the auntie edit: "I don’t know if I want kids."

welcome to the auntie edit!

i started mother curious as a way to welcome my childfree friends into my experience of motherhood to make it a little less daunting and a heckuvalot more inclusive.

for over a year and a half i’ve shared my perspective, today i begin to share theirs.

we’ll explore the baby question, childfree by choice, and what it means to become an integral auntie to friends and family.

i hope you enjoy this monthly special and please don’t hesitate to reach out if you or someone you know would like to share your perspective on what it means to be an auntie.

i am thrilled to kick off this series and introduce you to my dear friend, key member of my creative support team, and an incredible writer and editor to boot, Brianna Schubert!

if you are not already reading The Mood Board, hop to it!

TMB is my favorite place for creative inspiration, feasting my eyes on some colorful eye candy, meeting someone new and wonderful via her features, and mood scrolling the fun parts of the internet. to me, reading The Mood Board is the equivalent of getting a perfect flat white and laughing about nonsense with my barista, i can’t help but skip a little as i walk out the door!

When Annaliese and I were talking about how she could expand Mother Curious to include non-mothers, I knew immediately that this is where I wanted to share my story as someone who is completely unsure about whether or not I want kids.

I’m a 26-year-old freelance writer married to the love of my life and working toward moving to New York City so I can be where it’s all happening in the book world and my husband can pursue his acting career in a larger way.

I pitch to different publications all the time, but this is something so close to my heart, a vulnerable topic that I wrestle with and consider so carefully all the time, as you’ll read below.

Mother Curious has been an absolute inspiration for me; seeing the way Annaliese parents makes me feel like I could confidently do it in my own way, if I do end up deciding to have kids. I can’t express how much that means to me. And I’m so grateful to her for giving me the space to share my thoughts.

I hope even just one person relates. <3

In the discourse of having-kids-versus-not these days, it feels like people so often know their answer to the question. At least on the outside, they say confidently that “yes, we will someday!” or “not at all,” but I can’t be the only one who has wrestled with this question, turned it over, and still felt a deep uncertainty about what I want.

When I was growing up, I understood my future as this: go to college, fall in love, get married, get a house, have kids. I didn’t question it; I wasn’t exposed to other ways of being, at least not in my immediate circles. It was normal, expected even. I met my now-husband at 16 years old, and I was confident even then that he was the one I would build a life with. I remember picturing our future together: kids, a house, maybe a dog. But looking back, there was another part of me, even then, that wanted to live in the city, cook together, go to art galleries and theatre performances. We went to college, and as I began to be exposed to other ways of being an adult, I realized that my world view was incredibly narrow and had been much of my life. My partner and I began to grow – thankfully, together, though I’ll be the first to admit there were many growing pains along the way – and our ideas for our future began to shift.

I remember having what I can now recognize as an anxiety attack over not wanting to give birth in my college dorm room at around 19 years old. My now-husband, the sweet caretaker he is, held me while I cried, not knowing what to make of this. He wanted kids but wasn’t thinking about actually having any for a long while. I was seeing the entire world view crumble before me. Maybe I didn’t want kids. I didn’t know. But it was the first time I considered it, and it scared me.

My partner and I turned 20, then 21, then 22, 23, 24, and life was getting better and better every year. We were growing more into ourselves and closer together than ever, and we felt a balance settle into our lives. I allowed myself space to more or less forget about the question altogether, deciding that I’d probably have kids “in ten years,” though with each year going by, the “ten years” remained exactly that, and I kept pushing it off.

Then my partner and I got engaged, my sister had a kid, we got married, and my sister let us know she was pregnant again shortly after. Through it all, I found this question in the back of my mind getting louder and louder. I journaled and journaled, talked with my therapist, my partner, my sister, my friends about whether or not I wanted kids. Somewhere along the way, I got to a point where I was confident I did not. With the current political landscape, global warming, my own mental health struggles throughout my life, my extreme sound sensitivity, my partner and I’s difficulties with executive functioning because we both have ADHD… I was sure it was a bad idea. Not to mention the fact that the idea of birth still gave me the heebie-jeebies at best and absolute terror at worst.

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But then I’d be around my sister’s babies and talk with my friends who have kids and are doing parenting differently than I ever could’ve imagined it could be, and I’d wonder… maybe I do want this. I imagine dressing my own child in rain boots to go on walks. I picture my husband running around our home looking for our kid’s favorite stuffed animal or pacifier. I wonder what it would feel like to hold their hand while they cross the street or what a family group hug would feel like. Some days, this potential future feels real, close, tangible. Something I want.

Other days, I sleep in until 11 am on a Saturday and make up my day as I go. I like being selfish. I like being spontaneous and impulsive and chaotic. I like days when my husband and I are lazy all afternoon and don’t have a care in the world. I think to myself, I could never give up this peace, this ease. I don’t want to change my lifestyle, my plans, my goals to be a writer and my husband’s goals to be an actor… It often feels like our creative careers are just getting started. I can’t imagine putting anything on pause.

My mind would go back and forth like this, turning over the possibilities, the pros, cons, what-ifs, questions… but what good was that doing for me?

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been embracing a new mindset. What if, when I think about the question of whether or not I want kids, I just simply let the answer be “I don’t know”? What if I let myself sit in the uncertainty? Instead of feeling the waves of the changing tides of my mind, I am letting myself forge on through the water. I am uncertain, but I am sure of my uncertainty. Instead of fighting with it, I’m just letting it be. And for now, that’s good enough for me.

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my top three recommended reads of the week featuring mothers getting curious about what it looks like to challenge the status quo.

Amelia Larsen of Savoring Each Season getting curious about when and why joy became so complicated in motherhood. i think about this all the time and it’s one of the reasons i don’t shy away from sharing the good and the messy on mother curious. there is something so important about women being free to experience uninhibited joy in a society that teaches us to be fearful of what’s next. Amelia does a beautiful job of mapping out the impact of the past ten years of social media and how the tone has changed.

Jane Stephens Rosenthall Cooke of Poetry Is For The Mornings getting curious about the impact of technology, these phones, and our climate crisis. in this poem she voices some of my fears that are too big for me too put into words, so i listen to her voice and find hope anyway. do yourself a favor and put on your headphones to hear her reading. i could listen to her voice all day.

Amy Spofford of Multi-Hyphenate Moms getting curious about cherishing the lasts of parenthood. i often think about parenthood as the ultimate practice of letting go, but that doesn’t make it any easier. Amy writes about the honor of watching your children grow up, and the grief that comes with every last. it’s good grief indeed <3

table of contents

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Jan 14

this is a living table of contents that is updated as mother curious posts go live. MC was never meant to be digested in a linear fashion, choose what you’re looking for based on the topics below!

CONNECT: thank you so much for being here! i hope you enjoyed reading mother curious today. i’d love to hear from you! say hi to me on instagram, watch me try to figure out tiktok, or leave a comment on substack. the best part about substack is the conversations and connections we build together and i look forward to getting to know you too.