In the early months after my daughter was born, I thought it was surely the hormones surging through my body that made me, someone who had never been interested in babies, find my daughter’s every move endlessly fascinating. At some point the hormones would quiet, the fascination would diminish, and I would return to my prior self.
But nearly two years later, I find myself shoveling sand into a plastic turtle with genuine enthusiasm. How do I reconcile this reality with the ambivalence with which I once approached motherhood?
We are at a strange moment when it comes to ideas about parenthood in this country. An increasing number of adults say that they are unlikely to become parents, leading to much hand-wringing over declining birthrates. Some argue a drop in people having babies signals impending societal decline. Others believe the implications are overblown. These conversations play out in ways large and small, from political and policy arguments to the inevitable uncomfortable conversations over the holiday dinner table.
For all the talk, which many of us would rather ignore, there is a kernel of something real here that’s not being adequately addressed. For my generation — and, I’d argue, especially for women in my generation — the decision of whether to have a child has become highly fraught. It’s tied up with our desires for fulfilling careers, our willingness to risk a shift in the identities and lives we have built. It’s tied up in an understanding of all that went into making motherhood a choice that we get to make. With so much at stake, it is so easy to become paralyzed by indecision.
But perhaps what I would have wanted to hear when I was dithering was something like this: Having a child has been extraordinary. I came very close to not doing it. And if I had not, that life would have been a good one, too, just a different one. The hardest part of any decision is always the uncertainty, the time entertaining two possible outcomes, not knowing what happens on the other side. For those facing a similar choice, intensified by the holiday season, know that whatever you decide — or whatever is decided for you by biology and chance and time — it gets only easier from here.
As a critical care doctor, I deal with the gravity of uncertainty all the time. I walk my patients and their families through what can feel like impossible decisions. Sometimes families spend days or even longer in a state of limbo, uncertain which treatment path to choose. Any decision is a relief, because then we can start to plan. Just as there is relief in deciding to have a child and then getting pregnant, there is also relief in making a clear decision not to. We can leave our self-imposed purgatory.
For doctors, the decision whether and when to have a child is a particularly tough one, as our hours are notoriously long and we often work under unimpressive parental leave policies. I tell my younger colleagues that I chose to become a parent out of fear of future regret. Though that’s the truth, that reasoning didn’t feel good enough at the time and led me to moments of intense panic during my pregnancy. Surely there must be a better rationale to put myself through the mental and physical trauma of pregnancy and to potentially upend decades of career building (or so I assumed). Surely I must have within me a deep yearning and belief that I would not be fulfilled without a child. But that wasn’t the case. I did not want to wonder about having a child when it was too late.
Maybe the decision to have a child, which feels particularly heavy for those of us who make the choice to go through in vitro fertilization to do so, doesn’t need to be any more complicated than that. For many of us, there will never be that epiphany, that belief that the path we chose was the only possible one that could have led to a good life. There are simply two roads, two mutually exclusive paths. We each choose one.
When I became pregnant, a friend told me she was sure I wouldn’t become an annoying person with a baby — that is, the baby would not become the focal point of conversation. I would be the same person. Just with a baby in tow.
But I am not the same person. And for some reason, I feel almost embarrassed to admit how much I love being a mother. I spent my adult life until now with this idea that I was different from — and maybe even a little superior to — my peers who chose to spend time building their families. I was so worried about what a child would mean for my career. But what I did not anticipate was that what I would want itself would change.
I have the same desires to write, to work as a physician, to succeed, but they come up against a new and often more powerful want. Which is to be with this child. To watch her look of concentration as she strings words into sentences, to count the buses and dogs that we see in the morning. To feel her tiny arms around my neck when she gives me a hug. I find myself singing on the street and playing in the park with her, and I don’t even hear the internal narrative that tells me that I should be working, that this is not enough.
There will always be regrets, if we are the sort to entertain them. What I don’t see during my mornings at the park are the essays I will not pen, the TV show I will not interview to write for. The counterfactual was always going to be unknowable, whatever choice I made. On the other side of any decision, there might be regret, but there is also the joy of settling into your reality. It is, for me, the joy of holding my child close, knowing that of all the potential paths, this is mine.
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