This week I interview someone thoughtfully undecided about having kids: Emily Green, a destination specialist for Vaya Adventures, an outdoor adventure lover, and a friend close to my heart. Next week, I’ll reflect on our interview.
Q. What are your feelings sitting here today about having kids?
Basically where I’ve been the last couple years: leaning no but still undecided. But it gets more and more uncomfortable to be in this limbo. I’m in my late 30s, and time is ticking. Considering most of my close friends and family are clear one way or another, it feels pretty lonely to be in this undecided space.
Q. How have your feelings evolved over time?
I started down the path of freezing my eggs, and that was somewhat revealing for me. I did the initial ultrasound, where they tell you the basic fertility stuff, and then I kept putting off the next steps.
I recognize how privileged it is to be having these conversations about fertility and fertility preservation. For me, yes, it was a big financial investment, but I am not saving up to buy a house, and I don’t have an extravagant lifestyle. The financials were not completely prohibitive for me. I kept thinking, wouldn’t I be prioritizing this if it was really important to me? And I wasn’t.
I also knew that egg freezing was physically uncomfortable, but that wasn’t what was stopping me either.
On the other side, one impactful thing recently has been seeing my nephew at two-and-a-half. I’ve never been into babies, and the whole idea of getting pregnant, giving birth, and having a young baby is not at all appealing to me. But two-and-a-half is such a wonderful age. Having young kids rather than babies is something I’ve always been more attracted to.
Q. You aren’t someone who avoids hard things because they are uncomfortable.
Right. So my experience with fertility preservation told me a lot. It wasn’t that it was hard; it was that I didn’t want to continue down that road.
Now, I think it’s really a question of shutting the door on having kids, which I want to do but haven’t been able to do yet. I’m so envious of people who know. For me, it’s been hard living in that nebulous grey area. I’m indecisive in general in life. I’m a FOMO person, so there’s such fear of what I’ll miss out on either way.
You sent me this really wonderful essay called Fully Knowing the Road by Mark Nepo, which I refer back to often. He says you can never fully experience everything in life. If you hold on too much to things you’ve decided against, that’s called regret, and you’ll never fully experience the road you’ve chosen for yourself. I keep reminding myself of that. I can’t fully experience my life on one road until I leave the other one behind.
Q. What else has or hasn’t been helpful in sorting through your feelings?
You wrote an essay called To Know First or To Try First, and I really related to that. My partner and I fairly recently decided to pull the goalie because we were both ambivalent, and we decided to try and see how that impacts our feelings.
I had a hard conversation with my mom about this. She couldn’t understand how we were, in her view, treating something so serious so un-seriously. I suppose I can see why someone might view it that way, but for my partner and me, ambivalence doesn’t mean not caring; it means we can see enjoying both lives, even though they would be very different. Trying in order to know doesn’t mean treating the decision lightly, but rather that we think we’d be happy with either outcome.
The idea that I wouldn’t be more proactive about either path is strange to some people, but most people seem to have a clearer idea about which path they want! For my mom, maybe it’s because she’s from a different generation, but she also really enjoyed being a mom (and was/is a great one!) and hopes it’s an experience I will have. I got emotional at the end of the conversation about her not understanding, but maybe it’s okay that she doesn’t understand. She doesn’t have to.
Q. Do you get more questions about your feelings on kids than your partner does?
Oh yeah. My group of girlfriends spends way more time talking about it than his group of guy friends.
Both me and my partner are co-existing in this nebulous indecisive space, but it doesn’t matter as much for him. Many men can stay in that space until they are 70. It’s not the same kind of problem for them.
Q. The feeling of it being a problem, when did you start feeling that?
I have always felt this nagging upset that I’m undecided, but age has brought me closer to the point-of-no-return-and-could-regret stage. Before, I had time to kick the can down the road, so I worried less about it.
I have more data points in my life now too. There are strong peer effects. I’ve been thinking and talking about it more because other people in my life are thinking and talking about it more, as well as experiencing it for themselves.
Q. What are your biggest fears about becoming a parent?
So many things, which is why I’m still so on the fence. One of the first that comes to mind is that little babies seem to suck the life out of you. For the first year, people walk around like zombies tethered to this creature that only cries and shits and sleeps. I’m being sort of facetious, and of course I recognize that this is a very small part of the overall deal.
I am also afraid of what it would do to my relationship with my partner. It seems like our lives would become all about organization and schedules, and there’s already plenty of that now! I worry that the time, but more importantly the emotional energy required for a kid, would leave barely any remaining for each other or for the things in our life now. And I really like my life now. I like my work; I love my friends; I live 10 minutes away from my sister and her family; and I love the time my partner and I get to spend together, especially outdoors and fishing. I worry all of that would disappear, or if not disappear, that we’d be too exhausted to enjoy any of it!
Time is another big one. In other areas of life, I’m fortunate enough that I can buy my time back. I can buy doggie daycare. I can buy cleaning services. But I worry that the financial investment required to buy back my time if I had a kid would be prohibitively expensive. It’s a tragedy in this country that we don’t support families better in the early stages. The fact that even earning the income that I earn, I would still have to dramatically rethink my financials if I had a child, that is truly unfortunate.
Bottom line, I worry that I would end up resenting my kid for the time and energy they take, or the things they take away from—that I wouldn’t have enough emotional capacity to go around. As I talk through this, that’s definitely the biggest fear right there. I know everyone loves their kid, but I feel like it’s not societally acceptable to say, yeah I love them, but maybe I would have made a different choice. I worry that my resentment would take over my relationship with my kid and my partner in a toxic way. And that’s a scary thought that’s a bit hard to say out loud.
Q. What are your biggest fears about not becoming a parent?
It’s not that I worry about my life now without kids; I worry about what I’ll miss out on 5, 10, 20 years from now. And there aren’t many people to ask about that. Growing up, I didn’t encounter a lot of couples with no kids, because as a kid, I was hanging out with other families. And granted it was a different generation, but the few people I did meet who didn’t have kids seemed to not have them out of circumstance (fertility issues, mental-health issues) rather than choice. So I don’t personally have a lot of data points that can speak to the benefits or regrets of the no-kid decision that they’ve felt later in life.
Q. What draws you to it?
I love community. I’m big on community and sharing my experiences with other people in all sorts of ways, the good and the bad, supporting one another. And having this little tight nuclear community every day for the rest of your life, that’s really appealing to me.
I also think it would be an interesting project to undertake with my partner. I think we would make a good team.
Finally, I’m intellectually interested in having children. Watching the world through a kid’s eyes is so fascinating and hilarious and interesting. I am so entertained and inspired by watching other kids in my life figure things out. Their sense of wonder and awe and curiosity and lack of self-consciousness is such pure joy. It reminds me of what matters in life and to take myself, and life in general, less seriously.