Watering plants & having children
About taking bubble baths, teenage pregnancies, and The Really Big Decision
I’m laying on the floor of the living room watching our new ceiling fan spin. We got it for Christmas; it’s sleek, wooden, warm, matching the knotty pine walls. My mind wanders: I’m thinking about getting in the bathtub. I’m thinking about whether Nick and I should try to have kids in a year. I’m thinking about how muddy the dogs were when they came inside a few minutes ago, and I hope to myself that they haven’t jumped on our bed yet because we just cleaned the duvet cover yesterday.
I wonder where my sweatshirt is because I’m cold now with the fan on, and then I decide I’ll make myself a grapefruit-and-soda-water spritz in a wine glass for my bath so I can feel fancy. I glance over at one of my plants on the shelf behind the couch; it’s drooping. I forgot to water them last week, I remember placidly. Maybe I should do that first, before I make a spritz or take a bath or have children.
It feels like I think about having children more than anyone on earth – or more accurately, whether or not to have them. An errant thought about maybe having kids in a year sliding in between thoughts of a bath and my duvet cover is not uncommon. It’s been on my mind for years, even before I found my husband and began to endure the never-ending stream of questions from well-meaning friends, family, and strangers about whether kids are in our future. No, I’m used to these thoughts now. Ceiling fans, baths, kids?, duvet, plants. Just another day in the life.
I don’t think about having children in a daydreaming kind of way, even though I wish I did; my thoughts around whether or not to have children have felt less like some glowy maternal dream and more like a hard-fought civil war: battles constantly being waged over which decision will win, which decision will get to stake a claim on The Rest of My Life. The stakes are high and the troops take it very seriously. Sometimes I wish they’d give it up and grab a beer together, reaching some sort of peaceable compromise but no – someone’s got to win, which means someone has to lose. I’ll become a parent or I won’t; one side will have to wave a white flag. Surrender or die.
If that sounds intense, it’s because it is. Over the top, even. Too much, maybe. I have wished many a time that my approach to potential parenthood could be less heavy, but I don’t wish that as much anymore. If there is anything that warrants a little intensity, I suppose it should be a decision that affects The Rest of My Life and involves the creation of another person.
Plus, I’ve been here before. I made this decision already, back when I was 18, and it was very intense.
To put it succinctly: I became pregnant at 18 and decided to place my son in an open adoption. I’ll write plenty more about it, but kicking it off with just the facts seems like a good place to start:
His name is Liam. The pregnancy went very smoothly. I used an adoption agency. The adoptive family and I get along well, always have. Part of why I chose them is because they wanted the birth parents to be as involved as possible, and that’s what I wanted too. Liam’s birth father was my high school sweetheart; we’re still friends and he’s still highly involved as well (along with his lovely wife and their three daughters). My son knows exactly who I am. We text about movies and books and hobbies. I’m in his phone as “Renee Birth Mom.” He’s taller than me by three inches already. I have never once regretted my choice.
And it is because of this that, despite the truly stellar outcome, I cannot daydream glowy maternal thoughts the way other people in my life seem so achingly capable of. It’s because of this that the decision to have children with my husband feels closer to a tug-of-war than a give-in: because the battles have already been fought. Not Ready To Raise Kids won this war back in 2010. By the slimmest possible margin after an emotionally vivid bloody agonizing heartbreaking excruciatingly poignant final crusade. No decision on earth has ever been made less lightly or with more intentional deliberation. A decision to wage nuclear war could be made with less thought, and certainly with less heart.
And yet, birthing people, regardless of whether or not they leave a birth with or without their baby, are similar in one particular way: who you were before has ceased to exist. You are someone new now, and you don’t know her yet; a semi-stranger you pass on the street who looks mildly familiar, like you know them somehow but simply cannot remember from where. It will take a while to get to come to grips with her, this new you, to learn her and understand her the way you used to. But you are different now; rearranged. Still the same yet also wholly and utterly transformed.
So 14 years later, now in my 30’s and wholly and utterly transformed as I am, I hesitate. Because I know that motherhood is not just motherhood; it is a complete dissolution of your old self, a Rome that is ripped to the studs and rebuilt in a day, in a moment. An identity shift to the nth degree, a rearranging of your very atoms, a definitive schism, the ultimate and most instantaneous “before and after.” Two new people are born the day you give birth, and you are one of them. It is not just a huge, magical responsibility you’ve entered into, it is a rite of passage, THE right of passage…and somehow, someway, our society is still utterly terrible at supporting you through it. I cannot not think about these things. I know them intimately. L'ho provato sulla mia pelle – Italian for “I have experienced that on my own skin.” I have been there.
And so, I am intense.
And yet, in accepting this intensity, the intensity feels less overwhelming; an emotional irony I’ve always appreciated but the power of which I tend to forget – that in accepting where you’re at, you’re more able to transcend it, absorb it, move forward.
Ceiling fan, bath, kids?, duvet, plants. It’s okay to think these things. Even casually, on your living room floor.
I’ve grown to appreciate how deliberate I’ve been about the decision to have children; approaching it slowly, warily, asking questions, making no assumptions, taking notes, never haughty enough to presume I know things simply because I am, technically, already a mom. I’m grateful for this approach. Most days, anyway.
We’re leaning yes. I have an IUD that reaches the end of the road in 2025, and we’re not going to replace it. But I am going to write about it. All of it. About my birth motherhood. About what “being intentional” in this choice has looked like for us so far and what it will look like moving forward. About what a struggle it can be some days and what gift it feels like on others. About the discussions my husband and I have had, the books we’re reading together, the friends (parents and non-parents alike) we’ve talked to, the steps we’ve taken (emotional, relational, financial, otherwise) to prepare, the thoughts we’ve put into what we want our future and our relationship and our lifestyle to look like, the concerns we have about politics, the climate, the world. About what may happen if we choose to have kids but having kids doesn’t choose us, so to speak.
And especially about how difficult it truly is to be on the fence about having kids, when the only (or at least the loudest) voices you tend to hear come from two opposing yet opinionated camps: the Definite Moms (women who are already mothers and women who have always wanted to be mothers, for their own personal and valid reasons) and the ever-confident Childfree-by-Choice community (women who know with absolute certainty that motherhood is not for them, for their own personal and valid reasons).
Because I don’t really see them as opposing camps, but rather two ends of a spectrum – and I feel like more of us fall in the middle (and travel from one end to the other and back again) more often than we see.
I get it, though, why those of us in the middle struggle to find a voice. How do you discuss one end of the spectrum without accidentally insulting the other? How do you put into words that you agree with both but can’t commit to either? How do you verbalize that you wake up wanting kids on Thursday and not wanting them on Friday – and moreover, how do you explain that that doesn’t make you flaky or wishy-washy, but rather deeply deliberate, even as you struggle with the juxtaposition? That your vacillation is because you actually have the utmost respect for both parties, for both choices? You just want to make the right one, for you. The stakes are high; the troops take it seriously.
And I want to normalize it. So this is On the Fence: an outlet for discourse on a topic that has consumed me on and off for 14 years in ways I’ve both hated and appreciated, but have ultimately come to recognize as quite important. Stories of my journey so far into the realms of motherhood, the realities of ambivalence surrounding the topic of parenthood, and the journey to come as it unfolds. Because I think, whatever choice we make, we should have room to do it intentionally – however that looks for each of us.
But first I’m going to take a bath and make a spritz. I’ll water my plants when I’m done, if I remember.
This was beautifully written! As a woman also in her 30s who goes back and forth on the idea...it's refreshing to hear a similar perspective to what goes on in my mind. I'm currently single, so I spend my time wondering what my future partner will think/want. I'm excited to follow your journey! PS: Would love to hear about the books you're reading in a future newsletter :)