The metaphor:
I graduated college just before the 2008 Summer Olympics, and it dawned on me that I would never be an Olympian. I had never aspired or exerted any effort to be one, so it wasn’t a huge disappointment. Still, it felt surprising to register that doors could close to me. It’s the first time I remember realizing that it was too late to change my mind about what I could become.
Right behind that thought was another unpleasant one, contrasting starkly with the commencement address at my school that spring: as life went on, doors would keep closing like this, over and over. My own inaction plus time would turn options that didn’t interest me into paths it was too late to pursue, each “no thank you” hardening to “never.”
Today is Mother’s Day, and like being an Olympian, I haven’t wanted or taken steps to become a mother. Actually, unlike the Olympics, I’ve made sustained efforts to prevent becoming a parent. Another difference: I don’t know any Olympians, but over time, more and more of my friends have become parents. Not all, but many. I do think they all deserve gold medals.
This post is about the knowledge that one day, the door to motherhood will close to me, too. I think there’s heart and humor in reckoning with this, but please only read on if you want to think about fertility and time.
The story:
It was definitely me who bought the cookie cutters, though I don’t remember doing it. It must’ve been back in quarantine. I have a vague memory of producing half a dozen different kinds of cookies in Christmas 2020, way more than we could consume in the pod with my parents.
Since then, we’ve kept the six cookie cutters shoved in the back of a kitchen drawer. There are three stars and three Christmas trees, each set composed of a small, medium, and large version that nest together. The two largest shapes are slightly too wide and their corners often catch when we open or close the drawer. So I readjust them often, though I keep not using them.
This past Tuesday night, Steve and I were doing some spring cleaning, going through our drawers. Remembering the clunky cookie cutters, I grabbed them to throw in the bag for donation, then reconsidered. Maybe I should keep some. Maybe I would make sugar cookies again one day. I didn’t want to have to buy more shapes then!
I put the two largest ones in the bag. Now the four I had left would fit well in a drawer. I picked them up to put them away, then paused again. Do I really need four, though? Surely not, I reasoned, putting down just the small and medium stars. I’d keep these, which could be used in any season, and donate all the Christmas trees. That makes sense. But as I moved the tree shapes towards the bag, I hesitated a third time, fretting out loud, with real concern, “Am I going to regret not having the trees one day?”
Oh! I know this feeling! I thought, as soon as I heard myself say it, laughing with recognition. For the past few months, before and after I turned 39, I’ve been retaken by the fear that my future self will regret not having children, though I’ve never wanted them in the past. Even with all I’ve learned about dread, it’s easy to get sucked into it, mistaking the fear for important information. But feeling that same dread about something as trivial as cookie cutters helped me remember that it’s not a wise premonition, just run-of-the-mill anxiety.
This particular anxiety was born in my mid-twenties, around the time I changed my mind about getting married. I’d spent years telling anyone who would listen that marriage was a tool of the patriarchy, an institution created for ownership rather than love, and that I wouldn’t be partaking in it. I got a dressing-down from an aunt who pointed out that people – especially women – often need the legal protections that marriage conveys. Then I got a reality check when I realized I didn’t just love my partner Steve, I thought of him as family – and if we got married, the law would, too.
We got engaged when I was 25, a joyful but unsettling reversal. If time could change this closely held belief, I worried it could change others. I began to think of my future self as a judgmental stranger: someone I couldn’t predict. Someone I might disappoint. Not knowing Future Me made it hard to confidently plan my life. Should I be making choices based on what I wanted now, or what I might want later?
A few months after the engagement, I saw a newsletter post for an event called “Maybe Baby.” It promised an interactive discussion for “women unsure about having children” – or in my case, unsure how to operate while not wanting children. According to the event blurb, “the number of childfree women in the U.S. almost doubled during the previous three decades,” so that was clearly a viable path, despite how many people still thought of reproduction as inevitable. Still, the clarity of what I wanted was not comforting, now that I knew how much about me might change over time. If life was like a relay race, where I’d hand off the baton of the choices I’d made to an unknowable future self, I didn’t want to run too hard in the direction of my current desires.
When the day came, the room was packed. The session was led by author and filmmaker Michelle Cove, who’d interviewed hundreds of American women who married later in life or never at all. Along the way, she’d noticed a pattern in which women regretted their reproductive choices. The biggest thing to know, Cove said, is there’s no perfect reproductive choice – and therefore, no wrong one. Whether you have children or not, there will be moments in your life where the opposite choice would have been better.
Still, she continued, inconvenience doesn’t have to mean regret. In advice so concrete, I almost gasped with relief, she said the women who told her they regretted their choices felt they’d made them on autopilot. Women who grappled with their options and made deliberate decisions could look back and remember their thinking at the time. In that way, they could be at peace with their choice, even if in hindsight, a different one would have worked better.
On the way home, I clung to what this meant. I didn’t have to be sure what I’d want later or prove my feelings to anyone else. I only had to be deliberate to the best of my knowledge. I resolved to ask myself regularly: do I want kids today? If the answer was ever yes, I’d need to start considering my options. As long as the answer was no, there was nothing to decide: my future self would be able to remember why I’d felt that way, even if I later changed my mind.
Ten years later, the answer was still no. The decade between 26 and 36 had passed relatively dread-free, thanks to the practice of focusing on my current self, rather than guessing about my future self. As I moved into my late-30s, though, the anxiety started to slip back in: at some point, those peace-bringing not today’s would be turned by biology into never. And never was scary, because that’s where my future self lived, haunting me with her potential disappointment.
I was 36 when Ezra Klein interviewed poet laureate Ada Limon. It was May 2022, and she read a poem full of a never that came from infertility. In “Foaling Season,” she writes of a farm in the springtime. “I saw a mare with her foal, and then many mares with many foals, and I thought, simply, I will never be a mother.” As I listened to the podcast, I recognized the haunting permanence in those words. I felt like I could see them coming out of the speaker and arching towards my body, and I stared at with gruesome fascination, wondering how they would hurt me when they hit. But in that moment, they passed through me without much impact. Huh, I remember thinking. I wonder if that’s like a paper cut, and it will take a while to bleed?
Two years later, the poem resurfaced in my mind, unprompted. Never. Never. I will never be a mother. I was 38, and those words started to echo through little moments: hearing friends talk about how they hoped to meet other moms at their kids’ school events. Celebrating pregnancy announcements from friends I’d thought would stay childfree, like me. Every time I reheard the searing words, I could feel the door closing, feel myself suddenly on the outside: an observer, not a participant. I will never be a mother.
Just like when I was 25 and taking frantic notes at Maybe Baby, I was plenty clear about what I wanted now. The uncertainty still came from the impending permanency of the choice, that my future self would have no recourse if she wanted what I don’t. But unlike at 25, when I felt like the first runner in a multi-person relay, I’m further into the race now. In many ways, I am already a stranger to my mid-twenties self, wanting things I never would’ve guessed. And from this vantage point, I can see both the unknown future, with the selves I cannot fathom, and the past where my younger self made choices that shape my current life.
Maybe Baby taught me that my deliberateness would matter, but I no longer have to take this on good faith: I can already feel that it’s true. Remembering my earnest stress, I feel a surge of tenderness for myself at 25, wanting so badly to ensure future happiness that I questioned what I thought I knew. The fear I felt then looks from here like love that I didn’t know how to express, like a desire to get a gift for someone whose tastes and interests I had no way of knowing. Like any gift from a child, some parts of the life she built are beautiful treasures, like my marriage to Steve, and some are just as comically outdated as my old speeches about marriage. But in each instance, I can see how she made the best choices that she could, based on what she knew, and I’m grateful for it, again and again and again.
The question: What about your life now would surprise your past self?
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