There is a Costco about a mile from my new apartment in Brooklyn, so I paid $45 for membership privileges there when I moved in, anticipating making it back in all the savings I would reap on their low-priced goods. I never seem to have time to shop there, though, so today, when I was nearby and dropped in for the first time, a few things hit me: I am unlikely to recoup my $45 there; the reason is that I am not a Costco person; furthermore, leaving aside the $45, which I now regret, I have no desire to be a Costco person.

That, of course, makes me evil in the eyes of the “we know what’s best for you” right wing.

Almost two years ago, the New York Times Magazine published a profile of a woman who made a decision the right wing did not approve of, and it’s still giving them fits. Amy Richards recounted her thinking after discovering, totally unexpectedly, that she was not only pregnant but carrying triplets. She and her boyfriend had already talked about pregnancy and agreed they would raise any child they conceived, even though they weren’t planning any – in other words, they were “pro-life” poster children, at first glance. But triplets was more than either of them had counted on. Richards noted that the long-term bed rest her doctor recommended would essentially destroy her career for that year at least, as well as the fact that raising triplets would completely change her plans for her life and family. Putting it in a somewhat flippant nutshell, she said: “[N]ow I’m going to have to move to Staten Island. I’ll never leave my house because I’ll have to care for these children. I’ll have to start shopping only at Costco and buying big jars of mayonnaise.” Richards opted for a selective reduction – abortion of two of the fetuses to leave the other to gestate alone. She had determined the tradeoffs she was willing to make, and the balance she was willing strike between her desires for her own life and her plans for a family. She made the decision to carry one – but just one – unplanned fetus to full term and raise that child, but acted to avoid the complete disruption of all her other plans for her life. That wasn’t good enough, of course. It was the “mayonnaise” line as much as anything that drove the right wingers off a cliff – how careless!, how shallow! They never mentioned giving up her career, her income, or her mobility, the increased health strains, or the fact that she simply did not want or intend to spend her life caring for three identically-aged children. But the mayonnaise! – the idea that unwanted children are objectionable because they make it impossible to live out your own plan for your life – that was too much. Her blatant admission that she had plans for her life, which didn’t include triplets, and that she believed she had the right to act on her own desires for her own life, was proof of depravity. They’re still hyperventilating about it, two years later.

But enough about her . . . let’s talk about me. There I am, wandering Costco in a daze. It’s just . . . big. Space is at a huge premium everywhere in New York (except Staten Island), so you get used to seeing tiny, cramped grocery stores. A New York grocery store shopping cart is smaller than the standard models used elsewhere; in fact, in many New York grocery stores, the “cart” is just a wheeled frame that holds one of those rectangular plastic arm-baskets you use if you only want a few items. Not at Costco. There are no arm-baskets, for one thing; it’s not a place you go to if you want “just a few items”. And the carts are about twice the size of full-size carts anywhere else – yet you still see many people dragging two of them around the endless aisles, mounded with huge cans and boxes like they’re outfitting a medium-sized logging camp.

That brings us to the goods themselves. Costco is a weird amalgam of odd bits of every retail category you can think of: 50″ plasma TVs next to leaf blowers next to potting soil next to monster-sized boxes of fruit bars. Pick up some truck tires on your way out – just past the display of potted orchids. Each category of good has just one or a few items in it, seemingly chosen at random. On the high-ticket stuff, you have to know exactly what you’re looking for – they have good prices on what they’ve got, but it’s random chance whether what they’ve got suits your needs, and if it doesn’t, they probably don’t have an alternative. It’s in the bulk goods that they really come into their own, though – and for Costco, “bulk goods” basically means any item a normal person could even conceivably purchase more than one of. Nobody needs two 50″ TVs, that’s true – but who doesn’t need 24 boxes of Pop Tarts? If you need any Pop Tarts at all, obviously you need a case of them – and that’s the smallest lot size you can buy at Costco. Ditto for most other edibles, and a lot of other things as well.

As this sank into my understanding, I gradually realized why I was never going to get my $45 back. There’s simply nothing there I can buy. I don’t want, and can’t use, as much of anything as they’re selling there. Entire tenderloins at $40 each; round roasts the size of my head; 4-pound bags of pretzels; 50-pound bags of rice; 24 rolls of toilet paper shrink-wrapped to a cardboard pallet; yes, and the big jars of mayonnaise, a gallon of it at once – these are not single-bachelor-one-bedroom quantities. What would I do with a beautiful, just-baked on-site, still-warm, caramel-apple pie that weighs fully 5 pounds – or a flat of 15 fresh butter croissants, the smallest unit size offered? (Actually, I know exactly what I’d do with a 5-pound apple pie and 15 butter croissants: eat them – which is why I didn’t buy either one.) There are subtler signs identifying Costco’s target audience: for one thing, the store doesn’t give shopping bags – they put the individual items back in the huge cart and you wheel it out the door into the parking lot, meaning that they assume anyone shopping there will also have arrived in a car with a lot of cargo space. (Almost no New York grocery stores even have parking lots. West Coasters will be shocked, but it is very, very common for New Yorkers never to own cars their entire lives. Those aren’t the New Yorkers who shop at Costco, however.) There is no “express lane” at checkout – again, it’s not that kind of place. Among their odd items, they sell bedsheets, but only in King or Queen sizes; double or single beds are for singles, and if you’re single, you’re not shopping at Costco. And, if you’re still not sure who exactly Costco is for, just take a look around the store: families everywhere – the kind of families where, when the parents go anyplace, the kids go too, because they have no choice. Huge families where it takes both parents to push enough shopping carts to hold enough food for all the kids, and keep control (sort of) of those same kids all the while. Families buying pallets of toilet paper, cubic-foot-sized boxes of Cheerios, and big jars of mayonnaise. Families with lots – lots – of kids; some I daresay with triplets.

I abandoned my measly four items (2.5 lbs of ravioli, a 10-pack of tuna fish, a huge chunk of cheese and, remarkably, an ordinary-sized loaf of bread) and left the store empty-handed. It would have taken an hour to check out and I didn’t have a bag to carry them home in anyway. It was a frustrating waste of a morning, but I left with a sense of relief.

I was relieved, basically, that I wasn’t a Costco person – that I didn’t have more kids than I could handle, that, while I appreciate a bargain as much as anyone, my life wasn’t defined by trying to find ways to fill mouths, or even simply by the logistics of doing so even if I could afford it, relieved that the mechanics of keeping body and soul together still left me some room for actual plans and projects in my life that extend beyond those mechanics, relief at not having fallen into a life of child-tending that I had previously spurned and still do not want.

It’s hard to say such things without incurring the wrath of those who have made other choices. I don’t think most of the people at Costco today are victims or slaves, that they necessarily feel trapped into their lives or wish they were relieved of the burdens of their families – though I suspect more than a few of them do feel that way (half of all pregnances, and about a third of all births, in America, are unplanned, after all). I don’t think their lives are barren because of the amount of time they devote to their families, though again I suspect many of them are harboring unfulfilled desires for that same reason. I don’t denigrate their choices for their lives, other than to the extent of not wanting to make those same choices myself. But there’s a fine line between acknowledging that I recoil from the lives many around me have chosen and suggesting that they should do so as well. And many people with children seem to take offense not only at the choices of, but even the existence of, the childless, as if merely having, still less living, one’s own values was an assault upon others’ choices.

That last point, really, gets to the heart of the matter. The right-wing assault upon so many aspects of liberal democracy comes down to an inability to abide others’ acting on values the right wing does not approve of. More and more we are told we cannot make choices in areas that smack strongly of private behavior: sexuality vs. abstinence, contraception, abortion, the type and kind of sex one has, and so drearily forth. Richards’s decision to carry an unplanned pregnancy to term failed to win approval from the right wing – otherwise so eager to impose exactly that choice on all similarly-situated women – because it was accompanied by a decision not to do so for more than one such fetus. She dared to make the choice many others have made – to value her own career and income, to keep her projects and goals intact, to remain in control of her own life’s path, to be the kind of person with the kind of life she envisioned and desired for herself. Her statement that she did not want a life bounded by burdens and obligations she did not choose or value outweighed her otherwise “pro-life” choice; what mattered was not her willingness to gestate and raise an unplanned child, but her insistence that that decision could be weighed in the balance with the other things in her life she was also committed to and valued, and that she could take steps as an active agent to get the life she wanted and felt she deserved to have, not just that life that fate handed her, subject to the approval of hostile, judgmental outsiders.

In other words, she made a choice for her life similar to the one I have made for mine – under vastly more fraught circumstances, of course. (Indeed, she made the choice to have an unplanned child and devote herself to raising it, which I certainly have never done and never even faced, and they still can’t stop howling at her.) It was the temerity of putting herself in the equation for her own life’s plan that so enraged the right wing – the act of choosing when and whether and how many unplanned children she could or would accept, rather than acquiescing in their predetermined plans for her on that score, that made her anathema. She did not even set her own life, her own values and goals and projects, above all other considerations – only above some of them, above the limit she felt she could manage; but leaving herself any space in her own life, letting herself make any choices in favor of herself when faced with encroachments on her life she did not plan or want, was enough to make her evil.

I am glad not to be a Costco person – to live a Costco life. I am much, much gladder not to have such a life forced upon me by circumstances I have no right or ability to control. And more than anything, I am worried that the right and ability of almost every woman to have and live by such preferences for herself – to set herself at some positive value in the balance of decisions about her own life’s path – is under assault and may conceivably be lost in the face of the wrath of those who sneer at those who dare to care how their lives will be lived.