A few months ago, while sitting at a too-loud bar with one of my oldest friends, I got some truly shocking news: She had changed her mind about having children. “We’ve decided to start trying in two or three years,” she said almost sheepishly about her and her partner’s plans. I gaped at her for a few seconds before enveloping her in a bear hug and welling up at the image of a young girl with my friend’s expressive round eyes that popped up in my brain. I knew instantly that I’d love any future child of hers as fiercely as I’ve loved her since I was 12. I was immediately sure, without a shadow of doubt, that my brilliant, beautiful friend will be a great mom. When we untangled from each other, she answered my litany of questions: When did this happen? What changed? How did you know for sure? I felt incandescently happy for her but, as I laid awake in bed later that night, all I could hear was a traitorous little voice in my head: Why can’t you make up your mind?
I’ve always loved children. I grew up surrounded by younger cousins; in college I was a camp counselor and taught ballet to 5-year-olds. I genuinely enjoy playing with little ones and having in-depth conversations with teens. Seeing my friends’ children go from blank-faced newborns unaware of their own limbs to preschoolers with their own hilarious personalities has been a delight. I know I’d enjoy those parts of motherhood — it’s the rest I’m not sure about.
Because knowing too much about pregnancy and motherhood, I fear, has ruined me.
By now we know that the overload of brutally honest information from parents has taught millennial and Gen-Z women to dread becoming mothers. Over the past decade or so, the cultural pendulum has swung from messaging that casts pregnancy and parenthood in a way that’s a bit too sanitized to one with such unflinching transparency you may find yourself recoiling. There’s a reason the Girl With the List has over a million followers on TikTok and r/RegretfulParents draws so many eyeballs. In recent years, Hollywood has also given us a plethora of TV shows and films dancing around the idea that Mothers Are Struggling™ or confronting it head-on. Do you feel on the brink like Rose Byrne in If Had Legs I’d Kick You? Or perhaps you feel more like Sarah Snook in All Her Fault, mothering both your incompetent husband and your child. You could even take your pick between Jennifer Lawrence in Die My Love, Amy Adams in Nightbitch, or Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in The Lost Daughter.
Being a parent in a country actively and increasingly hostile to the needs of working people can be incredibly tough — and that’s before you add in the anti-science right-wing policies that make pregnancy and birth dangerous. As a way-too-online 33-year-old who reports on gender issues, I see it all: the horrific rates of maternal mortality, the increases in denials of emergency abortion care, the unequal caregiving burden even in the best heterosexual partnerships, the child-care cost crisis, the motherhood penalty on women’s careers … The list goes on and on. And then there’s the anecdotal data, particularly with friends who are parents: tales of nearly dying at birth, developing postpartum depression, sleepless nights, letting down after breastfeeding, what one friend refers to as “hot-dog labia,” tantrums that leave the entire family overstimulated, and going long stretches without having sex. It’s enough to make someone wonder why anyone would choose to do this at all.
It isn’t, though, when you see up close how life-affirming it can be to have children. One friend says her two kids have taught her that “the ideal way to be engaging with life is through sincerity and optimism. Cynicism is learned, and keeps you safe, but isn’t a truth about being human.” Another told me, “I had a lot more fun before I had kids, but I had a lot less joy.” The siren call of motherhood can be strong when I hear that.
In one of my group chats, I’m the only friend left who hasn’t become a parent. Recently, they all went back and forth on the challenges of weaning a 1-year-old, the anarchy after adding a second child to the family, and how there are very few places grosser than a classroom full of sniffly first-graders — all in the span of about 90 minutes. “You bitches are constantly giving me whiplash from ‘Oh my God, I want to have a baby’ to ’Oh my God, I am never having a kid’ to ‘Oh my God, okay maybe I can’ to ‘Oh my God, I definitely cannot,’” I joked. But it is true that holding so much overwhelming information at once has made it nearly impossible for me to parse through what I truly desire versus what’s just my anxieties and fears. Should I pursue motherhood with all the risks it entails? Will I regret it if I don’t? Am I holding off because I’m scared of how my life would change or because I don’t want to become a mom at all?
To be clear, I do believe it’s a good thing that people thinking about making such a monumental decision have more information about pregnancy and parenthood than ever before. But truthfully, I wish I knew less. If that was the case, I’d probably have made a choice either way by now rather than being stuck in this almost Peter Pan–like state of anxious ambivalence. Maybe I should just yank my IUD out and leave it up to the universe, hoping that a positive pregnancy test will bring clarity.
I was raised to believe parenthood was an inevitability — the adults in my life, the Evangelical church we worshipped at, and the conservative nature of Puerto Rican society we’ve lived inside made sure of it. As a teen, I’d talk about the day I’d become a mother and how I’d have four kids. Then, at 21, I moved to New York for my master’s degree and met my partner M. The bills made it clear almost immediately it was likely I would not be able to afford four children, and then, as I built my personal and professional life in the city, I found myself wanting to shed what suddenly felt like society’s unfair and gendered expectations of me. Through my 20s, I declared to everyone who’d listen that I’d never have children. Talking over the years, M. was okay with this: Though parenthood has never been part of his life goals, he was comfortable with either course our lives could take. I was — still am — the one volleyballing back and forth. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit and as my 30s approached, I found myself questioning everything I wanted for myself all over again: the scope of my professional ambition, my choice to live in New York, even my stance on motherhood.
Before I knew it, as the world reopened, my yearslong “Hell no” had softened to a “Maybe?” M. and I were now married and the most financially secure we had ever been. We had tentative conversations about what we’d want and how we’d deal with our lives changing. I tried to imagine being pregnant, the sleepless nights with a newborn baby, the glee of seeing the world through a school-age child’s eyes, navigating life with a sulky teen, and Christmas holidays with a loving adult. I could almost see it. Then everything came crashing down when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
A year after the decision, I wrote that, as someone reporting on reproductive health, I was opting out of considering motherhood due to my fear of pregnancy complications while living in North Carolina, which bans abortion care after 12 weeks. Some commenters on social media dismissed me as hysterical, as did a handful people in my life. And yet, a few months after I published the piece, Ciji Graham, a mother with a chronic cardiac condition about an hour away from me, died after being unable to terminate her high-risk pregnancy, according to a recent ProPublica investigation. As I stared at the screen after reading about Graham, all I could think was that knowledge is often a curse.
During the holidays a few months ago, I talked about my perpetual ambivalence with my parents. Now in their 60s, both are obviously itching to have grandchildren, though they have never applied pressure on me or my younger brother. Hanging out in the living room, I listed many of the reasons holding me back, from the ones out of my control (the general state of the world being scary, obviously) to the truly dumb (I like sleeping in on the weekends, sue me!) and the deeply existential (What if I’m an awful parent?). My mami, used to my spirals, responded with a sigh and an “Ay Andrea, tú piensas demasiao.’” She countered my anxiety with her own experience. Motherhood, even pregnancy, she swore, had been a breeze. While carrying me, her belly was so huge it looked like she was carrying twins. I said something like, “I can’t imagine dealing with that in the Caribbean heat!” She replied that, even as she waddled like a penguin in her third trimester, she was never physically uncomfortable. “¡Mentirosa!” I accused her while she laughed and swore she was telling the truth. When I joked once about how crazy it is to develop postpartum body odor, she was aghast, denying she experienced it. “That’s not a thing!” she insisted. (It is.) Speaking about the early years, she claimed my brother and I were allegedly angelic children who never threw tantrums. I for one remember la chancla all too well for that to be true.
But there is one thing my mother is absolutely right about: I do think too much. That’s the whole damn problem. “It’s a somewhat upwardly mobile millennial thing where a lot of normal life hardships are pathologized in a way other generations didn’t really do,” one of my friends, a new mom of an adorable and rambunctious 6-month-old, told me. “All of this is supposed to be hard. Even if our system wasn’t as fucked as it was, it would still be hard.” I’m not the only one whose brain has been hijacked by an unending pros-and-cons list. Last month, I posted about this essay on r/Fencesitters, a very popular forum for people unsure about having children. I didn’t expect to get any responses, and yet my inbox quickly filled up with messages from other women also paralyzed by the overload of information.
“It is so hard to parse through what are just fears and what are well informed, reasonable concerns.”
“The physical reality of pregnancy terrifies me: the complications, the postpartum period, all of it. And beyond that, the state of the world feels so uncertain. The economy, the future, all of it feels bleak. It’s hard to imagine bringing a new person into this when I can’t see what’s ahead for them.”
“I don’t know where I’ll land. What I do know is that this fence doesn’t look like ambivalence from the inside; it feels like responsibility colliding with uncertainty in an environment where women are asked to be maximally informed and then somehow intuitively certain.”
I also heard from women who were in a similar position but were able to ultimately settle on a choice. Whether they became mothers or not, they cited going to therapy, getting a diagnosis that forced them to decide “now or never,” and crossing the threshold of turning 40 as some of the reasons that extinguished the flames of their longheld ambivalence. I’m still not sure what it’ll take for me to hop off the fence, but knowing that I’m not alone in my anxiety is another piece of information I’m filing away. Unlike all the data and anecdotes that haunt my brain, however, this knowledge has triggered a different reaction: hope that, no matter what I choose, I’ll be okay.