Excuse me for the rant.
This is just a really, really big issue of mine.
Maybe it is precisely because I have seen the cost of motherhood in the lives of women I love and admire that I stand here, nearly forty years old, feeling no desire whatsoever for a baby of my own.
Of course this is a rather important question to discuss on the brink of marriage, and so I must address it here-if only because child rearing and marriage are so inherently linked in our culture and in our minds. We all know the refrain, right? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very word “matrimony” comes to us from the Latin word for mother. We don’t call marriage “patrimony.” Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage. Actually, often it is the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society, in which-as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered-many small communities considered pregnancy to be a stigma-free, socially accepted signal that it was now time for a young couple to tie the knot.
But with modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer “babies beget matrimony,” or even necessarily “matrimony begets babies”; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be nonnegotiable.
I know this from painful personal experience because my first marriage fell apart-to a large extent-over the question of children. My then-husband had always assumed that we would have babies together one day. He had every right to make that assumption, since I had always assumed it myself, though I wasn’t entirely sure when I would want babies. The prospect of eventual pregnancy and parenthood had seemed comfortably distant on my wedding day; it was an event that would happen sometime “in the future,” “at the right moment,” and “when we were both ready.” But the future sometimes approaches us more quickly than we expect, and the right moment doesn’t always announce itself with clarity. The problems that existed within my marriage soon made me doubt whether this man and I would ever be ready, truly, to endure such a challenge as raising children.
Moreover, while the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality-as it approached-only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop.) Every morning, I would perform something like a CAT scan on myself, searching for a desire to be pregnant, but I never found it. There was no imperative there, and I believe that child rearing must come with an imperative, must be driven by a sense of longing and even destiny, because it is such a massively important undertaking. I’ve witnessed this longing in other people; I know what it looks like. But I never felt it in myself.
Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, I felt at times “a thousand capacities” spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, “I want to work!”-and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart.
I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.
How would I manage that, though, with a baby? Increasingly panicked by this question, and well aware of my then-husband’s growing impatience, I spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could-married, single, childless, artistic, archetypally maternal-and I asked them about their choices, and the consequences of their choices. I was hoping their answers might resolve all my questions, but their answers covered such a wide range of experience that I found myself only more confused in the end.
For instance, I met one woman (an artist who worked at home) who said, “I had my doubts, too, but the minute my baby was born, everything else in my life fell away. Nothing is more important to me now than my son.”
But another woman (whom I would define as one of the best mothers I’ve ever met, and whose grown kids are wonderful and successful) admitted to me privately and even shockingly, “Looking back on it all now, I’m not at all convinced that my life was really bettered in any way by the choice to have children. I gave up altogether too much, and I regret it. It’s not that I don’t adore my kids, but honestly, I sometimes wish I could have all those lost years back.”
A fashionable, charismatic West Coast businesswoman, on the other hand, said to me, “The one thing nobody ever warned me about when I started having babies was this: Brace yourself for the happiest years of your life. I never saw that coming. The joy of it has been like an avalanche.”
But I also talked to an exhausted single mom (a gifted novelist) who said, “Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.”
Another creative friend of mine said, “Yes, you lose a lot of your freedoms. But as a mother, you gain a new kind of freedom as well-the freedom to love another human being unconditionally, with all your heart. That’s a freedom worth experiencing, too.”
Still another friend, who had left her career as an editor to stay home with her three children, warned me, “Think very carefully about this decision, Liz. It’s difficult enough to be a mom when it’s what you really want to do. Don’t even go near child rearing until you’re absolutely sure.”
Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, “Just go for it. It’s not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can’t do anymore now that you’re a mom.”
But I was also deeply touched when I met a renowned photographer, now in her sixties, who made this simple comment to me on the topic of children: “I never had ‘em, honey. And I never missed ‘em.”
Do you see a pattern here?
I didn’t.
Because there wasn’t a pattern. There was just a whole bunch of smart women trying to work things out on their own terms, trying to navigate somehow by their own instincts. Whether I myself should ever be a mother was clearly not a question that any of these women were going to be able to answer for me. I would need to make that choice myself. And the stakes of my choice were personally titanic. Declaring that I did not want to have children effectively meant the end of my marriage. There were other reasons I left that marriage (there were aspects of our relationship that were frankly preposterous), but the question of children was the final blow. There is no compromise position on this question after all.