I just spent the holidays with family. I’ve been married a year. I’m approaching my mid-30s. And due to an unrelenting year at work, I’ve gained some weight. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the last few weeks have featured a conversational dance of hinted “are-you-pregnant” questions.
I’ve ignored the hints and laughed off the passing comments about future grandchildren. What I haven’t responded with is my honest answer: I’m terrified about having kids.
Here’s why, from my least to most significant reasons.
I’m uncertain about the marriage consequences.
I love my husband. One reason I married him is because he’s always patient and kind. He can race cars for an hour with a child and never express boredom or frustration. He does not hesitate to get in the dirt with a toddler and stare at crunchy leafs and colorful rocks. It’s endearing. He’ll make an amazing father.
Yet I’ve seen marriages fracture under the stress of children. I don’t want that to happen to us, but I’m not sure how to prevent it.
I’m concerned about the financial consequences.
Kids are expensive. I grew up in a thrifty family. I am familiar with Craigslist furniture, second-hand clothing, Costco groceries, budget activities, and public schools. But despite kibitzing on parenting forums I know I haven’t fully priced in the costs. It’s hard to comprehend that quality childcare costs more per year than college tuition.
Further, my husband is a bankruptcy lawyer. I can’t help but worry about injury or chronic illness. Even with good jobs and health insurance, most American families are one health crisis away from bankruptcy. Adding kids multiplies that risk.
I’m apprehensive about the health consequences.
I have a pretty good sense for how my body operates. But I have no visceral sense of what hosting an alien parasite for nine months will do to it. I suspect pregnancy and childbirth will wreak havoc. Endless diet restrictions, throwing up, swelling, weight gain, strange hormones, torn flesh and resulting stitches, weird leaking fluids, sudden depression, pervasive exhaustion – my sisters and close friends have experienced them all. They sound unpleasant.
And those are the medically best-case-scenarios. They assume my husband and I won’t struggle with infertility. Even if we can conceive easily, miscarriages, stillbirths, and other major health complications are omnipresent risks. The U.S. maternal and infant mortality rates are not great (although far worse for women of color). I know too many families who have experienced devastating loss.
Still, billions of women have survived childbirth before me, and odds are I will too. (Inshallah.)
I’m concerned about the career consequences.
For the first 25 years of my life I never dared dream I would have a career. Now I have one, but I have zero confidence it will survive children.
I’ve worked places that seem professional about maternity leave. But I’ve also been in environments where my spine tingled with awareness that announcing a pregnancy would result in me (or any woman) being sidelined or fired. Maybe jobs exist where “family-friendly” is not a marketing lie? But from what I’ve seen in my field, I doubt it.
Even if my job reacts appropriately, there are still pragmatic consequences. Kids mean I can’t perform at the same level of productivity. I need sleep. My body is happiest when I go to bed at 10pm and wake up at 7am. I can’t get nine hours of sleep when I’m waking up every two hours to cradle a screaming child. I can’t be as alert during the workday when my sleep has been so interrupted. I can’t focus in project-mode, ignore rush hour, and lose track of when kids need to be picked up and fed. I can’t stay in the office until midnight to meet a court deadline. And I doubt I’ll be able to put the kids in bed at 8pm and then do a four-hour “mommy shift” like many of my colleagues — I’ll collapse from exhaustion.
Last year I jetsetted across the country multiple times per month. One reason I accepted those assignments was my foreboding sense that I had one shot to prove I was a hard-working and competent team player before kids ruined everything. Maintaining that schedule will not be possible when my doctor is restricting flight, I’m throwing up daily, or I’m breastfeeding.
I know kids will require me to set stronger work-life boundaries. (Which honestly, will probably be a good thing.) But I’m worried those boundaries will decimate my “billable” hours and destroy my professional reputation. I’ve studied too much capitalism, litigated too many civil rights lawsuits, and read too many internet comments to discount the severity of the threat.
I’m petrified about the spiritual consequences.
The “Eternal Marriage” course manual for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints dedicates an entire chapter to “Mother’s Employment Outside the Home.”
The chapter opens with President Hinckley’s famous pronouncement: “It is well-nigh impossible to be a full-time homemaker and a full-time employee.”
That “impossibility” message is etched onto my soul.
It doesn’t matter how many faithful working mothers I have sought out as role models. It doesn’t matter how many children of working mothers I have seen blossom into happy and confident adults. It doesn’t matter how many academic studies and literary summaries I’ve read about a mother’s education and a mother’s career being one of the top global predictors of child success. It doesn’t matter how active I am in the Aspiring Mormon Women Facebook group. At my core, I’m terrified the moment I have children is the moment I ruin them with my selfish career.
I’m no longer willing to give up my career.
A decade ago I planned on making that sacrifice. (I’ve written about my “Proverbs 31” struggle before.) I made major life decisions based on a hypothetical future family. I never considered law school until late in college when I was single and my professors made clear that my continuing education was their expectation.
I picked one of my cheapest law school options not to avoid debt for debt’s sake, but because it was “unfair to mortgage my future family for my own selfishness.” Since I wasn’t planning on having a career, I refused to expect a future husband to pay off my debt.
Even when I finished law school and found a job at a law firm, I envisioned it as a temporary gig. I had gotten married in the summer of 2012 while studying for the bar exam. I planned to pay off my minimal loans and “play” at being a lawyer for a few years, before God ordered me to give it all up and get pregnant.
Then my first marriage was a disaster. One temple-marriage faith crisis later, I left my ex. During Thanksgiving 2015 I told my friends “This year I’m most grateful for the feminist movement of the 1970s. Thanks to those women, California has no-fault divorce and I have financial independence.”
I will not cede that independence now. I own my own car, for which I nerdily ordered First Amendment license plates. I own my own home, which I happily decorated in red. I refused to change my name when I remarried last year. I maintain 100% separate financial accounts. Most importantly, I love my career. I love the chess game of litigation. I’m proud my skills have made a positive difference.
But still my mind plays a broken record of every General Conference talk and young women’s lesson on motherhood. My ex-husband weaponized those against me. A small piece of me still believes him. The internal dialogue is pervasive: I’m the problem. I’m the workaholic. My ambition is selfish. My career is a distraction “only to get the means for a little more luxury and a few fancier toys.” My income, which at times has been higher than my husband’s, fails to center him in the primary position of provider.
I remember bristling around age sixteen during a lesson about preparing to support our future husbands. I asked why I wasn’t allowed to have my own career goals. The laurel advisor answered: “Because as a woman your responsibility is to sacrifice your own interests so that your children can have a better future than you.”
I couldn’t help but retort: “You mean so my —sons— can have a better future. My daughters will be expected to sacrifice just like me.”
Then I felt guilty. I chided myself for not accepting my divinely gendered role in life. I shouldn’t be tempted by worldly success. I went home and prayed for forgiveness.
Now I’m furious on behalf of my sixteen-year-old self. Darn it, I can be both a good lawyer AND a loving mother. I can be a bubbly redhead who bakes amazing snickerdoodles, AND facilitates loyal litigation teams, AND attends soccer practice, AND crushes my opponents in court. Anyone who tells me otherwise is a liar!
Unless they’re not lying.
Unless women can’t have it all.
Unless any attempt to try will destroy both my family and my career.
Unless my selfishness “will bring upon individuals, communities, and nations the calamities foretold by ancient and modern prophets.”
I’m scared my career is my damnation and bearing children will accelerate my fall. No other success can compensate for failure in the home.
I’m terrified of being trapped.
Kids are a permanent decision. Permanent decisions who will scream they hate me and destroy my furniture while hitting me. They are little monsters I cannot leave. You can’t divorce your children.
I’m terrified of enduring years of exhaustion and pain for a faint hope that functional adults might emerge in the end.
I know the joy is supposed to outweigh their temper tantrums. I know raising developmentally appropriate children is categorically different than a horrible romantic relationship as an adult. But I’m terrified it won’t feel that way.
I’m terrified I’ll fail to be a loving mother because I will so desperately want to run away. I’m scared my only solution short of Child Protective Services charging me with abandonment and neglect will be to emotionally check out. My soul can’t survive being that numb again.
Sometimes I “joke” there’s no way I can have kids until the panic attacks triggered by my prior marriage stop. It’s been five years. They haven’t stopped.
I’m afraid of fear itself.
I’ve always assumed time would heal (it’s certainly helping). That one day I would wake up and suddenly be baby-hungry.
It hasn’t happened. I’m trying to confront the idea it may never happen.
I love playing with kids, but I don’t crave one of my own. Yes, I imagine I will someday convert my exercise room into a nursery and decorate it with dinosaurs. I delight when dogs, children, and other guests visit my home and fill it with life and joy. I smile when I think about posting “Adorable Dialogue by my Four-Year-Old” on my Facebook feed. I want to want to have kids.
But I’m scared. Feeding on that fear is the awareness that my mid-thirties have launched a biological doomsday clock. If I don’t get over my fears soon, it may be too late. The pressure makes it worse.
Yet I have to make a choice. A choice with consequences I can neither know nor predict, except that they will have eternal significance.
I’m terrified.