to be fulfilled unless you do this thing. So then your mind starts just going a little bit nuts.

Because even though you're not a hundred percent being pulled towards motherhood, all this outside commentary is starts to make you doubt your choice and starts to make you. Am I really making the best decision for myself.

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