“It’s Not The Path For Everyone”: Drew Afualo Opened Up About Her Decision Not To Have Kids
If you haven’t read Drew Afualo’s book, Loud: Accept Nothing Less Than the Life You Deserve, what are you waiting for? She dives into feminist philosophy, Samoan culture, genuinely inspiring motivation, and of course, stories from her own life.
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In one chapter, Drew shares an emotional account of a pregnancy scare that helped her realize she doesn’t want kids. As a fellow Samoan woman who’s also childfree while understanding the importance of family in our culture, I appreciated her open discussion of all this during a recent interview for BuzzFeed’s Voices of the Pacific series.
The 29-year-old told BuzzFeed, “That chapter was one of the hardest to write because it’s obviously a very personal and intimate decision. But at the same time, with that experience in particular, it was really important to incorporate it into my book. I did struggle a little bit with being that vulnerable. Thankfully, I was gently encouraged by my team to include it because it is so important to see representation in many different ways, including women who live lives outside of what is expected. Patriarchal expectation put on us through cultural expectation is also extremely confusing and can be very suffocating in a lot of ways.”
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Drew’s advice to people who can have children and are on the fence is this: “If it’s not a yes, it’s a no, and that’s OK.”
“Will your answer change? It’s really specific to the person, but in my experience, I know what I want and what I don’t. I don’t know if that’s shocking to hear from me,” she said with her signature laugh. “I’m very confident in my decision-making. Any sort of hesitation that I had, I realized after the fact, was purely patriarchal enforcement. It was not because that’s what I wanted; it was because I felt like that was expected of me as someone with a uterus. But also, Samoan culture, it’s very family-oriented. Kids are a huge part of life. So, I really had to come to terms with that.”
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Drew encouraged people who are struggling with this decision to “really unpack it.” She continued, “Sit with it and come to terms with it, and understand that bringing life into the world is not the only way to find happiness. It’s not the only way to find fulfillment, and it’s not the path for everyone, and that’s OK. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.”
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“And I really do feel like that was the last piece of my internalized misogyny that I had to rip out of myself, because even admitting it out loud, I still felt a lot of shame, which I shouldn’t. Shame for what? For whom? There’s no shame to be had; that is purely just misogynistic pressure being put on my shoulders as someone with a uterus, which is crazy to think about,” she concluded.
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