what if I never know if I want to be a mother

writing has always come easier to me than speaking. on camera I say a sentence and lose the thread before I finish it. on the page I can follow a thought all the way down, watch it connect to the next one, let the whole shape reveal itself. I’m a thought daughter. this is the version of the conversation I started on video last week, finished properly.

so. some things I want to say clearly.

this is not an anti-motherhood piece. I want to name that up front because most of what gets said publicly about this topic falls into two camps: women who always knew they wanted children, and women who always knew they didn’t. both are real. both deserve their certainty. but there’s a third room nobody built a door for: women who don’t know, who are in process, who change their minds partway through building a whole life around one answer. I’m writing from that room.

a pew research study from last year found that 57 percent of adults under fifty who don’t have children now say they simply don’t want them, up significantly from a decade ago, and the number keeps climbing. permission is spreading. but permission and certainty are not the same thing, and nobody is tracking the women who are somewhere in between the two, renegotiating something they thought was already settled.

a boundary before I go further: if you’re a mother, I’m not looking for you to tell me I’ll feel different once I have a baby, or any version of that gentle condescension. you’re welcome to comment with your own story. witnessing is welcome. advice is not. sometimes the most generous thing another woman can offer is letting you stay in process without handing you her conclusion.

for the past few years, motherhood felt settled to me. I built my business around it, a structure that would let me have a spacious pregnancy and postpartum without a pay cut. I trained my body the way you’d train for anything you were serious about, ate for it, thought about it as preparation for carrying life. fertility was one of my words for the year. my partner and I have baby clothes folded in a drawer in our closet. it was a plan I believed in.

and then, something moved. I think it had always been there and I just hadn’t let myself feel it fully: what if I don’t want to be a mother.

last year, around this time, I was at a retreat my experience was entirely around owning motherhood, looking straight at whatever fear lived underneath it. there was a birthing pool. someone poured water over my head. I said yes to all of it, fully, and what came up wasn’t fear of pain or fear of loss of self. it was the realization that I don’t have many examples of motherhood that make me want it. I see a baby and feel the softness of it, the sweetness. but I don’t look at my mother and feel envy, that pull of wanting to trade places. that’s not a judgment on the path. I love children, I respect the women raising them, and my body still says, not for me at this time or in the near future.

maybe it’s my age. maybe it’s something closer to selfishness, and I’m not in a rush to correct that. the thought of trading sleep for a newborn doesn’t move me the way it seems to move other women. give me the auntie role, the spontaneous flight to europe, the version of my life where school drop-off was never on the calendar. I’m grateful for everything my mother gave up for us, five children, and I also find myself wondering, honestly, whether she ever grieves the life she might have had without all of it. I don’t know if that’s a mother wound or just an honest question. maybe both.

there’s a sociologist named orna donath who spent years interviewing mothers who, if given the choice again, say they wouldn’t have children. not women who struggled with the difficulty of motherhood, but women who loved their kids and still call the decision something they would now choose differently. her research treats regret as something structural rather than personal: proof that the paths available to women may have been narrower than they were told. what struck me reading about her work is the idea that love and regret can live in the same body at the same time, and that admitting one doesn’t cancel the other.

grief feels central to all of this, whichever way it goes. I think about not becoming a mother and I grieve a life that isn’t going to happen: the fullness in my body, the threshold of womanhood I’ll never cross that way, the particular intimacy that comes from raising a child alongside someone you love. and then I think about crossing that threshold and I grieve differently: the list that stays only mine, the spaciousness, the time, all my energy staying with me, with my boyfriend, with my friends, with my work. both futures cost something. I don’t think there’s a way through this that doesn’t involve losing a version of a life you’ll never get to live.

there’s a shame underneath it too, small but persistent. am I less of a woman because I care more about the legacy of my work than about giving life to another body. there’s propaganda on both sides of this: one side handing out approval for every woman who climbs the career ladder instead, the other insisting women have more children than they can reasonably afford. neither one is actually interested in what any specific woman wants. which is exactly why knowing yourself matters here more than almost anywhere else. are you choosing a path because it was laid out for you before you could question it. because of fear. because of a wound passed down without your consent. or because it’s genuinely what you want. or maybe, and this is allowed too, because you don’t know yet.

this piece was never going to resolve anything. it’s not a conclusion, it’s a permission slip. to have this conversation with yourself, with your partner, out loud, without needing to land anywhere by the end of it.

one thing I keep coming back to: what would I need to feel safe enough to become a mother. I want to acknowledge the privilege embedded in even asking that question. plenty of incredible mothers didn’t have any of the conditions I’m describing and did it anyway. but I think what I’m reclaiming, and I notice younger women doing this well, is the right to ask the question at all. gen z is questioning marriage, questioning the default timeline, building entirely new paths through content and career and community. a pew survey found that 30 percent of 18-to-34-year-olds without kids simply aren’t sure yet whether they want them. that uncertainty isn’t a failure to decide it might be the most honest thing available.

I’ve been a little obsessed lately with a woman online who has built a whole following cataloging her reasons for not wanting children, hundreds of them, some funny, some serious, some I’d never considered. I don’t find myself convinced by her list. but I’m grateful for the information, for someone doing the work of naming what usually stays unspoken.

THE LIST

I wasn’t raised by parents who pushed motherhood on me directly. it was just the assumed shape of a life: you get married, you buy a house, you have babies. because what else would you do with the time. except now I’m actually asking that question. what else would I do with the time. maybe I want to find out.

maybe I don’t need the answer yet. maybe saying this out loud, and staying honest as it keeps shifting, is the whole point.

I’m grateful, at least, for a partner who reminds me weekly that he wants me for who I am as a woman, not because I might one day give him a child. because of everything I already am without one.