Whether to have kids (weather to have kids?)
A reader seeks advice / A part I cut from All Fours / Writing about kids.
In the chat a woman writes:
Hi chat!! Having big scary convos in my partnership about whether to have kids. I made up my mind a long time ago that I didn’t want kids (and always resented all the pressure around it) but now my partner does and there is a part of me that wonders what if…. and I just need guidance on making this huge decision and navigating this choice.
Not a new question, but one I wanted to put here so that we might lift the veil between group members of different generations. This response from @katrinamichie caught my eye:
I knew I wanted a child and I don’t regret it even being divorced and single. But, I tell people if you’re not sure maybe don’t. It’s hard. It’s expensive. It can be all-consuming at stages. I don’t know that most people regret having children who do, even if they’re on the fence, but I think it’s valid to not want children, especially if you’ll be the birthing parent or you have a male partner.
“If you’re not sure maybe don’t” is what I’ve thought, loudly, though I’ve never said it this directly — I find it hard to, as a person who wanted and had a child. Here is a section of an early draft of All Fours that I cut1, written when my child was seven or eight:
If we described the hardship of a mother’s life accurately, in practical terms (“unless you have money you won’t have very much time for your creative work, yourself, or even your children”2) we might actually cause a woman to change her mind, and this feels like playing God. Who are we to encourage or discourage a soul into the world? Shouldn't the woman stay a bit dumb, a bit unknowing, so that the purity of her yearning can decide? And furthermore, the lives of are own, already-born children are so precarious that to tip the scales towards the non-existence of any child, even a future one, seems dangerous. If you warned too hard, seemed too ungrateful, mightn’t your own child die? A mother’s gods are forever wrathful and present — cars careening by, dropped knives, peanut allergies. The heart jumps to the throat so regularly, why risk it? And as always with women: we each believe we are the only one who feels this way; it is our personal, shameful failure. There is no useful reason to admit it, since it doesn’t apply to anyone else.
Also one other thing: once you have a child, you are unlikely to be able to comfortably imagine a life without them. And this seems to prove their worth. But does it? People tend to adapt to their hardships and then grow protective of them, conservative. (I’m thinking of women who stay with terrible men, defending them.) The unfamiliar, even if it is joy, seems perverse, almost evil. We hunker down in our misery.
Now that my child is thirteen and I’m divorced mothering feels, if not easier, then better. Less hunkering, less misery. But it’s still hard to write about; I find myself hemming and hawing with this text, writing paragraphs that are odes to my child — wanting them/you to know what a joy and honor it is to be their mom — and then deleting, because surely I don’t have to plead my case before the gods right now. (Yes. Now and forever. A writer I know mentioned only believing he was as good as his last book; this seemed lenient to me. More like: only as good as the the last thing you said or did.) (More on this later.)
One thing that I do tell women vacillating about motherhood is that these kids know their future will be radically shaped by environmental catastrophe. Even if you say little to nothing about this, they will find out (by around age seven) and when they ask you about it — "Is it true...?" — you will not know what to say because the truth is too uncertain and awful and you are trying to give them a safe feeling inside. But they will know, more and more, and this will quietly shape everything. The dark humor of kids these days is chilling at times. During the fires here in LA our immediate safety concerns played out above a steady back beat of: if it's like this now, and they are only twelve...
How are you thinking about all this? The conversation is obviously changing, women are having less kids, but still: my young (mostly queer) friends all have babies. What do you say to your friends who are trying to decide?
It was one thread too many and given that the narrator was already lying, cheating, fucking, questioning marriage, etc, I felt like this fictional child needed their mom's profound love more than further unmooring.
This description of "a mother life" was a place holder for something I would have expanded on…but if I had made myself do that then I would have grown bored with writing altogether. I always skip the boring parts and come back.
I always say (to straight women...): when your male partner says he wants to be a dad you should find out exactly what he thinks that role entails.
I remember my old therapist said that she never had a patient who regretted having a child, even if it was hard, but many patients regretted not having kids. It made me think, but wasn't a deciding factor for me.
I didn't meet my husband until we were both 40 (first marriage for both) and neither one of us felt strongly about having kids or not. We chose not to use birth control and let "fate" decide (insert eye roll). When I wasn't pregnant after about 6 months we thought, "Maybe we should do some fertility testing, just to see if there's an issue."
As it turned out, my husband's sperm were both slow and misshapen. Long story short, we ended up going through 5 rounds of IVF, one missed miscarriage using my own eggs at 12 weeks, two egg donors and a sperm donor. There's even more I could write about special genetic testing we did on embryos using my husband's sperm because he had a genetic disorder (neurofibromatosis or NF1) that we didn't want to pass on to a child.
We were both driven by the desire to be co-parents, especially me since mine had divorced when I was five and I didn't have a great dad. I was thrilled that my son would grow up with two parents, both very involved with his care. However, they say that man plans and God laughs.
I hadn't planned on being a single mother and I never would have gone through all that I did to have a child without my husband, but he was diagnosed with incurable cancer when our son was 6 years old. He died three years later in 2021 when my son was 9. He just turned 13 in February and he is becoming more independent. It's a mixed bag. At first it was very hard dealing with both of our grief and I wondered if it would have been better if I was left alone. More recently I am so glad that I do have my son because he gives me a reason to keep on living.
I guess my point is that we have to make the best of the life we are given. There's very little we can control in life other than our own thoughts, feelings and actions. I have been devastated but also expanded. The year after my husband died I reconnected to my own sexuality. I had sex with younger men in my apartment when my son was in school. I explored, I took many, many photos of myself dressed in lingerie, naughty costumes and nudes.
I created an alter ego and started an IG account under her name and wrote about grief in my captions. I wrote a memoir about my experience and it will be published May 5, 2026. I had been an administrator at an Ivy League university in NYC before all this. We had life insurance so I have my own money and I can live the way I want. But I'm also sad and lonely and wonder if I will ever love or be loved like that again.