Pandemic Love #11
What if I never know?
By Jeanne Donegan
How are you doing? Submit your questions to Pandemic Love here!
I resent that the pressures of modern life are incongruous with my biological timeline.
I resent that my female body has to contend with this timeline and not my male partner’s.
I resent that in order to have a family of my own making, I have to sacrifice personal goals.
I resent that we have fucked the earth so badly that it may not sustain younger generations.
I resent that it costs so much to live, and so much to die. And so much to give birth.
I resent that adoption fees are so expensive, as if housing, feeding, and clothing a child isn’t enough.
I resent that freezing my eggs costs money when men produce sperm their whole lives.
I resent that money rules most of the big decisions I have to make in life.
I resent that society has made me think I’ll feel empty if I don’t pursue motherhood.
I resent that society has made me think I’ll feel shackled and limited if I do pursue motherhood.
I resent that this fear of regret is so consuming.
This is an excerpt from a journal entry I wrote almost exactly two years ago at 28. This was right around the time when several close women in my life began having babies...some of them even on purpose, which was a far out concept to me. It was really exciting to watch my friends go through this experience, to witness their bodies and their entire personhood transform, and later to hold these precious little people that they created. It was amazing, really. But it also forced me to reckon with how far away I was from this experience in my own life, and if this was even an experience I wanted to have. When I wrote down this list of resentments, I was asking myself the question: what will I regret more, having kids or not having kids? Two years later, I still don’t know the answer.
This month’s submission asks this same question, and since it’s something I’m currently processing myself, my response may be more subjective than usual. I’m sharing some of my own thoughts and questions on this topic in hopes that they might provide comfort and/or camaraderie, and spark more dialog around a very important, emotional, and personal decision.
I want to preface that this question was submitted by a straight, cis woman, which I also identify as, so today’s column will be approached from that perspective, though I acknowledge there are additional challenges people of other identities may face in asking themselves the same question.
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[If it matters - straight, committed, monogamous relationship]
I'll be 32 this year and I can feel my chest tightening thinking about the implications this means for me, as a woman. With womb.
The funny thing is I never really gave childbirth much thought. I put my head down, worked hard to carve out a sustainable life and career for myself and just assumed one day I would "have a family" whatever that means. But now as I feel time slipping through my fingers, I need to confront a few truths.
First one: If I do want to carry and give birth to a child, and I want myself and that child to be as healthy as possible, there is an ideal timeframe to do this. And there is a...."suboptimal" timeframe.
Second truth: I am closing in on the suboptimal timeframe. I'm not there yet, but hell, I don't know any more today about wanting to have a baby than when I was 22.
I know this is a highly personal choice, and no one should feel pressured on it but time is the biggest pressure cooker of all - and no one is guaranteed fertility. How do I grapple with this extremely challenging topic, on which I feel I still have so much to consider and so many unknowns? If I don't know, is the answer "don't"? And a larger, unanswerable question that I am afraid to ask...what if I never know?
Decidedly Undecided
31, She/Her, New York
First, thank you for sending in this question. As noted above, this is something I am also thinking a lot about, and it feels like such an important decision that is often difficult to talk about–the decision of whether or not to have kids. Like all conversations concerning women’s bodies, there’s a ton of misplaced shame around it. Some women seem to have always known they wanted to be mothers, although it’s hard to say how much of that desire is biologically ingrained, and how much of it is the result of societal pressure. The conversation surrounding fertility swings heavily from those who find themselves pregnant but don’t want to be, to those who desperately want to get pregnant and aren’t able to, yet that space in between is blurry–those who are paralyzed by the decision, when there’s a limited window in which to make it. How can we possibly know if we’re making the right choice?
I appreciate what you said about pragmatically confronting those two truths–the first one is scientific fact. There is an ideal timeframe, and a “suboptimal” timeframe to get pregnant and give birth. But the second truth you mention is less concrete, that you’re closing in on that suboptimal timeframe. While there is certainly a general timeline we are paying attention to, everyone’s body is different. There are plenty of women who have healthy pregnancies throughout the full spectrum of their 30s and into their 40s, and there are also many women in their 20s who experience complications in pregnancy and birth. The unreliability of it all is scary to think about, but what’s important to acknowledge here is that there are some aspects of this decision that are beyond our control no matter what age we are. Learning to relinquish a little bit of that desire for control will be necessary in whatever choice you make.
I think it’s important for both of us to remember that we’re at the beginning of our 30s, we’re solidly in the middle of the timeline. Middle is a chill place to be. We get to watch some of our peers figure things out first, we can learn from their lessons, and we get more time to live our lives only for ourselves and contemplate what we really desire for our futures. That is valuable, and it’s important to be present with that and appreciate it as opposed to fretting about a decision that might be five or more years away. Like you said, you’re not there yet; and the kind of anxiety that comes with projecting too far into the future seems to only make time fly faster.
Something that I’ve been practicing lately when I start to work myself up about this, is to remind myself how long a time five years is. Time is a challenging concept in that it always feels like it’s moving too fast or too slow, but when we look back we can gauge it more by how much we’ve accomplished, how much we’ve grown, and how our lives have changed in a given timeframe. Five years ago today, I was in my last year of graduate school working on my thesis, veering towards a total crash and burn breakup with my then boyfriend, employed one day a week in a low-level gallery position, and had absolutely no idea what my life would look like in the next few months. So much has changed since then, and had I been able to foresee five years into my future, I would have felt so much less anxious and uncertain (Covid aside, of course). I would encourage you to take stock of where you were 5 years ago and try to apply that type of thinking towards where you might be in the next 5 or so years. Just because you don’t know today, doesn’t mean you have to remove the option entirely, but you can alleviate some of the anxiety by making incremental decisions, i.e. “I am deciding not to have a kid this year,” and revisit the thought again in a year. It may help you to make a list now of what circumstances you feel would be right for you to have a child, and when you revisit the thought you can gauge how close you are to that “ideal” set of circumstances.
If you have the means, you can also consider freezing your eggs. It is prohibitively expensive (costing somewhere around $10,000 out-of-pocket, unless you have exceptional insurance or work for one of the few companies that offer to pay for it), but if the option of having a biological child feels really important to you, this may be something you want to seriously consider in the near future. While it’s not a guarantee, it can help reduce some of the pressure of time itself. The biggest factor affecting fertility is less the age of our bodies and more the age and amount of our eggs, which starts to significantly change throughout our mid 30s. So, the chances of getting pregnant later via our own frozen eggs, are much better if we freeze them in our 20s/early 30s.
But on to the question that is at the root of all the fear -- what if I never know? I tried to talk to my mom about this feeling a few months back, and that’s a conversation I plan to continue having with her over wine in the future (mom, if you’re reading this, start carving out some time). But what she said on the phone a few months ago stressed me out even more. In an effort to comfort and ease my spiraling she said, “well, if it’s meant to happen it will” or maybe, “it will happen when it happens,” something along the lines of letting fate decide. I can understand why she would say that, because that’s how I came into her life, when she was a newly married 24 year old, but I have an IUD and I’ve had one since I was 22. I’m not getting pregnant unless I make a very conscious choice to remove it, or to not replace it this June and gamble my future on condoms and pulling out. Fate doesn’t play the same role in my reproductive life as it did in my mom’s (and I think this applies to a lot of women of our generation). This realization just put the onus back on me to decide when and if I want to do this.
It has become a cliche to say things like, no one is ever ‘ready’ to have kids or there’s never a right time, but I think there is some truth to that notion. Even when you’ve planned your pregnancy, there is only some much you can do to prepare, and inevitably it will be overwhelming, but you somehow figure it out. In the long run, there doesn’t appear to be a major difference between people who planned those pregnancies and people who followed through with unplanned pregnancies–generally speaking, people love their kids all the same and don’t regret having them, though they may harbor fantasies about how their lives would have played out differently in either case. I asked one of my oldest, closest friends her feelings on this recently. She’s also 31 and now has two kids, a 2 ½ year old and a nearly 1 year old. Here’s what she had to say:
“If you have doubts about whether or not you want to be a parent, then don’t do it. But if you have doubts about the timing of it, about not feeling ready or prepared, then you have a different set of questions to ask yourself–and it’s worth asking sooner than later.”
A moment later I reminded her that she had always been adamant about not wanting to have kids and we laughed about it. Her point though was that there are two different questions: Do I want to be someone’s parent one day? And am I ready to be someone’s parent now? -- the answer to that second question is often no, and yet people manage to do it all the time regardless of their readiness. But the answer to the first question will help you answer the second. If you have always looked into your future and assumed you would “have a family,” how does it feel when you look ahead and picture not having children in it? If that thought makes you feel sad, then maybe you do want to be a parent but you just don’t feel ready now. And if that’s the case, try to identify what the barriers are that currently prevent you from having kids, and how you can tackle those barriers in the next X number of years, realizing that the timing may never be perfect. I know for me one of the biggest barriers is financial instability. I grew up in a household with 3 kids and palpable financial distress that I don’t want to relive. Combine that baggage with my meager arts educator salary, and a partner who just went back to school, and there’s no way I could responsibly start a family at this time. If money were no object...maybe I’d do it tomorrow, but for now I choose not to dwell on the BIG decision until I resolve my financial situation.
Another huge factor to consider is your partner–if the person you are with now is someone you plan to be with for the foreseeable future, or is a person you can envision having an amicable co-parent relationship with even if you don’t remain partners, then their contribution to this decision is relevant. How does your partner feel about the idea of having kids, and are they aware of the anxiety you’re carrying about this narrowing timeframe? I think women often feel really alone in this fear–even if you’re in a loving partnership, there’s a limit to understanding the enormity of this feeling and the responsibility that comes with being the one whose body has to contend with it. It’s important to talk through those feelings together if this partner will play a part in your decision making. And it’s worth asking yourself (and your partner) how important it feels to you, in this future vision of family, that a child be biologically yours, and why. Can you see yourself being open to adoption and/or fostering? That might be hard to picture now, but this option isn’t as time-sensitive.
The other side of this coin is that you decide not to have kids. I can’t pretend to know whether that’s the right choice for anyone, including myself just yet, but I can say I’ve encountered a significant number of people in my life whom I deeply admire and look up to who do not have children. Some of them are wildly rich and well traveled, some are outrageously talented artists, some are accomplished intellectuals and scholars–they all are people you’d want to talk to a party, many of them look far younger than their actual age, and they are all cool as fuck. Sometimes, I find myself really identifying with the pursuit of this lifestyle, and try to remember that there are many ways to create a sense of “family”–through community, friendship, partnership, and being someone’s wicked chill aunt figure that they think is way cooler than their own mom. Deciding not to have children opens up your life to a myriad of opportunities and experiences that would otherwise be impossible. There’s a freedom available to you that is not an insignificant thing to consider. Are there things you want to do in life that you would be giving up if you were a parent? How do you feel when you think about losing those things?
The truth is, no one else’s experience can answer this question for you, or for me. We have to dig deep inside ourselves, attempt to block out all the external forces pressuring this decision, and try to identify how we would really feel if we decided not to have children, or how we would feel in the future if we found out we waited too long to try. Or even how we would feel if we found out right now that we weren’t able to conceive–like you said, no one is guaranteed fertility. Whether or not we have children, it’s important not to pin all of our future happiness on any one, single idea. We derive joy and fulfillment from many different things, and the more we invest in all the different types of relationships in our lives the better.
I don’t think you can make the wrong choice–you just have to make a choice and embrace it, with the slightly irritating awareness that time may end up making the choice for you, and that it’s okay if that’s how it happens too. <3
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This Month’s Resources:
Don’t know if you want a baby? This is how I found my answer - Kerry Eustice, The Guardian
Does Health Insurance Cover Egg Freezing? - Rachel Lustbader, Healthcare Insider