Unveiling a Mother's Point of View: Embracing a Childfree Child with Rosalba Fontanez

How healing her own generational trauma helped one mother respect her children's choices by honoring their individual life paths

This series is for the parents and family of childfree people.

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Family is the people we hope support us. But going by what I’ve seen in the online spaces expressly for childfree people, familial support is sometimes hard to come by—if not completely withdrawn—when you don’t follow the “life script.”

In this case, that script includes giving your parents grandbabies.

As you’ll be able to tell from the following questions sourced from online groups on Facebook and Reddit, childfree adults are sometimes punished by their families for their choices.

Being shut out of family support can lead to not only loneliness but shunning has a uniquely damaging effect on our mental health.

So that’s why I invited my mom Rosalba Fontanez to have this conversation. Celebrating Non-Mom May with your own mother might seem contradictory, yes. But she’s here for a reason.

Unbelievably, even to me, she and I’d never talked about this. I don’t actually remember declaring that I wasn’t going to have kids. That would be like announcing that I was right handed or have curly hair. Like we used to say in the 80s: no duh.

Because it just was always understood. But seeing what people in these online forums have had, or are actively having, to go through seems like the opposite experience. Enter my mom, a Mexican immigrant who’s lived in the US since she was 17, over 45 years.

Here’s Part 1 of our very candid, sometimes heartbreaking, conversation.

Paulette: So from 1976 to now, you've, you've lived a lot of different lives, you've had a lot of different careers. And I remember my mom, who was very strict as a teenager. she's not the same person anymore.

Rosalba: I grew up.

Paulette: You know what Mom, I credit you with recognizing that you've made mistakes. You're human. And I don't know how many adult children have the conversation with their parents and, and their parents are like, “I didn't get it right necessarily.”

Rosalba: Right. Yes. We're, we're human and we're learning as we're going. You know, we look back at our, whatever we didn't do right, and we always have a chance to redo it or do it better next time around.

Paulette: That's what your work centers around, right? Dealing with generational trauma and no longer repeating patterns that have been passed down in the womb. Can you tell us about that?

Rosalba: Exactly. Well, yes, my work as a hypnotherapist/shamanic practitioner/reiki teacher, it's been about healing the past so that people can have a better life. All that embraces generational healing. We carry a lot of the past wounds from our ancestors. When the person is ready, I help them heal [those wounds] with all the tools and and practices that I have at my disposal. I help them heal from their past so that they can have a better life. And therefore offer a better life to those around them.

Paulette: So this is where there's an interesting intersection because what you're helping people do will also carry forward, correct? To future generations.

Rosalba: Absolutely, that's the whole idea.

Paulette: So I have never asked you this question. We have never had this conversation. What is it like to have a child who does not themselves want to have children?

Rosalba: That's perfectly okay with me. What is it like from a mother's point of view? Well, I'll tell you, let me retrace back.

One of the questions was what were your expectations as a mother about becoming a grandmother?

I was reflecting on that and going back and really examining, my motherhood years, I never really expected to become a grandmother. I never had that expectation. I never saw my children having children.

Now, I wanted my children to have a fulfilling life. To enjoy life to its max and explore their…everything! I didn't know how to put it in words when I was younger, but this is what it was about.

The fact that later on in life, two of the boys made me a grandma, that is wonderful and I love the grandkids. But I also—I am very, very serious and with much intent from a place of love to respect—revere and honor those who are not here to have children.

Paulette: How much of your work as a hypnotherapist and shamanic practitioner do you think has informed your view of that? Or was this something that you've had from the beginning?

Rosalba: I probably had it from the beginning. But it became very clear after I went through my own inner healing to discover who I was and why was I here on planet Earth. And what was my service to humanity?

After all of that was when I became aware that, that's right: not everybody is here to bear children. And we have to respect and honor those people who aren't. You have a reproductive system, in that center of creation in your body, but it doesn't necessarily mean that it's to be used to create other lives.

But to have creativity, to expand your creations. You become a maker and are fulfilling a lot of aspects of your life from exploring your creativity.

Paulette: One of the women I interviewed this season, Talia, also makes the reference, that she does other types of mothering. It wasn't what was born of her womb. She guides and mentors and mothers a community that she created. And it's like motherhood to the next degree.

I feel like there's also a lot of division in groups of mothers where one woman is more of a mother if she gave birth naturally versus C-section. And all of these other weird boundaries and bullshit.

I hope you never subscribed to that!

Rosalba: Oh, oh, oh!! But I was the subject of that was when you were a toddler. I had an acquaintance whose baby girl was just a few months younger than you. She referred to something very similar. "I gave birth naturally. I'm better woman, or a better mother," or something to that effect.*

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I cut the conversation off at this point because this comment alone illustrates the point. This one-upmanship and fight for superiority parents will lob at each other, they’ll just as easily weaponize against us the moment the word “childfree” falls out of our mouths.

Why? Because we’ve all been culturally brainwashed that this is the “proper” way to be a human: breeding the next generation of more humans.

Anything outside that narrative is considered by popular culture to be deviant, possibly immoral, and potentially harmful.

If you don’t believe this, then try to name 10 Disney villains with kids in their original stories. Most of them are indeed childfree.

And those are the stories we feed to children. The indoctrination begins very, very early.

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Stay tuned for the rest of this conversation coming next week. Or listen to it in its entirety on your favorite podcast app, or

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*FYI, my mom had both her kids via C-section 🤷🏻‍♀️