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My husband and I always thought we would remain child-free.
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But recently my mother told me she wanted to be a grandparent.
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Now we have decided to have children, and we are excited about our decision.
I’m 41, and until recently I thought so remain childfree. I’m the oldest of four, but we all hate kids for different reasons. As for me, I spent my adulthood pursuing my dreams as a writer and performer in Los Angeles. After decades of trying not to get pregnant, I still have the fear that I might become a teen mom, as one of my stand-up pieces goes.
My parents live in rural Minnesota, where most of their peers have had grandchildren for ages. During a home visit last September, my mother, who could not hold back her tears, told me how sad she was not to have grandchildrenespecially now that she is retired. “It’s not what I thought it would look like,” she said, her voice breaking.
My conversation with my mother made me rethink things
I was shocked by her confession. My parents, lifelong teachers and coaches, have centered their entire existence around family and children. They deserve grandchildren, if anyone does. Unfortunately, my brother, who is most likely to reproduce at this point, lives with his wife in Sweden, and they plan to stay there. Even if and when they have children, they won’t live down the street or even a short plane ride away; an entire ocean will separate my parents from their grandchildren.
Around the same time my mother was sharing her desire for grandchildren, it suddenly seemed like everyone I encountered in LA’s creative scene—actors, writers, comedians—was pregnant or navigating new parenthood.
I went down the rabbit hole on a fellow writer’s Instagram account. She was one single mother long before this baby boom, and I scrolled through a decade where her daughter grew up in reverse. Even through the social media highlights, it was clear that there had been difficult times, but also immense joy and fulfillment. I surprised myself with the thought: ‘Maybe one day I’ll want to do that.’
Earlier that summer, my parents and I met in Phoenix for an extended family celebration. For years it had felt like time stood still—that I was thirty, and she was fifty, and that we would all be frozen in time together forever. But on that trip I felt that era was coming to an end. We were having so much fun, but next to us an invisible hourglass was slowly emptying, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. My 40th birthday was only a few months away. Gray hairs came for all of us, strand by strand.
For the first time, I felt my fertility was fleeting. Was I really going to pass up the opportunity to build a relationship as deep as the one I shared with them – a relationship that was now entering its next phase?
On another recent visit home, my parents clipped an article about the “Active Grandparent Hypothesis,” a theory that suggests that being active allowed hunter-gatherers to live long enough to take care of their grandchildrenand left it on the dining room table. My dad gestured to it, “Hey, read this… Interesting article!” My parents are eternal realists, stoic with a touch of optimism. They are runners, walkers and cyclists who always exercise. Maybe evolution would keep them around long enough to still spend time with the children of their own late-blooming children.
My husband and I started seriously considering having children
They did their research, and I did mine. I started googling everything I could about pregnancy (old age, in my case), childbirth (terrifying), and parenthood (manageable? fun even?). I read a lot of articles and started interviewing moms and other experts for my podcast. My husband and I had honest conversations about what we wanted our future to look like. We wavered back and forth – sometimes having a child seemed like the most obvious life-affirming choice, while other times we couldn’t imagine sacrificing our children. freedom to travel or the time to delve deeper into our work.
We were both ambivalent about having children, at best. But that heartbreaking conversation with my mother, along with our trip to Arizona, opened my mind to a possibility I had never seriously considered before. Soon after, my husband’s brother and his wife went from being absolutely child-free following fertility treatmentsand my husband fell in love with the idea of our future children being cousins. Now we are planning to do an egg harvest ourselves. Our shared vision looks very different now than it did eighteen months ago, and I’m starting to get excited about this change of plans.
My mother said, “Don’t have a child for me.” But the truth is, I am – and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I see how having children can deepen their relationships with their parents and the rest of their families, and I want that for all of us. And when you consider how my decisions affect the other people in my family? That makes me think I might be good at this motherhood thing after all.
Read the original article on Business Insider
