When you turn 40 with no kids and a profound ambivalence about having them, you become acutely aware of just how little time you have left to get over your indecision. You also quickly realize just how small (and ever-shrinking) of a club you are in. There’s no calendar date after which it’s impossible to have a child, only an invisible winnowing-down of opportunity—and an incredibly evident winnowing-down of women who exit their reproductive years happily and decisively childless.
For the ambivalent and aging among us, the knowledge that the sun is setting on our reproductive years feels more like continuing, one foot in front of the other, down a comfortable path. There isn’t much of a strong feeling of actively choosing not to deviate—more of an ambling forward nonetheless, never actually knowing when we’ve crossed the border into the land of no possibility.
And, for me at least, there’s a kind of frantic scanning about for fellow travelers. Maternally ambivalent women are told over and over again to look deep inside ourselves, to tune out social expectation and fear of regret and the voices of our anxious mothers, and ask ourselves what it is we really want, as if there is some core truth resting deep inside of us and if we only had a few hours of quiet time, we’d find it. Much more often, these core life decisions are made not from a place of deep internal wanting, but in response to external norms and expectations—which of late include plenty of warning from women already across the Rubicon about how dreadful it is on the other side of parenting.
Because human beings are extremely social apes, much of what we want or do not want depends on the actions of the other apes around us. My reproductive decisions partly reflect the fact that many of my friends and acquaintances do not have children (some “yet,” some at all, a group that is growing, perhaps partly thanks to the aforementioned dread, and partly to the many more opportunities now afforded to women for building meaningful lives). If I lived in a culture in which nearly all women had babies, or in which motherhood was a woman’s primary path to life meaning and community respect, I would probably have had a baby too. But I live in a particular American subculture in which it is well within the norm to have children well after 30, increasingly common for women to forgo children entirely, and widely expected to filter life’s biggest decisions through the lenses of desire and meaning and self-actualization. And so I have waited for that magical moment when I will know: when my heart will wobble with tentative yearning at the sight of a big-headed infant, or when my brain will firmly settle into a clear no ma’am as I help a harried mother drag her stroller up the subway steps.
Instead, I remain in the land of no children and a million doubts.
It should be said that this land is one of disposable income and generous travel and last-minute plans and late mornings and daily exercise and plenty of time outside the walls of my home. It is a big life, and it is one lived largely how I want. That’s precisely what makes it so hard to give up.
It’s from this place on an invisible border that I read with great interest Ann Friedman’s first few serialized dispatches from the land of soon-to-be parenthood, the story of a woman who was decidedly child-free until an unplanned pregnancy and a series of subsequent events led her to choose to go another way. The series isn’t complete yet, but it’s being published while she takes time off for birth and early motherhood, so I won’t say we know exactly how the story ends, but we’ve definitely been let in on a major plot point.
Ann and I are roughly the same age, and we entered journalism in roughly the same way, through feminist blogging, which is also how we got to know each other nearly two decades ago. I’ve always been an admirer of her work, but I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite as knocked out by a piece of writing about parenthood (or not-parenthood) as I have by what she calls her “story about a year spent in the wide, cold gulf between known and unknown.” I read that line and I thought: I live in this gulf, and I know its loneliness in my bones.
To be honest with you, I expected this indecision to have passed by now. I guess I thought that by the time I was hearing “over the hill” jokes, I would have either a child or no intention of ever having one. But for American women of a particular cohort—coastal-city-dwelling professionals with college and perhaps graduate degrees—the age at which one might begin to panic over one’s reproductive future has crept up ever higher, because the age at which our peers generally reproduce is now higher than ever, and because reproductive technologies are more advanced than ever. In 2016, the average American woman had her first child at 28. Women in liberal coastal cities became mothers even later: The average woman in Manhattan first gave birth at 31, and the average woman in San Francisco at 32. And a college education pushed the numbers up, too: Nationwide, in 2016, the average woman with a college degree gave birth for the first time just after her 30th birthday. Seven years later, those numbers have likely ticked up.
This has been objectively wonderful: Women of my generation have had unprecedented freedom to live alone, choose or reject partners, marry or not, reproduce or not, and spend many more years of our adult lives working and adventuring and exploring and figuring ourselves out without worrying that we’re getting too old for marriage or babies.
To be clear, none of these choices were made out of ignorance. If you’re a woman in America it is virtually impossible to escape early adulthood without hearing about your ever-waning fertility. It’s not that we wake up at 30, or 35, or 40 and realize, oops, I forgot to have a baby. It’s that some of us were doing more interesting things, and some of us never landed in the right circumstances, some of us were never sure, and some of us flat-out didn’t want to.
In my late 20s and early 30s, I had a hard answer to the baby question: Not right now, I’ll worry about later, later. By my mid-30s, though, I knew I either had to choose, or allow the unsentimental nature of biology make the choice for me. I talked to a therapist, to my husband, to friends, to strangers. I journaled; I went on long walks; I had a doctor confirm I was still fertile. At the heart of the problem, I think, is that things were very good and I was very happy, and anything I wanted to change about my circumstances at the time involved making my world bigger and my life more adventurous—not shrinking it down to nuclear family size.
It doesn’t feel so different here near the end of the line, except that my life is, as expected, even bigger and even fuller, because I continued to make it that way. It’s just that the decision is more urgent, and yet somehow, I still am no clearer on what to do.
I’m not usually much of a personal essay writer. I’m writing this now, though, because I think we need more of what Ann Friedman is doing: Of sitting in the undecided and unresolved, even after a decision has been made, or made for you. Of acknowledging being undecided and unresolved as something many people go through, even if we don’t talk about it much when we are no longer there. Ambivalence and indecision aren’t unique to childbearing, but childbearing is unique in that it is one of the only decisions one ever makes in one’s life that it is impossible to undo, and that carries the most significant possible consequence: Someone else’s life. This does not seem like something to be ambivalent about, and so it’s easy to say that if you’re not sure, you shouldn’t do it. But also, having and raising children is one of the most fundamental things we do as human beings, and it can be the most transformative. An act that is necessary for our species’ survival, and that also creates a new relationship and a depth of physical and emotional experience unlike any other that exists in one’s life—this, also, does not seem like something to miss out on because you simply can’t make a decision. And I’ll say this about the deeply ambivalent: At least we really, really thought about it. I’m not convinced that everyone on the parenthood path can say the same.
I often find myself casting around for women whose lives suggest possibility on either side of this border: for the ones who seem to be building rich lives and deep ties without children; for the ones who mother well without making “mother” their central identity. And I want more of the in-between and the aftermath: The parents who love their children but wonder if they shouldn’t have had them; the nonparents who look at the ghost ship carrying the life they didn’t live and regret not getting on board; the people who smash the either-or frame and learn to exist with wonder at what they have and acceptance of the millions of lives they didn’t live; the ones who thought they knew what they wanted and were wrong, or never thought they had a choice and wished they had.
I don’t think any of this will direct the anxious and ambivalent to a clear end. But it may make the road a little less lonely.
