Mother load

I was 14 when I told my best friend I never wanted children.

“You can’t do that,” she said, staring at me, shocked. “You have to have kids.”

“Actually, I think it’s pretty easy not to,” I replied with a laugh.

As it turned out, I was right.

I didn’t always feel that way. And I don’t actually feel that way now, but life now is also a lot more complicated.

When I was a child, I aspired to motherhood, toting around dolls like many young girls do. By the time I was in the seventh grade, however, my thoughts on the matter had changed dramatically. By this point, my parents had divorced and my mother worked full-time as a nurse on the night shift at a hospital. There was a baby sitter, but I still often found myself tasked with watching my two baby brothers—a job that meant sleepless nights when my youngest brother had croup, soothing temper tantrums and keeping everyone on schedule on rushed school mornings.

There was love and fun, too, but when you find yourself sleeping with an anxious, sick 2-year-old the night before a math test, your perspective on parenting changes radically.

Thus, in my 20s—theoretically the best time, from a physical standpoint, to have children—I tried to avoid pregnancy as if it were a disease. I had college to think about, my first job, travel and the fine art of building relationships.

In my early 30s, however, my feelings started to shift. Most certainly that had something to do with being married, happily, to someone with whom I could imagine shouldering the responsibility of parenthood. Perhaps, too, there was something biological at work. Still, I remember the personal affront I felt when a doctor asked me if I wanted to have children.

“Sure, someday,” I said.

“You better hurry up, time’s running out,” she said.

I found her comment intrusive, offensive even. Was she going to come baby sit this future baby? Would she stay up late with it on sleepless nights so that my career wouldn’t suffer? Not only could we not afford to be a one-income household, I didn’t want to stop working.

Then, the concept of parenthood—even as I started to consider it a possibility—seemed absolutely terrifying from a practical standpoint. How did other people afford it? How did they make it work?

These days, my friends who have kids nod sympathetically when I tell them I still don’t know if we’re ready—financially, logistically or emotionally.

But, they advise me, if I really wanted children, I’d figure out a way to make it work.

“You don’t have to plan everything,” one friend said to me. “Parenthood is not something you’re ever ‘ready’ for. If you want it bad enough, you find a way to make it happen.”

Fair enough.

But even now that I’m in my 40s and thinking about the biology of it, I know that it’s not as simple as reworking a budget or figuring out how to turn the office into a baby’s room. It’s about day care and sleepless nights, long hours at the office, and a society that encourages family values but does not provide even the barest bones of an infrastructure to support them. Parental-leave benefits in the United States are among the worst in First World countries—12 weeks of unpaid time off—and the costs of day care and health insurance can be astronomical.

It’s not about choosing a career over family or vice versa. It’s not about working mothers vs. stay-at-home mothers—an ongoing national debate that seems to miss the point entirely—it’s about finding a balance and remembering how hard it was for my mother.