In which I ponder parenthood

2009 at 9am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

(or, To Breed or Not To Breed?)

This is a not-at-all-book-related post, but I’ve been thinking about these things for a few weeks and need to get them off my chest. Before my friend Kristen wrote a guest review here about Ayelet Waldman’s new book Bad Mother, I had never heard of Ayelet Waldman or the controversial op-ed piece that made her infamous in the Mommy and Me world. And now, I can’t stop thinking about it.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t agree with everything Waldman says, but I can completely understand where she’s coming from. I’m 26 years old, and I’ve been with my husband for nearly 8 years. We met when we were 18 and carefree. We’ve grown together, made major life decisions together, and bought a house together, and we’ve taken the gradual steps from casual fling to boyfriend and girlfriend to serious partners to engagement to marriage. We have spent a ton of time together. We’ve enjoyed being alone and being able to focus only on each other.  By all accounts, we should be thinking about having kids soon, right?

That seems to be society’s message, but I’m not buying it.

Let me be clear. It’s not that we don’t like children. We have five nieces and three nephews whom we adore, and we love spending time with them. But we’re always happy when we get to drive away, back to the quiet solitude of our house, where we can watch whatever we want on TV, have sex whenever we feel like it, make brownies and french fries for dinner if we so desire, and spend entire weekends on the couch because we don’t have to drive to sports practices or birthday parties or school activities. And we like it that way.

But it feels like we might be the only ones. I swear, at least once a week someone we know announces on Facebook that she is pregnant, and it’s not always with kid #1. We actually know a few people our age (and a few who are younger) who are on kid #2 or #3. And that boggles my mind. Now, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. It is an intensely personal decision, and I trust (and hope) that these people are doing what makes the most sense for them, but I sure as hell don’t identify with it.  Many of these people have only been with their partners for a year or two. And they’re already ready to have kids? To make those sacrifices of time and privacy and intimacy, and to give over their lives to another being for at least 18 years?

When I hear women talk about making the decision to have kids, they usually talk about how deeply they love their partners and how that love and their commitment to each other—with a little help from the proverbial biological clock— made them want to start a family. But I am deeply in love with my husband, and I can’t imagine it is possible for two people to be any more committed to each other than we are, and yet, I have no desire to have children, at least not in the foreseeable future. Increasingly, I find that when I express these feelings, people look at me like I’ve grown a third head.

Is there something wrong with me?

Should my clock be ticking?

Or is it possible that I love my husband too much to have children?

I will freely admit that at this stage in my life, I am too selfish to have a child. I like to sleep in and spend time alone and read for hours on end. I like that we can pick up and leave for the weekend with little notice and that when we want to spend a day out together, we can leave the dog home alone and not be arrested for it. And I like having my husband to myself.

He’s funny and smart, and even though he annoys the living hell out of me at times, he is excellent company. He does a hilarious Eddie Vedder impression, and he can quote The Simpsons and Family Guy far too easily. He is snarky, and he says exactly what he thinks, and he doesn’t pull any punches. He is singularly focused on landscaping our backyard, and he has turned our guest bathroom into a “grow room” to prepare his seeds for planting. He makes little piles—laundry, books, mail—all over the house, and it makes me crazy. But damn, the man makes the best grilled cheese sandwich this girl has ever tasted.

And I have a hard time imagining that I’ll ever want to share that.

The interesting thing is, I haven’t always felt this way. Growing up, I just assumed that I would meet a man and fall in love and get married and have kids. Isn’t that what we train kids, especially little girls, to think from day one? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Mommy with a baby carriage?

Adrienne Rich was right, wasn’t she?

When hubby and I found ourselves falling in love, we had all those conversations that people who are falling in love are supposed to have. We learned about each other’s backgrounds and beliefs, childhood memories and fears, hopes and dreams, and plans for the future. When we started figuring out that we wanted to live our lives together, we decided to get married in our mid-twenties, and we thought we’d start trying to have kids in our late twenties.

Then we got married, and something in me shifted. I realized that I was 25, and now that we were married, kids—even on accident—were a real possibility, and that those late twenties when we planned to start trying were a little too close for comfort. And I completely freaked out.

So we started talking, and we realized that the idea that marriage is natually followed by children was something we had absorbed from our families and from society, something we just always assumed would be true for us, too. But we don’t want to do something, especially something so big that it involves bringing new lives into the world, just because it’s what we’re “supposed” to do. We want to be mindful of our feelings and our desires and our motivations, and we want to have kids (or not have them) for the right reasons.

I firmly believe that it is possible to have a full, rich, happy, passionate life that is satisfying and rewarding without having children. Why are we taught to assume that all childless couples are lacking something, as though anyone who doesn’t have kids is walking around with a gaping hole inside,  feeling hopelessly empty? I know that for couples who desperately want children and are unable to have them, that statement may be true. But it doesn’t apply to everyone, and I resent the idea that if my husband and I choose to grow into our thirties and forties and beyond without having children, people will assume we are secretly miserable. I think it is important for us to challenge these assumptions.

I’m only 26. I know that things could change. The biological clock could start ticking, and I could find myself longing to become a mother. It’s difficult to imagine, but I won’t rule it out. If we do have children, I know that some of my priorities will change because they will have to change, but like Waldman, I will still want to be close to my husband, to make the distinction between loving our children and being in love with him, to have cherished time alone together and an identity outside of motherhood. I will do my best to give my children whatever they need, but I will not give them everything of myself.

And that won’t make me a bad mother or an insufficient woman.

I love my husband. It is possible that I love him too much to have children. And it doesn’t mean that I think I am somehow capable of a bigger or deeper love than anyone else. That’s not what I’m getting at at all. It’s just that I can’t fathom sharing him or giving up our quiet alone time together or having a small, stinky child shrieking from the back seat during our road trips. (Not to mention the ubiquitous toddler smell of pee, cheerios, and sour milk that seems to be a built-in feature of vehicles that frequently transport children. Nope, not ready for that.)

It is possible that we might want to live the rest of our lives with each other and only each other. And I believe we could be very happy doing it. (Especially with all the research showing that having kids actually decreases couples’ marital satisfaction. Click here for a few examples.)

Now, it’s an argument for another day, but would we even be having this discussion if Waldman’s article had been written by a man?

Have you been through this? Are you happily married or partnered with no kids? Did you think you wouldn’t want them but now can’t imagine your life without them? Has having kids changed your marriage but turned out to be worth it? Or not?

This just isn’t something many people are talking about openly, and I’d love to hear some other perspectives. Thanks for enduring the rather long post. I promise something lighter and shorter tomorrow.