One of my very favorite homegrown hustles is an ATX-based operation called Read Receipts, wherein creator
embroiders texts, memes, and “internet-y things” onto stuff you can wear. Chantal has a razor-sharp eye for the zeitgeist, and knows exactly when a niche internet soundbite is so deeply resonant with our current moment that we simply must wear it on our bodies.A recent drop included a black crew neck sweatshirt inspired by this tweet:
The tweet alone could be the subject of a full-length college term paper, but Chantal’s riff on it stuck with me because there’s an underlying implication in there about how millennial women (and perhaps culture at large) feel right now about the choice to become a parent.
Straightforwardly: being proudly childless is a reliable weapon in the modern feminist’s fuck-the-patriarchy toolbelt. As is sex for pleasure, visible aging and, apparently, having a cat. But it also begs the question of whether we subsequently believe that choosing to have a child is inherently … anti-feminist?
The answer to that question isn’t what this essay is about—but it does allude to an acknowledged fraughtness surrounding the choice to become a parent in 2023. It’s a choice I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, and it seems that I’m not alone.
THE CHOICE (*said in Toy Story THE CLAW voice*)
Many women I know feel ambivalent towards the prospect of becoming parents. Don’t confuse ambivalence with apathy: we aren’t indifferent about or bored by the idea. In fact, many of us are very interested in parenthood—but we have (often substantial) mixed feelings or contradictory ideas toward the idea of becoming parents ourselves.
I notice this in the intimate conversations I have with friends: some already parents, admitting to the utterly-debilitating-yet-meaningful aspects of parenthood they’ve since seen realized; others seriously considering becoming parents for the first time, and agonizing over the high-stakes effects they know the decision will have on their lives.
I’ve also noticed that as millennials age further into comprising the majority of adult Americans, we’re discussing our ambivalence more openly, as in Alison P. Davis’s buzzy piece, Why can’t our friendship survive your baby?, for The Cut this fall, or Rachel M. Cohen’s Vox essay this month, How millennials learned to dread motherhood.
In Cohen’s piece, she points out that the tenor of the current conversation around parenthood feels markedly different than how our parents’ generation approached the decision to have kids:
“College-educated millennial women considering motherhood [...] are now so well-versed in the statistics of modern maternal inequity that we can recite them as if we’d already experienced them ourselves. [...] Previous generations “did not experience the same vocal outward world that we’re living in today, where everybody is telling you it’s almost crazy for you to have children,” said Sherisa de Groot.”
This resonated. And it made me consider the reasons I wanted to have kids, in spite of this growing, public narrative that doing so is, at worst, “selfish” and even “morally wrong,” and at best, pretty damn hard. How did I decide I wanted to go for it?
reasons
I didn’t grow up daydreaming of “traditional” girlhood fantasies in technicolor: getting married in a dress that looked like a layer cake, or (despite my obsession with the Olsen twins), dressing my twin children in matching outfits. Instead, I imagined milestones like getting married and having kids in the abstract; as something that would “probably just happen” one day. Instead, I filled in sketches of my future with dreams of meeting best friends on a college campus somewhere, and moving to New York City and walking purposely to a glittering building where I had important things to do.
So when, a few years into my 30s, I found myself married to a cool person and getting weekly inquiries from my mom about when we were planning to make her a grandchild, I was caught off-guard. “Society” was telling me it “was time,” but … did I want to have kids? Part of me answered with a resounding yes: I’d lived some life, and I felt excited to create, influence, and cultivate a new life … especially one partially made out of a person I loved a lot.
But there were, of course, other reasons.
make me look smart; make me belong
First: parenthood appealed to me intellectually. I wanted to join a specific type of discourse I saw happening in the world—the discourse Cohen references above. I wanted to be able to weigh in on whether I felt becoming a parent meant incurring a career tax (I do). I was dying to know whether I’d feel like I was taking on more of the mental load of parenting as a mother (I don’t). I wanted to use this knowledge as social capital: to develop an opinion, to feel smart, to leverage it to connect with others. Millennials have been socialized around intellect as achievement, stability, happiness; that our intellect is a way to achieve a sense of psychological belonging. Selfishly, I saw parenting as another way to get more of that.
Second: I implicitly understood that for a woman, having a child functions as an external marker of success in our culture. Embarrassing as it is to admit, the overachiever in me wasn’t willing to forgo that marker. In their frank conversation about telling a non-pregnant friend you’re pregnant for the first time,
and her friend Michelle reflect on how this idea can make sharing pregnancy news a tense moment between friends:“It comes back to worthiness [...] there’s a certain success that’s aligned with pregnancy, [that we’re] fulfilling our goal of being a woman. There’s a success engrained in child-bearing that feels like, ‘I’m a failure if I don’t do this.’ There’s something very competitive about it, which feels very female.”
Like Michelle says above, more than just wanting the title of “mom” on my resume, I was also seeking validation that I am worthy; that I’m capable, I’m important, I’m interesting. From society at large, definitely—but also from my direct family and community. In the comments section of
’s How to kid-proof your friendship, a reader illustrates how this can play out:“I'm childfree and very excited to be an aunt, but my mom - who has held her tongue about my child free choice - is now UNLEASHED and has ZERO boundaries or self awareness about pregnancy chat now my sister is pregnant with her first.”
In reply, another reader sums it up well:
“In my case, my parents are very involved in childcare for my siblings’ kids. And, while nobody takes issue with my choice to be child-free, nobody takes any interest in it either.”
Dark, right? And while I have faith that had I chosen not to have kids, my family wouldn’t have outright rejected me, I have no doubt that part of my readiness was motivated by fear. Fear of not just a literal experience like the ones these commenters describe, but fear of what it might reveal about us as a culture: that if you’re a middle-aged woman without kids, you’re suddenly less … interesting?
let me be me
Most disquieting, though, is the reason I’m most reluctant to admit: I wanted, badly, to be accepted and celebrated for something that was traditionally feminine.
To put it bluntly (and a little angrily), I’ve spent what feels like my entire adult life trying to reform my inherent qualities1, my “self,” to be more masculine, because that’s what I understand our society to value: making money, being productive, being analytical, delivering results2.
But motherhood presented a realm where I was culturally “allowed” to lean into my femininity, and would actually be praised for it! I could be productive (literally: by producing a human) not in spite of being a woman, but because of being one. It felt like a revelation. I wanted, for once, to feel like I didn’t have to contort myself in order to be celebrated—and to be honest, that’s felt as good as it sounds.
kinda effed
As vulnerable (and unflattering) as it is to admit, I feel validated for pursuing motherhood for these reasons. Because they’ve all delivered: I love getting to be an “insider analyst” on parenthood, and the newfound set of experiences I have that deepen my connections with fellow parents. I’m proud that my list of major milestones now includes “mom.” And it’s made me think seriously about how I can show up to all my pursuits in ways that feel less like “masculine me” and more like authentic me—whether they win me the approval of others or not.
And while I suppose I find these outcomes satisfying in my own life, I find this validation kind of a bummer more broadly. That, while it is entirely possible to be part of important cultural discourse, to be seen as wildly successful, and to be celebrated for our femininity without having a child (and we know it! see: hyper-promiscuous childless woman aging and alone with a cat!), our culture offers up child-rearing as a kind of fast-track to those outcomes for women, making its siren call spookily difficult to ignore.
I know that this choice will always carry tension—as all meaningful decisions should. I’m not suggesting that these are “bad” reasons to want to become a mom, either. But I’d like to see us untie these notions from motherhood a bit, so that we can make more space for all the other reasons to pursue parenthood.
One of those reasons for me: creating new life gives us more people to love, full stop. Which means we get to spend more of our precious four thousand weeks3 earth-side on loving. And that, to me, feels like the whole point.
What are your reasons?
Thanks for reading! Wishing you a restful, love-packed holiday. Fresh provisions coming in 2024 🧺 ✨
💘, Becca (a mom)
I know this is a loaded sentiment. In fact, I don’t believe in people having “inherently” gendered qualities; gender is a social construct, and we all contain multitudes. That could be an entirely different essay, but for now, what I mean to reference are those qualities we have historically associated with the feminine: eg, caretaking, compassion, capacity to nurture.
I’m overgeneralizing, but you get it.
One of the best books I read in 2023. Read and let’s discuss!