I’m turning 29 soon and the first of my friends is having a baby in the new year. This news has prompted a lot of self reflection. I’m pretty ambivalent about having a child myself but also feel like it’s the next milestone. I feel a great deal of pressure to decide whether or not to have a child – but this is largely self-inflicted. Unlike others I don’t have family asking this question.
I know I have a few years to decide on this (and might not be lucky enough to be able to have a child in the event), so how can I reframe my thinking and be straightforwardly happy for my friend without feeling the pressure to decide what I want to do with the rest of my life?
Eleanor says: The new year, the next milestone, the new life stage; all these different vices to make us feel squeezed by the question: “Am I where I should be in life?”
I think the fact that you feel uncertain now really matters. There are some big life changes that you can leap into despite ambivalence – Should I move country? Change my job? – and there are some big life changes where the ambivalence itself makes the choice.
In the case of having children, the gamble of “doing it despite ambivalence” doesn’t just affect you. A kid isn’t in the first instance a milestone. A kid is a person; a person who’ll be able to tell if their parent regretted their existence. Yes, you’ll hear stories of blissfully converted ambivalence; parents who weren’t sure about being parents until they looked into their newborn’s eyes. But there are also stories that people are less eager to share because they’re so hard to say out loud; parents who gambled on uncertainty, wished they hadn’t, and made their child pay a lifelong tax for that regret. I think the rules for whether to create a person permit a lot less leaping despite ambivalence than the other big life changes. We sometimes bundle all these “life stage” things – kids, relationships, career – as questions about what I should do with my life, when really having a child is a question about whether to create someone else’s life.
That very fact might give you the strategy you wanted; a way to reframe this so it doesn’t just feel like awful pressure to decide the rest of your life. Perhaps instead of running headlong into the question, the goal could be to make it feel less of a leap. Start with smaller, information-gathering questions. Not, “do I want kids” but, “how do I feel when I spend an afternoon watching my friend with their baby?” “How would I feel if some omniscient 8-ball told me that kids weren’t in my future; relieved or deprived?” “If I did have kids, which parts would be not-negotiable? Would I need to be near my own family; would I want to have a partner; would I adopt?” “What kind of parent would I want to be; how close am I to that now?”
Thinking through some of these first-stage questions can be less panicking and overwhelming. The goal is to sort of sneak up on the big question sideways, so as not to startle it; to ask smaller, practical questions about what having a child is like materially, instead of treating it as a huge frightening symbol for “where I ought to be”.
Once that’s your relationship with the question, it’s a lot easier to separate it from your feelings about your friend’s new baby. You asked how you could be “straightforwardly happy” for them, but I don’t think that needs to be the goal. It’s really common to feel poignant or compared or even envious when friends go through big life changes. Instead of chasing those feelings away with a broomstick, it might be interesting to allow them (privately), for long enough to ask whether they’re really reactions to having a child, or just reactions to the pressures of life progression.
It sounds like at the moment, whether to have children feels like an iteration of that same tightening, squeezing, question; am I where I should be in life?
But we can do a lot of damage by treating big life decisions as symbols. You should make this decision because you want to, not because of what it represents.