Maybe Baby: 28 Writers Tell the Truth About Skepticism, Infertility, Baby Lust, Childlessness, Ambivalence, and How They Made the Biggest Decision of Their Lives

LORI LEIBOVICH

Introduction

IT ALL BEGAN WITH A LETTER.

A woman in her thirties wrote to Salon, begging us to publish more stories about people who had chosen not to have children. The reader, herself struggling with the question of whether to procreate, spoke of the personal cost of giving up her salary as the primary breadwinner in her family, even temporarily. What would the return be on the investment? she wrote. Are there any laws that would require my children to pay for my nursing home when I am old? Are they going to be a sufficient hedge against poverty and loneliness? This woman’s letter—which was marked not for publication—set off a fierce debate among the Salon staff. Some thought the reader was crass and emotionally crippled, and said anyone who would think about childbearing in stark financial terms shouldn’t be a parent in the first place. Others defended her, saying she was being refreshingly honest about her fears. The fact that she was painstakingly examining her decision to have children, they argued, made her far more responsible than those who have kids simply because they feel they should.

Since the issues raised by this reader sparked such a spirited discussion in our office, we decided that the question was worth pondering in a public forum. Why have children, anyway? And should you have them if you don’t feel a biological or emotional urge? If you don’t, will you feel those urges later, and regret it? Does choosing not to have children mean you’re selfish? Or are those people who choose to have children to fulfill themselves, or to ease loneliness, or to take care of them in old age, the really selfish ones? Are the sacrifices to your body, your finances, and your freedom worth it? And why do so many parents preach the procreation gospel to their non-parent friends? How can anyone making the decision to parent ever really grasp the magnitude of the changes, good and bad, that it will cause in their life?

We wrestled with these and other questions in a Salon series called To Breed or Not to Breed that ran in May 2003. Among the highlights, all of which appear in this book, was Salon’s staff writer Michelle Goldberg’s essay—the confessions of a happily married twenty-seven-year-old who didn’t want kids but feared she’d regret it if she didn’t become a mother; Cary Tennis, Salon’s popular advice columnist, wrote about searching for his biological urge for children and still coming up empty, though married and settled, at fifty; Amy Benfer, a twenty-nine-year-old writer and former associate editor for Salon’s Mothers Who Think section, told of her controversial decision to go ahead with an unplanned pregnancy at sixteen, against the advice of those she trusted. The essays were personal, provocative, and counterintuitive.

Publishing an online magazine means instant feedback. Within minutes of posting articles, we know what our readers are thinking. In our eight years in the business, however, we have never been deluged with so much emotionally charged mail as we were after we launched To Breed or Not to Breed. We were shocked and a little overwhelmed, as hundreds of readers flooded our in-boxes with their stories—some heartbreaking, some heartwarming, none simple—about how their choices about children shaped their lives.

Many readers thanked us profusely for recognizing and respecting the choice to remain childless. Once-reluctant couples shared their conversion stories about how their lives had been enriched after they became parents. One mother wrote that until she had a child, she felt invisible and underappreciated by society. A father wrote with sadness about the trouble he was having staying close to his childless friends because they had so little in common anymore. The most memorable—and tragic—letter came from a mother who wrote that she wished she had never had her son, a teenager with severe emotional problems.

What made our readers so passionate about the question of whether or not to breed? For the first time in history, parenthood isn’t a given. Until a generation ago, most Americans got married and had kids, period, even if they were doing it later. But thanks to enhanced reproductive technology, greater freedom for women, the advent of the birth-control pill, and changing attitudes about what constitutes a family, people have new and often confusing choices when it comes to having children. Couples can opt out of parenthood, women can have children into their fifties, single women can procreate on their own, and gays and lesbians can start families—or not. All of the old rules about childbearing no longer apply.

We realized that the stories that appeared in the Salon series were just the tip of the iceberg. We wanted to dig deeper into this issue that causes so much guilt, anxiety, and strong opinions. We decided to explore in this anthology the question of whether or not to parent. While the novelty of the series came from those who were passionately against having children, the book would need to address a wider range of experiences: those who grappled with doubts but went ahead and had kids anyway; those who went to great lengths to become parents by pursuing in vitro fertilization and adoption; those whose decisions about childbearing were informed by their negative experiences as sons and daughters; those who entered into parenthood blithely only to discover that it was much more work than they bargained for; and those who were grappling with their own ambivalence about parenthood and wondering what they should do.

In a particularly timely example of life imitating art, I found out I was pregnant three weeks after I began work on the book. Suddenly, what had started as a purely professional project became a personal one, too. I knew I wanted to have children years before I was ready to have a baby. When I thought of my future, I saw children there. I remember sitting at the student union in college, puffing away on a cigarette and telling a friend that while I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to be a wife, I was positive I wanted to be a mother. As I entered my thirties, this foregone conclusion took on a biological, physical dimension. I fell in love, got married, and immediately wanted to grow my new family. The ticking of the proverbial clock became louder.

It was when I actually got pregnant that I became ambivalent. Almost immediately, I was knocked sideways by anxiety—not to mention nausea, depression, and crippling fatigue. For someone who thrived on control and order, I resented the fact that my body had been hijacked—and the reality of my professional and personal life about to be upended in a mere nine months sent me spiraling. Suddenly I felt that I hadn’t planned this well at all. How could I edit a book about deciding to become a parent when I felt like I was walking on such unsteady ground myself? I should have waited to have kids when my career was in a more stable place. What was my rush?

Maybe working on this book while you’re pregnant will be therapeutic, one friend suggested. Maybe it will help you clarify why you made the choice you did. Before working on the To Breed series, I had never really considered why I wanted to be a parent, just that I would do it, some way, somehow. It was a biological, more than a rational decision.

But now, for many people, biology plays a less central role. A generation ago, if you were gay or unmarried, you didn’t have a choice about parenthood. Your decision was made for you by society, by the limits of science or of your own imagination. Married women—and it was always the women—who remained childless used to be viewed as defective, or they were pitied. Today, according to Census Bureau data from June 2002, 26.7 million women aged fifteen to forty-four are childless, a record number. Other reports estimate that one in one hundred children in this country are now conceived with assisted reproductive technology. Meanwhile, thousands of single women decide to have children on their own, and there are more than two million gay households with some three million children.

Many essays in this book confront this new frontier of parenting, this wilderness of choices. I sought out writers whose work I admired, and those whose decisions about parenthood were complicated or unique. I contacted parents and non-parents, and asked them to honestly, bravely examine their choices. Laurie Abraham writes about how drinking connects her to the person she was before she had children. Joe Loya and Maud Casey look at their decision about whether or not to parent through the prism of mental illness, and ask themselves whether it’s selfish to pass on bad genes. Lionel Shriver admits that she’d rather play tennis than take care of a baby. Dani Shapiro writes about how the bad mothering she received made her fearful about becoming a mother herself.

For most of us, the decision of whether or not to parent is one of the most important we ever make. I hope that these stories will expand and deepen a dialogue that only began with the To Breed or Not to Breed series. My own journey into parenthood was made much richer because of this book. It was wonderful, in the first few months, to talk to some of the authors of these essays about the miraculous and tedious parts of parenthood, about the fact that my identity—the person I knew myself as—was slipping away every day and in its place was this person, this mother, whom I didn’t know or recognize. I received an e-mail from Anne Lamott shortly after I sent her a photo of my newborn son, and she wrote, Isn’t it amazing? Isn’t it hard, and kind of awful sometimes? But there were also moments—such as a rainy April day when my son was so hysterical that I had to hold him on top of the dryer for an hour in order to calm him down—when I thought about my childless contributors and felt profound envy.

As I write this, the product of my decision sleeps in the next room. He is one year old, with a full head of red hair, sparkling blue eyes, a determined and joyful spirit, and chronic ear infections. I am thirty-four, with my first gray hairs and lines around my eyes. I am exhausted, ecstatic, guilty, and wholly in love. I am his mother. It’s a word I’m not yet used to, even one year into this game, and yet here we are.

PART ONE

No Thanks, Not for Me

MICHELLE GOLDBERG

To Breed or Not to Breed

WHEN PEOPLE LEARN THAT I’M IN MY LATE TWENTIES, happily married, and am not planning to have children, they respond in one of two ways. Most of the time, they smile patronizingly and say, You’ll change your mind. Sometimes they do me the favor of taking me seriously, in which case they warn, You’ll regret it.

I’ve heard this enough that I’ve started worrying that they might be right. After all, I’m not completely insensitive to the appeal of motherhood. In fact, I have a name chosen for the daughter I don’t plan to have, and sometimes I imagine the life I could give her. Spared my mortifying suburban childhood, she’d be one of those sparkling, precocious New York City kids I’ve always envied. I’d take her around the world, to study languages in Europe, to see the Potala Palace and the Taj Mahal. She’d have all I wish I’d had.

My husband doesn’t particularly want to be a father, but he’s said that, should I ever feel the ravenous baby hunger said to descend on women in their thirties, he could be coaxed into parenthood. He’s a loving and generous man, and I have no doubt he’d dote on our child if we had one. So would his wonderful family, who live within walking distance of us. They’re the reason his sister, a bar owner, has more of a social life than any other young mother I’ve met. I think of his grandmother and late grandfather, who lived in a rambling house in rural Maine. Three generations of their adoring descendants admired them as few people admire the very old anymore, and seeing that has made me think that family can be the key to the best kind of life.

Still, the vague pleasures I sometimes associate with having children are either distant or abstract. Other women say they feel a yearning for motherhood like a physical ache. I don’t know what they’re talking about. The daily depredations of child-rearing, though, seem so viscerally real that my stomach tightens when I ponder them. A child, after all, can’t be treated as a fantasy projection of my imagined self. He or she would be another person, with needs and desires that I would be tethered to for decades. And everything about meeting those needs fills me with horror. Not just the diapers and the shrieking, the penury and career stagnation, but the parts that maternally minded friends of mine actually look forward to: the wearying grammar-school theatrical performances. Hours spent on the playground when I’d rather be reading books or writing them. Parent-teacher conferences. Birthday parties. Ugly primary-colored plastic toys littering my home.

I can sort of see that it might be nice to have children, but there are a thousand things I’d rather spend my time doing than raise them. The daily grind of motherhood seems like a prison sentence to me. Though I have nothing but respect for the work of raising children, I don’t like being around them. At least, I don’t like being around most of them most of the time. Some people say I’ll feel different about my own, but I’m not sure I want to take the risk. I think about Martha Gellhorn, the globe-trotting war correspondent who, when she was middle-aged, adopted a little boy in a moment of loneliness and sentimentality. At first, she was in love, like mothers are. Then she grew bored and frustrated. According to a recent biography of her, she was terrible to him, and he was the great failure of her life.

Two years ago, when I wrote a story about all this for Salon, I got dozens of letters in response. Most were empathetic, but a few, mostly from men, were disgusted, calling me a selfish caricature of feminism. Those letters hurt because I suspected they might be right, that some nurturing part was missing in me. But I doubt the wisdom of bringing someone into the world just to defy that fear.

Especially when motherhood seems so hard even for those who want it more than anything. When I wrote my Salon story, I spoke to Rick Hanson, a California clinical psychologist and coauthor of Mother Nurture: A Mother’s Guide to Health in Body, Mind, and Intimate Relationships. He told me that raising a child is grueling even for those who like childish things. Most parents, men and women, say they dramatically underestimated how intensely demanding, stressful, and depleting parenthood would be, he told me.

Meanwhile, despite general social disapproval of childless women, their ranks are growing. A quarter of American women will never have children, Hanson said. The numbers are similar in other developed countries. Some of these women can’t have kids, but others simply have other priorities. Three-quarters of America’s childless women are physically able to be mothers, according to Hanson.

They won’t always be. Fertility starts declining in your mid-thirties. Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s 2002 book Creating a Life may have been shoddy, irritating, and smug, but it was accurate in its assessment of the dismal odds stacked against women who seek fertility treatments in their forties. After a certain age, having a baby is no longer an option.

This breeds another fear—that I’ll regret my effrontery in defying the whole history of the human race. Are deliberately childless women setting themselves up for a lifetime of barren desolation?

According to the experts I spoke to, the happy answer is no.

When I started writing my story for Salon, I would have described myself as ambivalent about childbearing. Yet when experts told me I was unlikely to suffer debilitating psychological fallout if I spared myself motherhood, I felt enormous relief, as if I’d been let off the hook. They said that people who choose not to have children (as opposed to those who desperately want to have children but can’t) tend to have better marriages, better finances, less stress, and are no more likely to be unhappy in old age than parents. Most people, and especially most women, have a physiological yearning to reproduce, whatever the costs, and are glad they did. Yet maybe being born free of that desire is a gift.

Some women really do love mothering, Madelyn Cain, author of The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today, told me. I happen to be one of them. I love being a mother. It’s the greatest joy of my life, but what makes me happy and brings me fulfillment doesn’t necessarily make everyone else happy.

The notion that different people have different desires shouldn’t be a difficult one, but when it comes to motherhood, many people can’t get their heads around it. Even Cain had trouble at first. She began The Childless Revolution in part because she was angered by the dismissive way her childless friends were treated, and because she was struck by the newfound social acceptance she experienced when she had her first baby at thirty-nine. Yet part of her still believed that deep down every woman wanted to be a mother, a misconception undone by the more than one hundred interviews she did for her book.

What she discovered was that choice, not motherhood, is the real key to happiness. Cain divides the women in her book into three groups—those who affirmatively decide not to have children, those who can’t have children, and those for whom circumstances never align to make motherhood happen. Citing her own interviews as well as books like Elaine Campbell’s Childless Marriage: An Exploratory Study of Couples Who Do Not Want Children, Elaine Tyler May’s Barren in the Promised Land: Childless Americans and the Pursuit of Happiness, and Marion Faux’s Childless by Choice: Choosing Childlessness in the Eighties, Cain said, The ones who decide they don’t want children, they don’t regret it.

Cain came to believe that lack of interest in childbearing might be biological, like being gay. Researchers have found that within mice, there is a gene, the Mest gene. When it was in place in mice, and the mouse gave birth, it was a nurturing mother. When the mouse was Mest-deficient, it was a non-nurturing mouse. I think down the line we’re going to discover that just as homosexuality is something that’s physical, the same thing will be discovered about women. Why do some women melt at the sight of babies while other women are indifferent? It would seem to me it’s something innate.

That’s why Cain said women who don’t want kids should ignore the well-meaning advice they’re often bombarded with. Don’t second-guess yourself, she says. Trust your instincts.

That might seem obvious, but the strange thing about being a woman without much interest in mothering is that many people you love and admire will tell you not to trust your instincts. Motherhood, they say, is, for all its struggles, an experience of such ineffable joy that those who’ve done it can’t imagine life without it. Motherhood evangelists have a store of conversion stories. Either they, or someone they know intimately, had once been like me, cherishing their independence and impatient with children. But when bathed by the blissful hormones that accompany procreation, they saw the light and now their lives are richer and more meaningful than they ever thought possible. They say those who haven’t parented can’t even begin to comprehend its radiant satisfactions. And, of course, they’re right—we can’t.

That’s what makes the decision to forgo it so hard. There are few experiences in life that come more highly extolled than parenting, so how can you ever know if you’re making a mistake by rejecting it? It’s fairly easy to find stories of those who regret not having children, but it’s difficult to find a mother who will say she wishes she’d made a different choice.

It’s very rare for a woman who has children to regret having children, Hanson told me. You will find women who say, on the one hand, ‘I love my children, they’re profoundly fulfilling, and I can’t imagine not having had them.’ But on the other hand, they’ll say, ‘Boy, this is really stressful. This has really strained my marriage. My health has never been up to par since I had my first or second child. I really regret the impact of having kids on my career. Having children has made me financially dependent, and really limited my options for making money.’ I hear them say all those things, but you rarely hear moms actually saying, bottom line, I should never have done it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they never feel that way, though. Among the many e-mails I received in response to my Salon article were a few from women who said they wished they’d never had kids, but that they couldn’t admit that wish to anyone. In 1975, many women told Ann Landers the same thing. A woman wrote to her with qualms much like mine—she and her husband were torn about childbearing and asked, Were the rewards enough to make up for the grief? Landers put the question to her readers, asking, If you had to do it over again, would you have children? Astonishingly, 70 percent of her respondents said no.

Just a few weeks ago, I was having dinner at a friend’s house, trying to carry on a conversation between the demands of her toddler and the cries of her baby girl. When her first child was born, she’d tried to work, but soon found she was paying nearly as much for day care as she was earning. Now, despite her intellectual ambitions and first-rate education, she’s a full-time mother, a role she seems half-amazed to be playing. I talked to my friend about this essay, and about the fact that, for all the sacrifices involved, every mother seems to recommend motherhood.

I don’t recommend it, she said.

She was speaking in a harried moment. At other times, she’s told me that motherhood has brought her more happiness and satisfaction than she’d ever felt before. There’s no way for me, an outsider, to know which of those sentiments predominates in her hectic life, and which is more enduring.

Overall, though, Hanson told me that mothers generally aren’t more satisfied with their lives than childless women are. For all the truth about the innate physiological rewards of mothering, he said, The happy people are the ones who wanted kids and had them or didn’t want kids and didn’t have them.

This is true even in old age, a time when many assume the childless will suffer alone while their peers are comforted by grandchildren. A few years ago, Tanya Koropeckyj-Cox, a sociology professor at the University of Florida who researches aging, completed a study based on surveys of 3,800 men and women between the ages of fifty and eighty-four. For years we have heard warnings that if you don’t have children, you will regret it later, she said in a press release. But beliefs about childlessness leading to a lonely old age are simply not supported by our study. In a previous report published in 1998, Koropeckyj-Cox concluded that there are no significant differences in loneliness and depression between parents and childless adults.

Besides, what some parents gain in intimacy with their children, they lose in intimacy with their partners. Research has shown that on the average the greatest challenge to a couple is becoming parents, Hanson said. Many marriages hold together for a few years when the child is young, but they’ve been strained beyond repair by everything that comes from having kids, and the couple divorces, maybe by the time the kid reaches first grade. Some people think they will save their relationship by having children. It almost never happens."

He cited a study by John Gottman, a renowned expert on marriage at the University of Washington, which estimates that couples have eight times more arguments after becoming parents. Hanson said he’s seen this in his life as well as his practice. Many couples overcome all this, and having children brings them closer together. That’s certainly true for my wife and myself. But during the early years—our kids are now fifteen and almost thirteen—boy, we quarreled and were emotionally distant and troubled in our marriage like we’d never been. We argued about all the issues that new parents commonly argue about—how to raise the children, who is doing more, the inevitable lack of time for an intimate relationship.

You can hear the same complaints in one of those 1975 letters sent to Ann Landers, which Cain reprinted in her book: I am 40, and my husband is 45. We have twin children under 8 years of age. I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an overly exhausted nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him. Our children took all the romance out of our marriage. I’m too tired for sex, conversation or anything.

Such alienation is less likely when people don’t have children. Statistics show childless couples are happier, Cain said. Their lives are self-directed, they have a better chance of intimacy, and they do not have the stresses, financial and emotional, of parenthood.

That, finally, is why I think I’ll resist the pressure to give in and join the natural order of the world. I love my husband too much, and he’s enough of a family for me. When people talk about marriage being hard work and full of compromises, I worry that some day I’ll understand what they mean, but so far, I don’t. That’s a miracle I’m continually grateful for, and one I don’t want to strain with responsibilities neither of us wants.

Still, when people say you’ll change your mind, they could be right. If that happens, though, I hope it’s because the desire to be a mother smacks me sideways, and not because I’m afraid of what it means that the desire isn’t there.

ELINOR BURKETT

Emancipation from Propagation

BARBIE NEVER SET A HIGH-HEELED FOOT into the pastel bedroom that was my girlhood home. Nor did Pitiful Pearl, Chatty Cathy, Mrs. Beasley, Shirley Temple, or Raggedy Ann. Although my mother filled my refuge in a tony suburb of Philadelphia with all the other accoutrements of 1950s middle-class girlhood—from stitched-down pleated skirts and cardigan sweaters to circle pins and Seventeen magazines—she never gave me a single doll. On birthdays and Hanukkah, she wrapped up puzzles and books instead. Subconsciously, I absorbed the message: Reading and figuring things out are more important than warming bottles and changing diapers.

In case I missed that not-so-subtle instruction woven into her purchasing habits, my mother—not one to leave matters to chance—made her meaning abundantly clear in a more direct fashion: Don’t worry about getting married and having a family, she told me whenever she noticed me playing house too seriously and, later, when I seemed to be daydreaming too obsessively about some perfect future with my latest boyfriend. Go to school, develop your profession, she counseled. Everything else can come later.

I suspect that I would have assimilated that admonition subliminally even if she hadn’t been so forthright; I knew that my mother hadn’t forced her way into the Ivy League, joining the first class of female graduates from the University of Pennsylvania, looking for a husband, a house in the suburbs, and a yard filled with screaming kids. A woman of steely intellect and fierce determination, she had envisioned a life as a scientist, and I became part of the plan only after she and my father bowed to pressure from their families to create a more conventional life.

Encased in an icy shell of self-protectiveness, my mother never spoke to me of the price she paid for her dreams’ denial. She died without uttering a word about whether she had been haunted by her thwarted aspirations or