Ok friends, this is the most vulnerable piece of writing I’ve shared publicly. If you could give me a little digital hug, that would be great because I’m nervous to press publish over here.
I’ve been trying to figure out if I want to have kids or not.
I just turned 33, and have realized this is the time I need to be thinking deeply about this question. But real talk, every time I think about it, the scene from Broad City about marriage flashes through my head.
For my fellow early-thirties millennials, it feels like this is a question I get asked or am asking constantly. It reminds me of being in high school and people asking me where I’m applying to college. We were all taking the SATs, applying to college, and on a clear track.
It feels like some of my female friends are applying for the job of “mom,” and I’m over here reading the job description and not 100% sure I want to fill out the application.
The problem begins with this fundamental question:
How am I supposed to decide if I want to build a family with someone if I don’t have the someone I want to build the family with?
I’m currently single, so imagining a future and maybe a future child without the person to share that life with is very hard to do. It feels like a chicken-and-egg problem.
As a single woman of a certain age, it seems like this is the question I need to know the answer to before I make any further big life plans.
I tried making a decision tree to tackle this concept for my own personal scenario, but it felt more circular than linear. When I tried to make it a universal chart to map to any other perspectives, the branches became infinite. Here was my best attempt to map my own thoughts…
Sure, I don’t need to know this answer today. But when I start doing the math on whether I want to have kids, it does kind of feel like I need to know today.
Say I meet someone tomorrow, and they are my person, and we want to have kids. If we’re following the ~normal~ societal track, we would date for about 2 years before we get married. Then, it probably would take a year to plan a wedding.
Ideally, we’d have a year of child-free married life (if things went perfectly without any fertility challenges). Plus 9 months of pregnancy.
So I would have a baby nearly 5 years from now if I met the love of my life TOMORROW. That would make me 38, which is technically a geriatric pregnancy.
That’s a lot of pressure on a timeline that I didn’t sign up for! This biological cuckoo clock feels like it’s ticking faster than I am comfortable with.
A lot of my friends are currently freezing their eggs to add time to that ticking clock. I have some not-so-fun medical trauma, so the idea of an elective medical procedure is not on my to-do list.
I’m also a full-time artist on my own health insurance plan. I don’t work for a company that would cover the costs. If I wanted to freeze my eggs, it would cost $13,000-15,000. Plus annual storage fees. My friend in New York is paying $1,000 a year to store her little eggies. As if New York rent for myself isn’t enough!
The bottom line with egg freezing is that if I had a stronger feeling I wanted kids, I could push through and find solutions. But since I’m on the fence, it doesn’t feel like a direction I want to pursue.
When I zoom out, I try to imagine my life with and without kids. I try to think of the day-to-day and what I truly want, not what I think I’m supposed to want. What I continually come back to is that I don’t think I’d be thinking about having kids if everyone around me wasn’t thinking about it.
I wonder how to tell what is a biological or intuitive desire to have kids versus a societal version of subconscious peer pressure.
I’ve been told many times that I would be a great mom. I’m very maternal and love being a supportive friend.
But just because I would be a good mom, does that mean I want to be?
My generation has more freedom in deciding whether to have kids than any generation before us. I’m incredibly grateful for that privilege. Previous generations of women were expected to have kids and to do so at a much younger age. This generational change can make it challenging to imagine what the future might look like if I don’t have kids, since there are fewer examples of childfree women to look to. But I am doing my best to imagine both scenarios.
When I start to picture the early days of being a mom, mental health is my biggest concern. I hear stories of women who face postpartum depression or other mental health challenges during or after birth.
The lack of sleep, stress, and pregnancy hormones create variables I can’t control. I have a mental illness that makes sleep incredibly important to stay stable. And having a newborn crying all night would put that in jeopardy.
Ruby Warrington writes in her book Women without Kids, “Am I willing to risk my mental health to have a baby? I sometimes think that guarding my sanity so ferociously makes me selfish.”
The idea of sanity being selfish hit home for me.
I also wonder about the somewhat selfish motivations for having a child. For example, I’m an only child and would like it if my family lived on another generation. It’s a common desire for people to want to have kids so they can help take care of them as they age. I always wondered what it would be like if I had a daughter who looked like me (my mom and I look so much alike, and I love it).
On the other side of this exhausting mental roundtable, I see so many reasons why having kids sounds lovely. The idea of seeing the world fresh through a child’s eyes, building a family, watching them learn and grow, and absorbing the world around them. Getting to do arts and crafts, play outside, and be silly.
But I think there are more reasons why it scares the hell out of me. Not being able to control the health, happiness, or well-being of the person I love most in the world sounds quite stressful.
There’s much less freedom and flexibility with a sprinkle of identity loss. I literally just wrote a book on how much I love quiet, and being in the crossfire of toddler tantrums seems like it might make finding quiet pretty tricky.
Oh, did I mention that it’s also very expensive?
For my dear friends who are receiving this and know me mostly for writing and making art about climate change, I promise the dots are connected.
The world is a pretty scary place right now on many fronts, climate change being one of them. I often get asked if climate change is a factor in my decision. Yes and no. At one point, I thought I didn’t want to have kids solely because of the climate crisis.
Now I think parents have the biggest reason to fight for our future. It’s a personal decision for every person, but I see both sides.
I think about adoption, and I like that it doesn’t require my body to bring a new child into this world. I think I’m more open to adopting or being a foster parent than most of my friends.
Particularly because the idea of being pregnant and giving birth does not sound appealing to me whatsoever. I remember when I was little, I thought that by the time I was old enough, they would have technology that babies could just be born outside of me.
Which is technically a surrogate. So you know, it’s possible. But an extremely expensive and complicated option. The only certainty I know within this question is that I’m not interested in raising a child alone.
This piece comes from my own personal perspective after over 2 years of oscillating and noodling and going back and forth. I’ve interviewed friends and family members with kids as if I’m a filmmaker making a documentary on the concept of parenthood. But it’s just little old me trying to make a big life decision.
For those queer, trans, or anyone for whom the path to parenthood looks completely different, I see you. I can imagine this question is even more complex. While my decision tree may have different branches, we both are swaying through this foggy air together.
As I check the score on this game of mental ping pong, I’ve decided that I’m about 80% sure that I don’t want kids.
On a practical level, this murky clarity translates into regularly changing my Hinge profile between “Don’t want kids” and “Not sure” if I want kids.
There is a world where I change my mind. Maybe I just haven’t met the right person yet. I’m sure there are blind spots I haven’t discovered in this process. But that’s where I’ve settled for now.
I’ve had more friends have kids since I started thinking about this, and I am loving getting to be around their little ones and see them grow up. And I think that might be enough.
I think enough for me might look like being an amazing Aunt Nicole. Maybe volunteering more with kids. And definitely being a dog mom.
Though I don’t have a final verdict, I wanted to share my experience and thought process in case it resonates with other folks out there grappling with this question.
I’m giving you a big hug and know that you will come to the right decision at some point. Maybe that’s later rather than sooner. But for now, I hope you can be gentle with yourself, because I know it’s not easy dancing with this uncertainty.
Love,
Nicole
P.S. Here are a few of my favorite resources I’ve found during this journey:
Liz Moody’s Podcast: Kids or No Kids? Sharing my choice and all the reasons behind it. Listen here.
Mari Andrew ’s post sharing that she’s pregnant and her recent posts on being a mom. Read here, here, and here.
New York Times: What I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Motherhood by Daniela J. Lamas. Read here.
Cry when the baby cries by Becky Barnicoat
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