by Meghan Daum
Against abortion? the bumper sticker says. Then don’t have one! And in 2015, that should be the end of that.
* * *
I was in Missoula, Montana, recently, doing book promotion, when a young woman I had never met asked me out for coffee. A beloved editor we knew in common had passed away, and the idea was that we would get together and tell a few “Carol” stories.
“I have to admit,” she said, when we had settled into our table, “that you and Terry Tempest Williams are my biggest literary heroes, and one thing I have always admired about you is that you are both childless by choice.”
I realized when she said it how long it had been since anyone had found that particular aspect of my life admirable. What most people—especially women—found it, almost without exception, was selfish, misguided, or even mildly creepy, like the way Winona Ryder got away, at first, with shoplifting, but eventually, inevitably, got caught.
“What I want more than anything is to have a life like yours,” she said, “writing, traveling, publishing books.”
I knew she had recently sold her first book to a very good press and said, “It sounds like you are well on your way.”
“The only thing is,” she said, “I’m eleven weeks pregnant, and I guess why I really asked you out for coffee is that I was hoping you would tell me that I can have it all.”
There it was again, that advertising slogan. While I stalled for time by sipping my latte, she told me she had similarly asked Terry out to coffee and presented her with the same conundrum. Kind, unsarcastic Terry, who had the benefit of being raised in a culture that values politeness so much more than we did back in New Jersey. However poorly she had scored on this unexpected test, she would have done a million times better than I.
Not to mention the tricky fact of eleven weeks, which was a lot different from four and also different from thirteen. Did this young woman really want me to tell her she could have it all, or did she want me to say, Quick! Here’s my cell phone. Make the appointment while there’s still time!
“How many weeks pregnant were you when you talked to Terry?” I asked, still stalling. When she looked at me strangely, I said, “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t believe you can have it all. I don’t believe any of us can. In fact, I believe the very expression having it all is not only a myth but also a symptom of how sick we are in our contemporary culture. Nobody gets to have it all, not even Donald Trump. You will have one thing or another depending on what choice you make. Or you will have both things in limited amounts, and that might turn out to be perfect, just exactly the life you want.”
* * *
Feminist friends my age groan in agony when they meet young women who don’t even know precisely what the words Roe v. Wade refer to. But, in fairness, what did I know, at eighteen, about Margaret Sanger, or everything it took to pass the Nineteenth Amendment, or how many states failed to ratify the ERA? Not nearly as much as I should have. Not enough to understand the debt of gratitude I owed to the women who had come before me.
But what is perhaps even more unsettling is my dawning understanding that because I came of age right on the heels of Roe v. Wade, of Gloria Steinem and Adrienne Rich, of Joan Didion and Alice Munro, it might have been more okay for me not to have children than it is for the women I met at Butler University. Maybe my generation had the distinct advantage of watching our own mothers see on the horizon the choices that would soon be available to women, only to realize how half buried they already were in the quicksand of overbearing husbands and carpool commitments and the Junior League. Maybe because we watched them retreat into the bottle, or the prescription pills, or worse, it was my generation who swore upon our Barbies and our Mystery Date board games that we would not be similarly trapped. Maybe those battles have fallen now, too far into the rearview mirror, or maybe, as Nan Nowik would say, the dominant paradigm has taught this generation of young women how to police themselves.
* * *
The first time I got pregnant was exactly nine months before my first book was slated to come out. I was twenty-nine years old, and I conceived around a diaphragm (with spermicidal jelly). The father of the child and I were not married, but we were in a decent enough relationship. I liked him a lot, which I understand now is probably the best thing one can say about any relationship, and I thought he would make a pretty good dad.
When I called to tell my mother I was pregnant, she said, “You have a very special talent, Pam, and if you decide to have that baby, you are going to become perfectly ordinary, exactly like everyone else.” My mother was an actress, a singer, a dancer, and an acrobat. When she was sixty-five years old, she could still do handsprings down the beach. To cope with her life’s disappointments, she drank three fifths of vodka per week and took a mountain of daily Vioxx, the combination of which would kill her within that year.
When I called my editor to tell her the news, she said something much less pointed, though along the same lines and undeniably true. The publisher was behind my book of short stories in a way that was not so common—they were sending me on a multicity book tour—and it would be in the book’s best interest if I was able to go.
Contrary to the belief of some outspoken congressmen, no woman ever wants to have an abortion. I have never met one who takes it lightly, who hasn’t thought about the abortion with if not some version of regret, at least with some sadness for the rest of her life.
I have often wondered what would have happened if my mother had had a more standard reaction, for instance excitement about being a grandparent or a guarded hope that if I had a child, it might settle me down. Had there been even the slightest parental pause, space that would have allowed me to say how I was feeling about it, would I have made a different decision? Twenty-nine feels so young to me now—surely I thought I had unlimited time ahead of me. I was so naive about the pressures of the publishing industry I might have believed that if having the baby hurt this book’s sales, I’d be given the chance to write and promote another. Had this all happened before Roe v. Wade, every single thing about my life right now would be different. Not necessarily worse and not necessarily better. I don’t believe under any circumstances I would think I had it all.
* * *
I will admit without hesitation that my life is rich and full of pleasure. I love to work hard and I do, at both teaching and writing. When I’m teaching, my job is to make and hold a space for someone else’s creativity; when I’m writing, I get to prioritize my own. I spend the money I earn at both pursuits on adventures that will lead to more writing, the publication of which will lead to better teaching opportunities, which will lead to more adventures, which will lead to more writing, and so on, if I am lucky, for the rest of my life. I value my time because it gives me the capacity to earn money and I value the money I earn because it buys me freedom, and these seem like reasonable priorities. I live on a spectacular piece of land in a spectacular part of Colorado. I paid off the mortgage last summer, after twenty-one years, with every single dime of the money I earned either teaching or writing. It feels to me, all in all, like a comparatively honorable life.
It also seems honorable that another woman would value motherhood over all my priorities. But I do not believe that I am selfish and she is not. There are women who choose motherhood for selfish reasons. There are mothers who act selfishly even if they chose motherhood in a burst of altruistic love. Selfishness and generosity are not relegated to particular life choices, and if generosity is a worthy life goal—and I believe it is—perhaps our task is to choose the path that for us creates its best opportunity. It is quite possible that I would be a less generous teacher, a less supportive partner, a less available friend if I had children of my own to take care of. Love is not a pie, the saying goes, but it is also true that there are only so many hours in a day.
Or, in the parlance of the Butler creative writers, is it necessarily a bad thing when a woman gets to be all about herself? Is that not what our feminist foremothers were trying
to tell us, that if a woman actually had five minutes to be all about herself she might find a cure for breast cancer, or win an Olympic gold medal, or negotiate peace in Gaza, or become president of the United States?
* * *
A student sent me an e-mail telling me she was dropping out of my private writing group: “I love the group and will really miss it,” she wrote, “but I can’t see spending the money I ought to be spending on my children’s education on my own.” I pictured her imagining, as she wrote the e-mail, a bunch of women standing around giant pieces of brightly colored plastic playground equipment in the town where she lives nodding sagely at her sacrifice.
But what I wanted to ask was, Why not? Why is their education more important, inherently, than yours? You are a very talented writer with immense potential. What if your children turn out, even after that expensive education, to be just a couple of dolts?
The median home price in the town where she lives is $904,000, so we can rest assured that her kids are in no real danger of remaining uneducated. I do understand that it is noble to want what is best for one’s children. But I worry that we have taken a big step backward if it is perceived as nobler still when doing for one’s children comes at great expense to oneself.
My mother said one thing to me more than any other and it was “I gave up everything I loved for you.” It was an expression she used for almost any occasion: to make me clean my room, to make me part my hair on the side, to make me wear my retainer, to make me sign on to one of her psycho diets, to make me wear those awful Ann Taylor jackets with the four-inch shoulder pads, to make me break up with whatever boyfriend. I could fill pages with the things this simple set of words had the power to make me do. Years after my mother died, my therapist asked me to make a list of the things my mother loved, and as usual I obliged him: acting, singing, dancing, tennis, sewing, travel, vodka.
“And how many of those things did she enjoy after you were born?” he asked me.
“All of them,” I said. “Every single one of them, right up to her death.”
“How about that?” he said. “Turns out the only thing she gave up was … what?”
“The condition of childlessness,” I said, which I had to grant her is no small thing, and a condition I admit to loving myself.
* * *
And maybe it’s love, unsurprisingly, that all this comes down to. And love, like selfishness and generosity, is not exclusive to one demographic; it infuses every single thing we do and are. I love the physical world and the experiences I get to have in it so deeply and completely that it threatens to break my heart every minute, and I have made countless life choices—in addition to childlessness—to ensure that I can be out and in the world on my own terms almost all the time.
When I am puking my guts into a hole in the ground in Bhutan, I am loving the prayer flags that flutter over my head; I am loving my body’s ability to preserve my life by expelling whatever poison I was too stupid not to consume; I am loving, in retrospect, the temple where I was given the cholera-tainted orange that has landed me in this position; and I am loving, most of all, the fact that some combination of luck, hard work, and skill has landed me on assignment in Bhutan, a place that has lived in my imagination since I was a map-devouring child. And for Bhutan, feel free to substitute Bolivia, Botswana, Laos, Serifos, Paris, Istanbul, or, while you’re at it, Telluride, Provincetown, Grand Forks, or New Smyrna Beach, to name only the tiniest fraction of the totality of the places I love. And when I say I love them, I mean I love their particularities: the smell of the yak butter candles in the Gyantse monastery, the woman in Kasane with beads in her hair who took my hands and taught me to dance, the four gangly graduate students at the University of North Dakota who asked me, during my visit, if I wanted to get up at eight on Sunday morning to go to the gym and sit in a smelly little plexiglass box and watch them play basketball.
“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” my friend Sarah once said to me, “that will become your Tibet.” I have no doubt that looking into one’s own baby’s eyes is many inexpressibly wonderful things, but one thing it is not is Tibet.
* * *
For the last seven years I have had the great and specific pleasure of being a stepparent, and I therefore have a somewhat more realistic idea about the amount of time and money and psychic energy a person commits to expending when she agrees to have a child. And when I say a somewhat more realistic idea, I mean exactly that. My stepdaughter was already six when I met her, and she lives with her mother most of the time. I love Kaeleigh with the kind of love that would make me throw myself in front of a freight train to save her, so along with some small idea of the sacrifice, I also have some small idea of the reward.
You might think the joy that loving Kaeleigh has brought into my life would make me regret my earlier decisions, but just the opposite is true. I believe my childlessness contributed to my ability to step unhesitatingly and fully into her life at a time when she really needed me. First, having Kaeleigh in my life was new and interesting (yes, Sarah, not unlike Tibet), and by the time it wasn’t new anymore, I had fallen completely in love.
When I am at my best with Kaeleigh, I am able to show her a different type of life from the one her mother chose. In this house, I am the primary breadwinner and as such make most of the decisions; I fly 100,000 miles a year, sometimes to places she has never heard of. I took her to her first rock concert. I read her her first Salinger; I taught her how to ride a horse. On the other hand, I fly more than 100,000 miles a year, sometimes to places she has never heard of. I missed her eighth birthday celebration because I was stuck in O’Hare Airport, and I am almost never the one who holds her hair back when she gets sick.
I always used to say, when pressed about children, that I figured some kid would show up someday who needed something from me and I would be ready. Not only is that exactly what happened; it turned out I needed something she had to give, too. You might be tempted to say that with the arrival of Kaeleigh, I got to have my cake and subsequently eat it. You might even be tempted to say that now I have it all. But having it all is a slogan for ad execs and life coaches. I’ll settle for having freedom of choice.
BEYOND BEYOND MOTHERHOOD
by
Jeanne Safer
Nobody will ever send me a Mother’s Day card—one of those Crayola-decorated creations made by dedicated, not fully coordinated small hands. I will never search my newborn’s face for signs of my khaki eyes, or my husband’s aquamarine ones, or sing a lullaby. No child of mine will ever smile at me, or graduate, or marry, or dedicate a book to me. I will leave no heir when I die.
Now that infertility is so much in the news, this has become an increasingly familiar litany. But there is a difference in my case: I chose this fate. I made a conscious decision not to have a child.
I wrote these words in 1989, for a magazine article that would eventually become my first book, Beyond Motherhood: Choosing a Life Without Children. I was forty-two years old then, married for nine years, a practicing psychoanalyst for fifteen, and in the final stage of making the hardest, loneliest decision of my life—I waited till the bitter end of my fertile years to commit myself—and I wept as I wrote them. When I saw them in print, which made my assertions undeniably real, I wept again.
Reading them now, twenty-five years later, at what I hope is not the ripe old age of sixty-seven, I am still struck by their stark power, the pain I was trying to work through by putting them down on paper and absorbing their impact. Of course my original feelings came back, and I shed a few tears of recognition and empathy with my younger self. But along with that memory came a retrospective sense of pride and gratitude at what I did and how I did it: I realize now that this choice made my life possible.
It says something about the strength of the stigma, both internal and cultural, besetting intentionally childless women that I felt I had to publish this intensely personal exploration (its subtitle was “A Therapist’s Self-Analysis”) unde
r a pseudonym. I even took the additional, totally irrational step of insisting it be published in August, the traditional “shrinks’ month off,” as if anyone who knew me and read it would know that I couldn’t possibly have written it then because I wasn’t in town. At the time I thought I was simply protecting my privacy, but now I see that my real motive for the subterfuge was to prevent the remote possibility that my patients, colleagues, and acquaintances would recognize me and judge me as harshly as I judged myself. Shame—for being selfish, unfeminine, or unable to nurture—is one of the hardest emotions to work through for women who are conflicted about having children. Of course, the small minority of women who decided against maternity early on may avoid the angst that engulfed me, because wanting a baby is irrelevant to their identity. The infertile, though they have anguish of their own, don’t have the same struggle as I did because society assumes their hearts are in the right place, and does not question their femininity. At that time, I wasn’t yet ready to stake my claim aloud.
Nor was I prepared for the flood of responses my confession elicited from readers. The magazine it appeared in, the excellent but short-lived 7 Days, received more mail about the story than about anything else it had ever published. The topic had scarcely been written about before and it was clear that like-minded women felt that someone was speaking for them at last. Of course, the magazine also forwarded me a few letters from strangers asserting that I was misguided or neurotic, or both. Several were from helpful fellow therapists who recommended that I go back into analysis so that I would come to my senses before it was too late. Entering this fray was, and still is, not for the faint of heart. But I knew I had to write a book about it.
Among the prospective nonmothers I knew as patients and as friends, one of the most momentous questions to be wrestled with was whether they would have regrets later on. Would their hearts and their homes feel too empty, too quiet? What would they have in common with their friends who were mothers? What kind of connection would they have to future generations? Would they feel fully feminine? How would they tolerate missing the less complicated gratifications of grandparenthood? To whom would they leave their stuff? These issues certainly tormented me. So as I spent the next several years expanding my article into a book, I tried to interview as many older women as I could. Of the fifty interviews I conducted, five were with women over sixty. These women offered a unique perspective. I needed to know if the passing decades made them question their decisions and what it was like to make such a radical decision in the days when women had little control over when they had babies, much less whether they had them at all. They had made their choices in the prefeminist days before reliable contraceptives were widely available, in a world where there was even less support than there is now for outliers like them. Each one was content with her life. They did not fear aging without progeny (many noted that having children was no guarantee of care), they were satisfied with their mates and themselves, and, quite strikingly, they were proud of their independent spirits.