The Myth of Choice Parenthood

My mom was 21 when I was born. By 25, she had four kids. Today, that has shock value. I get tired just thinking about it.

I was a full decade older than my mom when I was a tired new mom with babies who wouldn’t sleep. It’s no wonder I was always tired. Being up all night in your twenties is easy. I was otherwise occupied on my 20-something late nights.

When I became a mother at 32, I certainly didn’t have the energy (or the body) that I had at 22. Three years later, pregnant again at 35, I was even more tired. The exhaustion of parenting is cumulative. Being pregnant starts it off with a bang, followed by seemingly endless night wakings, and then they learn how to talk… and you learn about a whole new depth of exhaustion.

Coming up on my 40-somethings, one bad night’s sleep can really throw me for a loop.

When I was 20 and pregnant, I made a choice not to have a baby. I had an abortion, stayed in college, and took the time to (kind-of) figure out what kind of life I wanted while it was still all mine. 

Even at 27, newly-married, I still wasn’t ready for a baby. I remember the feeling very clearly—on my honeymoon in Paris, failed birth control left me in tears in fetal position in one of those short, deep French bathtubs. The idea of a baby was terrifying.

We are only two or three parenting generations into birth control being legal for married couples—and (mostly) reliable. The Supreme Court is still ruling on cases that impact women’s access to birth control. And yet the sense that we can control our family planning is almost taken for granted.

Don’t get me wrong—birth control is awesome. But it doesn’t always work. It just doesn’t—there are plenty of unexpected babies to prove it. Still, what it has done for women could fill volumes.

Many of my generation spend a sexually active decade avoiding pregnancy, with the naïve assumption that it will happen when we’re ready. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

The idea that you can choose when to get pregnant, naturally or otherwise, choose when to give birth or how, choose what your life will be like when your baby is born, whether you’ll nurse, how much sleep you’ll get, what your children will be like and what they’ll need…it’s all false freedom.

The first lesson of parenting—you have no control, surrender is your only hope. 

So, when I read (here and here and here) about the controversy surrounding decisions by Apple and Facebook to pay for employees to freeze their eggs, my so-called choice feminism told me that more options available to women is always good. Except when it’s not.

There are good medical, economic and cultural arguments against egg freezing as a catch-all solution. For some, IVF is a gift, but for others it’s a disappointment—either way it’s far from a sure thing. And I agree with all of the cynics who see this as a way for companies to take the pressure off being a parent-friendly workplace. It does seem like a ploy to keep younger workers away from that struggle, to insist that pregnancy and parenting are things you can postpone and that will be there for you when you want them…In fact, why even time to date and settle down? You’ve got another decade at least. Just stay at your desk. We’ll take out your dry-cleaning. Go play ping-pong if you’re worried. 

The result is a line is drawn between parents and non-parents, further sidelining those who would ask for more flexibility, day care options, sick leave, and other things that make work work. Even for non-parents, it maintains a cultural work ethic of having no life outside your job. No time for family, friends, whatever you want to do can wait. I hear marathon training is pretty all-consuming. It doesn’t have to be a parents-only argument against reasonable work expectations. Most workers would prefer a life that offers more—whatever that means for them.

It seems to me that we need a re-centering. The articles about the science of egg freezing, the struggles of IVF, the reality that it may not be as easy to have a baby a decade later, those are needed voices. But there’s more to having a family than how hard it is to get pregnant. If you have a partner and want a baby, or even if you don’t have a partner and want to have a baby, it’s misleading to be told it’s all the same.

Forget about getting pregnant and giving birth, having a baby is harder when you’re older. Being up late nights, having the energy to run after a toddler… all of parenting requires energy. While we may be more emotionally ready to parent at 40, we can’t ignore that our body was more ready at 20.

Similar to our focus on the wedding and the honeymoon and not the marriage, our attention to procreation is heavily weighted on the pregnancy and childbirth side of things and not to the life of parenting that follows. No one cares about that until they’re there. And apparently it annoys non-parents when parents so much as open their mouths. 

I spent a good six months planning my wedding. A year is hardly uncommon. And I paid good attention in my prenatal classes, even took notes. Six-weeks focusing on everything up until the baby is in the world. Anything else is left for the steep-learning curve that begins when the baby arrives.

Maybe we should devote at least one week to the “happily ever after” of parenthood. Maybe pregnant couples should be required to do an internship—spend a day with actual parents, ask them questions. They could use your help anyway. Childcare’s not cheap (nor should it be—those ladies work hard!).

Parenting is hard in the same way marriage is hard. Making and birthing a baby—the only things we care about pre-parenthood—have virtually nothing to do with parenting. It’s like saying that someone who could plan a lovely wedding is likely to have a happy marriage.

The baby is easy, it’s being a mom that’s hard. And sometimes the baby isn’t easy. How are Facebook and Apple going to help with that?

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On Being a Pro-Choice Mom

I read something recently by a woman who wrote that becoming a mom made her politically prolife. At first blush, I get that. It makes some kind of sense. Babies and all.

But I disagree completely. Being a mom has made me adamantly prochoice.

The piece also got me thinking about this question—when did you begin to feel like the pregnancy inside your body was something other than your body... that it was an actual baby?

My husband and I first heard our daughter’s heartbeat when I was about 8 weeks pregnant. He cried. Listening to the sound of the fetal heartbeat was moving to him. For me? Not so much. It was weird and hard to process. I felt little scared and a little excited, but I didn’t feel like there was a baby in my body at that moment.

Six months earlier, I’d been pregnant for seven weeks. It was an ectopic pregnancy that ended with a dramatic emergency room visit. When I lost that pregnancy, it was a real loss. I was sad. I mourned. It was not devastating, as I can only imagine the loss of a child or the loss of a full-term baby during childbirth would be. Of course, anyone suffering from any of those losses will feel the loss in their own way.

For me, it’s really hard to pinpoint when my pregnancies felt more like a baby than my own body. In some ways, I’m not sure it really sunk in until the baby was out of my body, in my arms and breathing, with a face and a voice and a name. Even with my second baby, when I should have somehow been more ready for that moment, it still felt like a surprise when I gave birth and saw this little person, exactly as he had been inside my body moments before, now outside me and in front of my eyes.

The question of when life begins—when a pregnancy becomes a baby—may be a controversial political question, but it’s also a deeply personal experience for every pregnant woman living in her own body. And while I don’t think public policy on a woman’s right to an abortion should be decided based on my—or anyone else’s personal experience, it isn’t exactly separate either. (This article is a must-read discussion on the question of when life begins and the prochoice movement.)

For most people, when it comes to deciding whether to call themselves prochoice or prolife, they’d rather answer, “It’s complicated.” As Robert P. Jones wrote in his Figuring Faith column in the Washington Post last May, “Support for legal abortion has remained steady even as Americans’ identification with the politicized “pro-choice” or “pro-life” labels has fluctuated.” My personal stance on abortion has changed throughout my life, but my politics have always been prochoice.

My most deeply held belief about abortion rights is that if you can’t become pregnant, you’re welcome to call yourself prochoice or prolife, but in terms of advocating for legislation that will never impact you, just don’t. If you have no way of ever knowing what you might do if you were pregnant and didn’t want to be, then you’re in over your head.

When I was a teenager in high school, learning about all of this complicated life stuff, I thought that women should be free to decide for themselves what they believe and what’s right for them. But, of course, I thought, I would never make "that" choice. I would never have an abortion.

And I continued to believe that until I had barely exited my teens and got pregnant. I was 20 and halfway through college when I chose to have an abortion. Despite my previous thoughts on the subject, and how sure I was of them, I knew my decision from the moment I knew I was pregnant. I'm so grateful that I had a choice and grateful for the choice I made.

Because, you know what? You don’t really, truly know what you’d do until you’re staring at a positive pregnancy test.

When I got pregnant again in my early thirties, I was happily married and the baby was well-planned. And when that pregnancy turned out to be ectopic, I was really scared the whole baby thing was never going to happen for me. I thought constantly about the decision I'd make a decade earlier. I felt cursed, I felt punished, I felt bitter at the irony, but mostly I just felt really, really sad. And then I got pregnant again and gave birth to a beautiful baby girl.

Finally and very happily a mother, it started to sink in how hard this parenting gig is. I knew more deeply than ever that I had made the right choice with my first pregnancy. How could I ever have managed a baby at that age, with that guy or more likely alone? How could my life have moved past that point, to any happy place, after an unplanned baby was born and took over everything? As they do.

As a mother, I was lucky to be able to be at home full-time with my daughter, with the support of an amazing husband and everything we could possibly need, and it was still hard. Amazing, beautiful, magical, wonderful, yes, of course all of those things, but also hard. Really, really, really hard. The lack of sleep, the crying, the isolation, the every day, in-and-out, the same thing and no way out ever. Not to mention the “can I really do this and not screw-up this beautiful little human being?”

In all seriousness, we did ok. We did our best. We had love more than anything else, for our baby and for each other. And as someone put it to me when I was pregnant, "You'll do fine. You're not a crackhead and you have the Internet."

Just before our daughter turned three, we welcomed a second baby into our family. Our son was also planned—we were ready and we were thrilled. With my son’s birth, I experienced sleeplessness like I never knew, and for this and other reasons, I went though a really tough postpartum depression.  Somehow, I made it through that time, but I might not have. The hormonal changes that happen during pregnancy are powerful—and for some, especially those with a history of depression or anxiety, they can be scary.

Being pregnant is a little like playing Russian roulette—you don’t know what’s gonna hit you when you pull the trigger. It could be that the baby you get needs more from you than you imagined or the changes could be within yourself. No one knows what’s on the other side of pregnancy when they decide to have a baby.

I used to think I wanted to have three kids, but I know now that I’m done. If I got pregnant again, I would not, could not, choose to have the baby. To have a third baby would be wrong for me and for my family. I'm not sure I'd survive it. Not in a strict "life of the mother" kind of way that abortion restrictions have in mind, but I came too close to the scary bottom last time and I won't go there again. I love my kids too much to risk them losing their mother.

And I have made every effort to ensure I won't get pregnant again, but 98% effectiveness is not a 100% guarantee. We can do our best to avoid pregnancy, but unless anti-abortion crusaders think I should stop having sex with my husband, we can't be certain.

I never want to have another abortion. I’m sure it would be harder to go through now that I know firsthand what happens when a pregnancy ends with the birth of a baby. But I know that’s the choice I’d make. Or, rather, I think I know. The truth is, it’s hard for anyone to know what they would do if they became unexpectedly pregnant.

I wish no woman ever needed to have an abortion. But I live in the real world, with billions of other women, and we all deserve the right to make our own choices about our lives and our bodies, even if those decisions end up being different than we could have ever imagined. Life in the real world includes birth control failures, rape, medical problems, human imperfection and all kinds of decisions that are unimaginable until they are facing us.

The experience of becoming and being a mother may change the way a woman feels about ending a pregnancy, but I would hope it would also bring with it deeper understanding for women who face that decision. As mothers, we know what it feels like to be pregnant and to give birth and to love our babies. We also know how hard being a mother is and how much change comes with a baby, how much they need and how much they deserve.

No one should have to take on all that being a mother requires, or even all that pregnancy requires, if they don’t desire it fully. And that any baby would be born unwanted into this imperfect world is heartbreaking. And that's why being a mom has made me more pro-choice than ever.

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