If you’d asked me in my twenties if I wanted children, I’d have told you “hell no.” But by my thirties, I’d softened. When my therapist asked me on a scale of one to hundred, how badly I wanted a baby, I blurted out that I was 55% certain. But this was still just the flip of a coin, essentially.
I wanted a child slightly more than I didn’t want a child. I’d made pros and cons lists. Read books like Maybe Baby, an anthology of over two dozen writers on their parenting choices. I talked to those who had kids—and those who didn’t—about why they made the decisions they did. But nothing moved the needle significantly on that 55%.
Being 55% certain about motherhood stymied me. It didn’t help that whenever I disclosed to anyone how unsure I felt, I was told that I should really want a baby if I was going to have one. Children required sacrifice. They caused hardship. They meant giving up your dreams even if your dream was only to read a book in peace every once in a while. I was reminded that if I had a baby, I would barely recognize my former self. I wouldn’t want to do anything I liked to do before. Writing would be out of the question. Reading a newspaper would too. Friends, forget it. Work, don’t even think about it. I’d just spent the last three decades shaping and molding myself into the person I wanted to be—now I’d have to lose her?
I had no idea back then that what experts call “maternal ambivalence”—a feeling of uncertainty before embarking on pregnancy and parenthood—is the norm. In fact, research shows that maternal ambivalence is incredibly common. I was normal, and yet I believed that all those women I saw on TV, in movies, and on my social media feed, who seemed so certain they wanted children, were the normal ones. I knew my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and even my mother never had the choice to become mothers. It’s just what women did. But now we have a language, a lexicon, for maternal ambivalence.
It seemed bonkers to me that practically every woman I knew seemed to be scrambling to sign up for what amounted to indentured servitude. It’s not like the images we’re bombarded with make motherhood look like a good time. For instance, the book Nightbitch by Rachel Yoder, and the new film adaptation starring Amy Adams, follows a stay-at-home mom whose postpartum life is so surreal she turns into a dog. No wonder so many of us are unsure we’re all-in on motherhood. I didn’t want to be self-sacrificing, but I also had no desire to morph into an animal.
Everywhere I turned mothers seemed overwhelmed, exhausted and filled with rage—or, at the other extreme, glowing, happy-to-compromise, and excited by the identity-annihilating drudgery of their new life as a mom. Neither seemed realistic to me. Is there no middle ground?
We do women, and everyone, really, a disservice when we only show motherhood at the margins. Sure, there are the early wakeups, the diaper blowouts and the tantrums on the one hand. And on the other, the morning cuddles, the feeling of my daughter’s hand in mind, and the first “I love you.” But there is a whole world in between, a world that is messy and real and raw, and dare I say, human. Maybe we don’t talk about the quotidian because those moments are ordinary and as such they are hard to pin down. Maybe in our modern world we are always so busy and rushed that unless something stands out as really bad or really good we don’t have the bandwidth to mention it at all.
And yet, back when I was deciding about parenthood, I wish someone would have said that being a mother is like all of life: sometimes terrible and sometimes terrific but mostly in between. Back then, parenting seemed like something I should be all-in about if I was to turn my entire life around to bring a baby into the world. It didn’t help that my husband at the time never wavered on the fact that he didn’t want a child. If I wanted to be a mother, I’d have to leave my marriage at 37 to figure out how to have the baby I was only 55% sure I wanted.
Some friends told me I should adopt a dog or get better at keeping my plants alive before I considered children. Others told me I should offer to babysit my friend’s kid for a weekend. Everyone thought there had to be something I could do to give myself a little more certainty.
But the truth was this: what I needed was honesty. I needed everyone to stop putting their own judgements and expectations on motherhood and just share the truth. I needed the institution of motherhood to stop being a boxing ring where liberals and conservatives duked out their feelings to the detriment of actual mothers. I needed to hear that when my daughter waves hello to the birds in the morning my heart would be flooded with joy. And when she insists that she’s the only one who can put on her clothes, even though it takes three times as long, I would feel frustrated.
Motherhood isn’t something you can try out to see if you’ll like it or not. If you choose to have a baby, there are no guarantees that you’ll be good at it, that you won’t regret your decision, that you’ll figure it all out. You just have to have hope. It’s normal to be uncertain about such a life changing decision.
And it’s completely fine to ultimately decide not to become a mother, too. Society stigmatizes women who choose to be child-free. Studies oscillate between whether women who are child-free are ultimately happier or whether the reverse is true. At the end of the day, screw the studies. It’s a personal choice.
I wish someone had told me back then as I sat on my therapist’s couch that we don’t have to be all-in on parenthood to choose to have a baby. That kind of grand expectation adds pressure to what feels like an already complex decision. Who says that I couldn’t go from wanting a baby only 55% to 150% over time? Who says that I wouldn’t evolve and grow as I stepped into the realization that my life is my own and I don’t have to follow other people’s rules? Who says that our feelings are fixed and we can’t change?
I wish someone told me that any decision we make that is true to our deepest desires is good. I wish someone had told me that I’d remain unhappy as long as I was in limbo. I wish someone had told me 55% was as good a number as any.
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