by Ada Calhoun
A few happily single women told me they wonder if their independence may present new challenges in a later phase of life. In past generations, an unmarried woman might live in the family home as a “spinster aunt.” Such women had a family role, a financial backstop, and companionship. Now huge numbers of women in this country leave their parents’ house in their late teens. Then, if they don’t partner up, they may live on their own for fifty or sixty years.
The gap between how many children women say they want (2.8) and how many they are likely to have (1.8) is the widest that it’s been in the past forty years.³⁰ In May 2018, the Centers for Disease Control reported that the US birth rate is lower now than at any time since 1978. Reasons for the baby bust of the 1960s and ’70s include a faltering economy and women’s heightened ability to control their fertility. The Pill was approved as a contraceptive in 1960 and abortion was legalized nationwide in 1973. A recent New York Times survey turned up three leading reasons given today for not having a child: wanting more leisure time and personal freedom, not having a partner yet, and not being able to afford child care.³¹
“I was in grad school until my early thirties,” writes Briallen Hopper, who wrote the Havisham essay,³² “often making less than $25,000 a year, and when I finally got a job, my student loan payments cost about as much as child care. At one point a friend with two kids teasingly referred to my student debt as my ‘loan baby.’ I began to imagine my loan baby as a malevolent ghost, a changeling who had pushed my real baby out of the nest before it could be born.”
Sometime in our forties, most of us stop being able to have a baby. That can be a relief or it can be devastating. So many friends of mine did want children but for many reasons it never happened. They had a breakup that laid them low for crucial years of fertility, or they dated online forever without finding anyone they connected with, or they worked and worked until, when they had time for a family, there seemed to be no one left in their whole town still unattached.
One friend told me that in her twenties she believed that the ticking-fertility-clock-themed Ally McBeal (the 1997–2002 dramedy about a young, flighty female lawyer in Boston who wore miniskirts and fantasized about dancing babies) was an antifeminist conspiracy. She said she believed that gender was a social construct and that her body was her domain. She put a lot of effort back then into not getting pregnant, so much so that she was blindsided when she eventually wanted to get pregnant and could not.
“Having kids was the thing I wanted my whole life,” says Karen, forty-two, a psychotherapist in Arizona. She pauses. “I had to turn off the Facebook feature with ‘Six years ago … whatever.’ I was torturing myself with it. If only I’d done things differently then, I’d have a baby now.”
Technology has prolonged women’s hope of having a biological child. IVF was introduced in 1978. In 2016, 263,577 assisted reproductive technology cycles were performed in US fertility clinics.³³ The egg-freezing boom is an even more recent phenomenon. The first live birth to a woman via frozen eggs was in 1999; by 2016, there were egg-freezing parties for employees on Wall Street, and at Apple and Facebook.
“One thing that’s a little different for this generation,” says Margie Lachman, professor of psychology at Brandeis University, “is there have been some medical breakthroughs around fertility. Things like storing eggs or IVF. You see movie stars having babies in their forties.” Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek had their first babies at forty-one. Halle Berry had her second child at forty-seven. Susan Sarandon had her second at forty-five. Geena Davis had her first baby at forty-six—and then twins(!) at forty-eight. Nevertheless, Lachman says, “I don’t think it eases the dread.”
It also doesn’t always work, as a few couples I know discovered after several rough, expensive years. In 2016, just 22 percent of assisted reproductive technology procedures with the woman’s own eggs resulted in a live birth.³⁴
One single forty-nine-year-old woman I know who’d always wanted kids explained that she’d comforted a married friend through a miscarriage. For months afterward, her friend felt stalked by pregnant women—wherever she looked, there they were, plump and radiant. The pain was overwhelming, but then the friend became pregnant again and had a healthy baby. “I was happy for her, truly,” the single woman said. “But sometimes I want her to imagine what it’s like to live in that world, surrounded by glowy pregnant women. But to do it forever. And to be utterly alone while doing it.”
A woman from Georgia in her late forties, Michele, told me that after fifteen years of trying to conceive or adopt she’s decided to give up. Strangely, she says, one of the hardest parts of not having children has been the feeling of social isolation from her friends who are parents: “It’s been very lonely,” she told me. “Having that lack of connection has been really, really hard. It’s a hollowness that very few in your circle understand.”
I recently asked a friend of mine if she was still trying for a baby, and she said no. It was heartbreaking the way she said it, like how a doctor would tell you a loved one didn’t make it. She’d been having a couple of miscarriages a year for years, and finally decided it was enough. She’d done procedures. She’d taken pills. She’d acted on everyone’s advice and still her body had said no. And now she was saying no.
She could adopt, people told her. But no, again. The average cost of a domestic or an international adoption through an agency ranges from $25,000 to $50,000.³⁵ She and her husband didn’t think they could scrape that together. They could go the far cheaper route of adopting from the foster care system, but she said she didn’t feel she could handle the uncertainty that can be involved in that process when people are trying to adopt an infant rather than an older child.³⁶
The reasons why women don’t wind up with the families they wanted, taken one by one, may seem random or like bad luck. But there are patterns. Women blame themselves, ignoring the fact that their decisions are not being made in a vacuum. Wanting a career you love isn’t bad. Wanting to be stable financially before you have a child isn’t bad. Wanting to have the right partner isn’t bad. Unfortunately, sorting all these things out takes time. And women have many fewer fertile years than men, who can father children well into their fifties.
In order to have a family life and a career, women must move twice as fast to arrive at the same place. Rather than being assisted with this unlikely feat—say, via paid parental leave, accelerator programs at work, or partners willing to sideline their own careers for a few years—women are scolded, told they should have found a boyfriend in college, had a baby by twenty-seven.
In the coming decades, single Gen X women will find creative ways to navigate old age while maintaining their independence. I know quite a few women who are planning to have a “bestie row” of houses with their friends in old age or to live together Golden Girls–style.
“My best friend and I have been talking about it for a long time,” said a forty-six-year-old Florida woman. “I have these friends that I truly love so much. I want to be with them all the time. I’m constantly texting them or talking to them on the phone or planning things together. I have this fantasy that I’m going to win the lottery and buy a building and move everybody in.”
I have seen friends make one another executors of their wills and their medical proxies—with a vow to visit the hospital and tweeze stray facial hairs should the party of the first part become comatose.
Then, of course, some women wind up out of the blue getting everything they’d ever wanted.
Jo, a landscape architect, grew up in Connecticut. At forty, she found herself single and childless, though she’d very much wanted to have a family. She’d been going out with one of my husband’s best friends and we all thought they were going to get married and have kids.
They moved in together, and Jo became pregnant at age thirty-nine. Then, tragically, she miscarried. To make it worse, her partner did not seem disappointed enough and didn’t want to try again. The expense and effort were to
o much. As a lesbian couple, they had to find a sperm donor. A vial of sperm can cost hundreds of dollars, plus the cost of freezing, storing, and shipping. To have herself inseminated at the doctor’s office, which provided a better chance for conception, was another $300.
Heartbroken, Jo left her partner. She entered the dating world again at age forty, feeling she had about five minutes in which to find someone and get pregnant.
This year, she got married and had a baby. So, how did she do it?
I called Jo the other day to ask her. I told her that I’d interviewed dozens of people who’d entered their forties single and childless, hoping to change that, and hers was the only success story. I congratulated her on her efficiency.
She burst out laughing. And then she told me how it had happened.
A year after the breakup, she met someone and they started dating. Eventually, she broached the subject of having a baby: “It takes a while when you’re in a new relationship, to have that conversation,” Jo said. “At least for me. I think I was afraid that if it didn’t work out then I’m back to square one. I had considered just having a kid on my own, and I talked to my family about that. I was just terrified to pull the trigger.”
But a year into the new relationship at age forty-one, Jo went to the gynecologist, who told her: “If you still want to have a kid, you really need to do it now.”
“Can you just tell me how much time I have?” Jo said she asked the doctor. “What are we looking at?”
The doctor, of course, couldn’t say.
And so Jo went to her girlfriend and laid all her cards on the table. She said it was her last chance to have a baby, that she would do all the work, but that she’d love to have her support.
“What did the girlfriend say?” I asked.
“She immediately dumped me,” said Jo. “And so then I was like, Here I am again, in the exact same situation. The kid thing keeps killing my relationships.”
Only this time around, she was older. Maybe too old.
Then, two months later, Jo started dating somebody new who, as luck would have it, wanted a baby, too.
After six months of dating, they started trying.
Fortunately, Jo had just been given a raise at work, and she loved her job: “I like what I do. I believe in what I do, and I’ve been doing it long enough that I feel like I’m appreciated in a way that makes me feel good about it as well.”
The extra money helped when they decided to try fertility treatment. In their first round of IVF, she became pregnant.
On her forty-fourth birthday, Jo gave birth to a nine-pound-eight-ounce boy; soon after, he attended his mothers’ wedding. Our friend, whom Jo had broken up with those few years earlier, was there to hold the baby while the newlyweds danced.
There are plenty of happy endings, too, that don’t involve children or weddings.
The other day, I checked in with my friend Sarah, who’d told me over breakfast in Dallas about her struggle to find a partner. “Recently I’ve tried to expand my dating pool,” she told me. “To say yes to people I would normally say no to because they were too young or lived too far away. And while I’m not ready to plant a ‘mission accomplished’ flag around here, it’s really improved my dating life. I’m having fun. Less despair. It’s a very lonely place to be, waiting for someone who never materializes.”
8
After the Divorce
“I was talking about the Christmas dinner that we always have at the other parent’s house as the original family unit. Out of nowhere, my son said, ‘You don’t have to come.’”
My friend Hannah had just moved into a new apartment with her two children. This was the first time since she and her husband split up that at their mother’s place the kids would have their own rooms. The apartment was bright and roomy, and she was thrilled to have found it.
At her housewarming party, I took a seat in the kitchen to keep her company while she cooked. On the wall hung a calendar marked with the days of the week the kids were at their dad’s or at their mom’s. She pulled a sheet pan out of the oven with oven mitts and set it on top of the stove. She mixed a sauce. She arranged a platter. Children ran in and out of the kitchen and arriving friends poked their heads in to say hi.
Then two kittens wandered in.
“When did you get cats?” I asked.
She didn’t answer right away.
“Wait,” I said. “Are these the Christmas kittens?”
“Yes,” she said, opening a bottle of wine. “I’m cat sitting for the cats my ex-husband’s new girlfriend gave my children for Christmas. Yes, the Christmas my son said I didn’t have to attend if it would be ‘awkward’ for me with Dad’s new girlfriend. I told you that before, right? That my child told me I didn’t have to come to Christmas dinner.”
She reached down and petted one of the kittens. Then she took a very long swallow of wine.
In contrast to all the education we have today about the “good divorce,” “conscious uncoupling,” mediation, and healthy coparenting, the standard scenario modeled for us in the 1970s and ’80s was a contentious split ending with a mostly absent father and a broke mother—then maybe, a few years later, stepparents and stepsiblings.
University of Chicago sociologist Linda Waite, senior fellow at National Opinion Research Center, says that Gen X was at a disadvantage from the start because of our parents’ high rate of acrimonious divorce.
“If your parents are divorced,” Waite told me, “you see the world in a fundamentally different way. You see the world as unstable. You see promises as not meaning anything. You have role models for how things go bad but not role models for how things go well. That left people cautious and scarred and without models for good relationships.”
Our generation are the beta-tested victims of the Boomers’ record-high divorce rate. We may be late to marry in part because we are terrified of divorcing, doing to the next generation what was done to ours.
The divorce rate, which peaked in 1980, recently hit a thirty-six-year low.¹ Boomers, the vast majority of whom did not experience the pain of divorce as children, could view their divorces as radical acts of freedom. Divorce is significantly more normalized for Millennials and younger people and thus far less associated with failure. But for Gen X, it may be especially terrifying.
In a New York Times piece entitled “The Good Divorce,” Susan Gregory Thomas writes that if a Gen X woman does divorce, she will often go to great lengths to make it amicable—doing anything “to spare children the horrors of the Kramer v. Kramer bloodbaths of their own childhoods.”² They are also more likely to keep plugging away at a difficult marriage, hiding their feelings from fear that rocking the boat will sink it.
One woman I know had a hard-charging breadwinner husband for twenty years. He was laid off during the recession and became depressed. Rather than return to work full-time, he became a consultant, for half his former income. “The premise of our marriage for twenty years up until that point was that he was the earner and I was the freelance-writer mom.” She felt fortunate that she was able to find full-time work, given the job market, but she hated that she no longer had the latitude to pursue her dreams. Intellectually, she knew that was the kind of compromise marriage sometimes entailed: he had supported her; now she was supporting him. She still couldn’t shake a feeling of resentment and anger that he had changed the rules in the middle of the game.
“I wish I could say it all came out right in the end,” she said, “and that I was truly heroic. But I can’t.”
Kara, a forty-four-year-old in Atlanta who had two children earlier than many Gen Xers, came undone when her older daughter went away to college a couple of years ago. “I stumbled through most of my life. I wrapped everything into being a mother and a wife and then just really didn’t have an identity of my own. It’s been a rocky two years.”
Once, going out on a date with her husband gave her a terrifying preview of what married life would be like with an empty nest when t
heir younger daughter went away to college too: “He was tired. I wasn’t feeling well. And we didn’t have anything to talk about. What are we going to do? If we’re struggling now, what are we going to do when both the kids are gone?’”
When my childhood friend Jenny went back to school, she didn’t work for two years and so she and her husband had to stretch his salary to cover them and their two children, ages seven and nine. “I was cutting coupons and getting can-can specials,” she said. “And he’d say, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll get takeout.’ He thought that was the right thing to do, and I was trying to explain to him that, no, that’s not helping. He’s ordering food in, and I’m putting water in tomato sauce to make it stretch.” It was like two Americas living in one house, especially because his work took him around the country. “He’s going to Napa, and I’m saying, ‘We’re not moving the car today, because I have just enough gas to get to school.’”
They did marriage therapy and worked it out, but it can be hard in this phase of life to see the difference between a fundamentally good marriage going through a bad patch, like hers, and a toxic marriage that should probably end.
A forty-eight-year-old marriage and family therapist who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Elizabeth Stabinski is a Florida Family Court mediator. She herself divorced recently after twenty-two years of marriage. She has three sons, ages fourteen to twenty. And because she helps people avoid divorce for a living she is now feeling, she says,³ “very much like the shoemaker who has no shoes.”
“Despite having empathy for my clients for decades,” she said, “I never really realized what a crazy maker getting a divorce, even a peaceful one, can be, even for those lucky enough to have an amazing support network and a career. I walk around feeling like I am riding an emotional roller coaster most days, sometimes so excited about the prospect of my future and other times frozen in fear.