To mother or not to mother
when are you having kids?
I have entered the years of peak fertility. Like a propagandistic push to conceive, my life has become inundated with images of the pregnant woman. Social media ads sexualize the baby bump. Five of the five movies I have recently seen have made art of birthing scenes. High school friends show the feminine side of pregnancy through maternity photoshoots with whimsical wildflower backdrops. When they ask me, cupping the underside of their eggplant-shaped bellies with euphoric yet intrusive gazes, when I will be bringing new life into this world, I timidly shake my head and say:
“I can’t, I signed a contract when I was eight.”
That was the first contract I ever signed. It read,
“I, Haley Brengartner, will never have kids.”
In bubbly lettering, I authored my first and last name with the kind of jubilantly naive conviction that only children possess. I would have put my life on that statement.
We were seated around our dinner table whose finish was crumbling from age. A conversation about having children surfaced. My younger sister held excitedly to her toy baby which was nearly an extension of her. My youngest sister who was still just a baby babbled nonsense. I dug my fingers into the grooves that ran along the edge of the table that I left from months of anxious scraping. My fingernails filled with oak-colored varnish as I stated that I would never, ever, in a million, trillion years, have a baby.
Those words were not premeditated. They came out of me with a decisiveness I didn’t know I possessed. At the time, I didn’t understand them, but I didn’t question them either. They felt as though they belonged to me.
My dad, sitting adjacent to me at the head of the dinner table, thought it would be comical to write a contract I would inevitably breach so that one day we could reminisce on all of the meaningful ways I’ve changed.
He was wrong.
As I’ve aged into my mid-twenties, I feel like an apple that has reached pristine ripeness and will only continue to brown and bruise from the inside out. I used to perceive my body as an enabler of joy and experience. But I’ve internalized the inundation of motherhood around me to perceive my body as wasted potential. I was born with the gift of being able to create life-sized miracles that I will only let age and decay inside of me until it is no longer there.
My peers and my social media ads are only a microcosm of greater societal expectations. The outside world seems to assume that whether or not I will be a mother is not an if question but a when question. And when I respond with, I don't want kids, I settle into the trenches of my own disappointment and fear. Fear that screams that womanhood is less meaningful if it is not motherhood.
From the time I first uttered those words at the dinner table when I was eight, it has felt as though I was hardwired not to have children. This draw towards a childless life has been so potent that at a very young age, I convinced myself that I must be infertile. I was rationalizing the irrational. It was easier to cope with “I can’t” than “I just don’t want to”. The convictions and desires that have always held my hand down the path of a childless life have only recently become clear to me.
I wrestle with the conviction that if I were a mother I would never find a life of ease and equilibrium - I would either be a bad mother, never sacrificing enough or would I go off the sacrificial deep end and lose myself entirely.
The sovereignty I have over my life is one of the gifts I am irrevocably grateful for. It is not one I have always known; it wasn’t until just shy of a year ago I experienced sovereignty in full for the first time. Before I found autonomy, I didn’t like who I was. I was imprisoned by the images of unwilling sacrifice that my own parents imprinted on my heart. I watched my mother desperately claw for her independence. She couldn’t escape the demands of her children. Privacy was a rare delicacy. Her life became our lives. Resentment bubbled and burned until it scorched everything in its path. When it all became too much, I watched her pack up our childhood home and leave my sisters and me behind. My fears of the repercussions of sacrifice unraveled in front of me. My childhood groomed me into an adult terrified of asking for help out of the fear of backlash, accepting mistreatment as punishment for expecting fairness, and anticipating that sacrifice is always something I must feel sickly guilty for.
For most of my life, I believed that I was not wanted. Understanding what love looked like and how I was supposed to accept it took relentless years of unlearning. During those years, I poured myself into others, never halting to pour into myself until I collapsed into bouts of ugly depression that fed the cyclical patterns. Over and over again.
Parting ways with this sovereignty that took so long to surrender to feels like the threat of imprisonment. The thought leaves me terrified, questioning what I will give up and who I will become. Would I lose myself in motherhood so much so that I totally lost myself in the process only to wake up one day vying to have her back?
Good mothers are sacrificial. Good mothers hold enough selflessness to feed the whole world with tenderness. I fear that if I was a good mother, I would flatten into a doormat again. If I was a good mother, I wouldn’t be good to myself.
When I do my best to dismantle my fears of motherhood - trusting that I would be capable of being both a good mother and good to myself - I am still left with a lack of desire.
The first babies I ever held - the plastic kinds - were experiments more than vessels of my love. My squiggly paper scissors botched their hair and Crayola marker painted their chubby bellies. I was more of a non-sadistic Sid from Toy Story than I was an Andy. My earliest impressions of motherhood came from babysitting. I cared for a toddler who never learned not to poop his pants and two evil red-headed twins who I could only tame through finely crafted reverse psychology. They were devilish minions with large wobbly heads and unsteady bodies. The only time I would find myself softening to their babyhood was when they were fast asleep and their squishy cheeks were finally still instead of in a sloppy-slobbery-constant-motion.
I knew that my plastic dolls and the neighbor’s satan babies were less-than-ideal examples of what it was like to be a parent. I couldn’t then, and I can’t now, have enough information to understand what parenthood is like. But I tried. And I try. I observe mothers who frequent the coffee shop I sit at daily trying to absorb their euphoric wonder and admiration for their toddlers. I imagine what it would be like at any given moment to have a life that relied on me for relentless protection and undying love. I listen to the parents I admire tell me that having children is the best thing that has ever happened to them.
But not even the temptation of the world’s greatest gift has persuaded me.
It makes me wonder if there is something wrong with me. Why does everyone seem to want kids except for me? Is my soul tainted black? Am I eternally selfish in the worst kind of way?
Some days I internalize that not wanting children makes me a bad person. Is the slow life I desire - living among the mountainsides and trees, cultivating and living off the land, rock climbing the Earth’s stony faces, and living a deeply connected life to nature with my partner - a less meaningful existence? This question plagues me with a solemn sense of dread.
The choice to create a life is the scariest leap of faith I believe anyone can take. There are women, quite the opposite of me, who believe they were hardwired to withstand the sacrifice and selflessness of raising a child. And some don’t believe they are hardwired, but choose to do so anyway. I honor them for bearing the most pure form of love that exists. At the bottom of my pit of questions is reverence.
My hope for myself is that I can bear that motherly love in other ways. I will live in service of honoring those I am close to with selfless love. I will be in service of the earth. I will love unconditionally all that I am called to do. I want to believe that having a childless life is no less meaningful. I want to believe that honoring my own life and creating beauty in each day is just as momentous.
It fatigues me to constantly question if I am well-suited to be a mother. I just learned how to love myself. I owe that to my eight-year-old self.
This is my first of five essays from Cohort 11 of Write of Passage. I want to thank my new friends
, , and for helping me sort through these difficult thoughts and find resolution on the page.And my biggest most sincere thoughts to
for challenging me to dig deeper and to write fearlessly.If this essay resonates, please share it with a friend and drop me a hello in the comments. Thank you for being here. I’ll see you next Wednesday.
I feel as though I watch you give birth every time you publish an essay. Allowing acts of nature to come through the human body is no small thing, but the words and subjects you midwife are like small beings that will have their own life and impact others in the world. Even we men have our own forms of pregnancy and delivery. That you're willing to line up with the acts of creation that are suited to your being is an demonstration of authenticity and courage. I celebrate you and your choices.
Haley, this is so good. I know the societal pressure on men to be a father is much less existent than that on women to be mothers, but I very much relate to your story. I was in my mid-30s before I even entertained the idea of children. Every relationship I had up to that point came to an end as soon as they reached the point where the topics of commitment or children surfaced.
Like you, I always worried that I would lose myself to parenthood. I have a different perspective on that now. I believe becoming a parent can help you find out who you really are. It can help reveal to yourself what you really believe about some of the most important things in life. I could talk about this forever, so if you ever want to chat about this topic, just let me know.
To be clear, I absolutely believe that people can live a wonderful and fulfilled life without children, but as someone who became a dad in his late 30s and who knows several women who became moms well into their mid and late 30s, I would encourage you not to close the door on the idea.