The September Issue
First being on the fence about having kids was brat. Now it’s in Vogue. Literally… Vogue wrote about it! A friend who works in fashion shot this my way last week, and I thought it would be great to share while it’s still September, the month of the magazine’s biggest issue traditionally. (Which I only know because I remember the 2009 documentary called The September Issue about Anna Wintour and the fashion empire that is Vogue)
17 People on When They Knew They Were Ready to Have Kids (Or Not)
Writer Emma Specter even starts with a reference to Charli xcx’s song “I think about it all the time” off her Brat album, which we already covered earlier in the summer, nbd. Just me being ahead of Vogue on trends. Ok kidding, but let me have this!
Upon my first pass of the piece, I found myself a little disappointed. For the most part, these aren’t people who were on the fence and therefore not really helpful to anyone still deciding. Most of them start with something like, “I always knew I wanted to be a mom…” or “I always knew I didn’t want kids…” Great! Good for you! Not that it makes proceeding with that decision easy all the time, but there doesn’t sound like much consternation about it. The consternation is kind of the most important part for us here. Maybe it’s not fair, but I struggled to take input from somebody who “just knew” and who I didn’t perceive understood the issue from both sides. I wanted to hear from somebody who really gave a fair evaluation to both possibilities and then chose.
A few days later, I reread it and felt a bit differently. There felt like a diverse range of scenarios, backgrounds, and points of views represented. Sure, several of them didn’t sound like they’d walked in the shoes of a fence sitter, but some of them did… or at least represented some not so straight forward or linear paths. It’s important to me to not just share experiences and opinions that match with my own. Mother of a Dilemma values all vantage points on this! So I’m highlighting a few here that I thought were particularly interesting…
DECIDED “YES”
Natalia, 36, mom of a two-year-old: I don't think I ever “knew”; I just made a decision. I was hoping to “know,” but it never really happened that way. I was in a good place in my relationship, with a stable job with insurance, and I thought the pandemic was coming to an end (right before Omicron). I also have PCOS and was told I would have fertility issues so that was always a looming threat. With my partner we decided: let's try for a bit (6 months) and if it doesn't happen we will stop wondering. It happened right away, my first cycle. I still think I would have been okay without kids and I'm okay with my kid.
Jamie, 34: I think I’ve always lived under the assumption that I would have kids because I was socialized to believe that it’s what you do when you “grow up.” Then I found myself in a long term relationship with a person who has shared values and a love of family. It was easy to envision being a parent with her and the joyful memories we could create, while also fully aware of the stress it would put on our relationship. We are a same sex couple, and I had some fears around it feeling forced or clinical, and questioning if my desire to have kids was coming from wanting to fit into heteronormative standards that my straight friends were living under. We decided to take steps toward finding a known donor who is in the queer community and would want to be a part of our future child’s life, not knowing if we would find that. But we did, and now things seem to be falling into place in a way that doesn’t feel forced but feels exciting and beautiful.
Terrence, 43: There was a point in my career about four years ago when I gave up on following flawed paternal leaders and started working on becoming a better leader myself. After doing a little therapeutic digging, it dawned on me that I’d transitioned from being someone’s child to preparing to become someone’s strong, caring, and supportive father.
Jane, 33: I’m an only child and have always hated children and still do, to be honest, but feel like I’m growing out of (some) selfishness and want to have a child (girls only ofc) because I have older women friends with teen girls and I LOVE these children and feel suddenly able to conceive of having one. I'm also feeling free to move into my “I want a kid” era because I have admitted to myself, my family, and my partner I am not meant to bear or birth children. I'm feeling excited about adoption and being the mom to raise a child while also maintaining a relationship with the “belly mama.” I might even consider surrogacy? I don’t really care to see my DNA passed on, but my husband is dying to.
DECIDED “NO”
Andrea, 28: I decided I didn’t want kids when I was diagnosed with cancer and realized I didn’t really want to go through freezing my eggs. Someone had told me that kids change your life so much you should want to go to the ends of the earth to have them, because if you don’t want it that much it will be too hard, and I listened. In that moment at the doctor I realized that I really didn’t want to try very hard to have kids and it wasn’t that important to me. It took years and therapy to see it with the clarity I have now, but looking back, that was the moment, and it was one of the best decisions I made for myself.
Lauren, 39: In my 20s and even my early 30s, I could very clearly see myself having a few children. In fact, I desperately wanted children. I have come to realize over the last several years that I am 1) super sleep-dependent, 2) very dependent on my antidepressants and unwilling to stop taking even the ones that would harm a fetus. Then, my dad died. He was my person, and at the time the doctors gave him five to six years, but by June 2020 I knew that wasn’t gonna be the case. I could feel it in my bones that he wouldn’t survive that long. I had always imagined that my dad would do daycare and he would be the best best grandpa to my children because he was such a great grandpa to my nieces and nephews. I simply could not imagine raising my babies without him. And layered on top of it all is George Floyd’s murder. I could not imagine raising a Black child here and without my dad. Now, I just really love being an aunty and going home and not dealing with a puking five year old at 3 a.m., LOL.
Helen, 42: I froze my eggs at 30 years old because I was unsure if I wanted kids and followed the suggestion of my doctor at the time. Earlier this year, as I got a notice to renew my annual subscription for storage of my 12 eggs at the cryobank, I decided to discard my eggs as medical waste. I had spent $12,000 over the past 12 years to store my eggs and had never developed the desire to have children. I saw my friends and many women my age decide to have children, but I never yearned for it at all. I didn’t feel what they had experienced by having children to be a joyful rewarding experience for me. I also never felt that anything was missing in my life by not having children. It was exactly the opposite. I felt free and and excited by the possibilities of not having children in my future. I become 100% sure in 2020 during pandemic that I didn’t want to have kids and felt really empowered and excited having come to that that conclusion. The last step was discarding my frozen eggs.
For more of these, go back up to the top and click on the link and read through all 17. Let me know which profile resonated with you most in the comments!
It’s nice to see major outlets like Vogue acknowledging this in their Culture section. We’re going to see this topic continue to ascend to the national spotlight over the next few years, you can count on that. And we’ll be here to discuss it all every step of the way.
Valerie