Pro-con lists and other strategies
“Even Cheryl Strayed suggested a pro-con list,” I told my husband David. I’d just finished reading Cheryl’s beautiful Dear Sugar column addressed to someone unsure about parenthood—a column that spoke to me so deeply, I cried on the city bus.
What Cheryl had actually suggested was not a simple pro-con list. It was a detailed imagining of what life would be like with and without kids. This is largely how David and I made the decision to move cities. When we dressed up the bare decision as theater, telling ourselves stories of alternate future lives, we could hear our own excitement about life in Denver and sense the fear that would keep us in Chicago.
But when it came to parenthood, that strategy didn’t work for us. The future film of life with a child was a blank reel. At least the internal aspects. We had little trouble imagining what would be hard from an outsider’s perspective—looking bone tired at work and fielding side eye at restaurants and on airplanes. But we couldn’t picture how we would feel picking up and talking to a little person we had never met. We could much more easily imagine the future film of life without kids because it was more of what we knew. But comparing this full-color rendering to a blank one did not get us very far.
Even as ambivalence after becoming a parent is becoming a (somewhat) less taboo topic, I’ve found few resources that explore the question of whether to become a parent (with Cheryl Strayed’s column as a noteworthy exception).
When I turned to empathetic friends for advice during my years-long debate, I got two different types of suggestions. The first set of suggestions, pro-con lists included, played right into David’s and my tendencies to over-analyze. We love long, heady discussions. We applied our skills to the question frequently and with great fanfare. But analysis never got us very far.
Others believed that making a conscious decision was the wrong approach. They suggested that we let nature decide, see what happens, roll the dice, or put the decision in God’s hands. But I couldn’t bring myself to believe that either nature or God would be better equipped to make the decision for me (or that God or nature would have any interest in doing so even if equipped!).
Both approaches to parenthood decision-making, I came to see, avoided the heart of the question: what did I truly want? Leaving the decision up to God or the universe skirts the question entirely. And an analytical approach misses the deep feelings that make this question loom so large for those of us who are unsure.
The process that led to my decision was in many ways the opposite of analysis. It involved dismantling my analytical frameworks, doing away with the pro-con lists, and feeling my way through.
Join the conversation: Have you had others suggest approaches to making the decision about becoming a parent that have been helpful or unhelpful? I would love to hear from you!