The Unbearable Ambivalence About Children
Summer is tough because everyone is pregnant. After Victoria Day Weekend, the official start to Toronto summer, when the sun starts to blast the city into the high 80s, layers of winter clothes strip away to reveal who’s carrying and who’s not.
On the bus home today there was a woman, younger than me—now they are all younger than me—sitting with an older woman who might have been her mother. The younger woman’s belly a low-carrying curve underneath the gray crewneck that showed off the black ink on her forearms and her neck. And I was like, really? Her and not me?
Another older woman—older than middle-aged and younger than truly old, in that weird interstitial zone, post-wrinkles and gray hair but pre-geriatric—sat down next to the tattooed pregnant woman with a smile, asking in Portuguese when she was due. Impending motherhood brings out the goodwill in everyone, and what do I have to engender warm feelings other than a cute queer girl haircut and a willing smile? Those trinkets don’t win everyone over, and as we know, it’s a fight for survival out there. You need every advantage you can muster.
About two weeks ago my husband and I decided to stop trying. We decided that we valued my health and our relatively secure life too much to risk a new, unknown being jostling it all. My bestie-who-is-also-my-ex calls my child-free, newly-married lifestyle “enviable”—outside of our easygoing jobs (chosen in part for this purpose), my husband and I go out when we want, watch TV when we want, fuck when we want, and are utterly in love. A tiny being could ruin it all, land me in the hospital in a mental health crisis after two months of no sleep and rollercoasting hormones; it could consume our freedom and our finances, and basically wreck everything.
And yet. And yet. And yet it is summer, and I can see how pregnant everyone is on the bus and on the street, all those curved bellies, pelvises holding heartbeats, pulsating life. I feel chilled with my lack.
Sometimes—often—my seeing slides into checking. It is a self-abnegating game I have played before, back when I wanted nothing more than a partner and child. Checking on the street, on the bus, on the subway, in the restaurant, in line at the movies, to see who is holding, who has meaning, who is loved by their partners and their incubating life and God. Who does not have the same worries as me—who has traded up for a whole new set of worries, a set I longed for, still long for even though the final decision has been made. (We could always have an accident, if only his sperm count would comply.) I am checking to see who is the best, the most blessed. I am checking to see who has engendered the goodwill of the older women on the bus and of the universe. This is what is meant by the platitude, “Human beings are social creatures.” Showing your baby bump off on FB and Insta where others can judge and envy.
“There is no winning this,” says my bestie-ex, the woman I will always love and never understand, the greatest good ghost ship of my life. She is trying to get pregnant through her second round of IVF and although she is the cheapest person I have ever known, she is going all-in on this effort to conceive at over $10,000 a pop.
Last week, before her second round of egg harvesting, she asked me if I could come pick her up after the procedure—they put you under, and her live-in partner of 7 years had a meeting. I considered it carefully, overnight. At Korean brunch the day before the surgery, I told her I was worried my difficult feelings would pose a problem. She told me she didn’t understand the logic but respected the boundary, and that her partner could likely rearrange her conflict. (My bestie-ex’s autism spectrum disorder sounds through loudest and clearest at moments like these, moments that require emotional reasoning.)
Now, she is waiting on the results of the egg analysis; as she tells me, a million things could go wrong between here and a child. I talk to her with a strawberry milkshake in hand, out on a post-prandial stroll with my husband in our sunset neighborhood. She is woozy and nauseous from the anesthesia but happy with her decision, driven to be trying. Oh, for clarity like hers.
There is no winning this. It’s not even either-or. It’s if-then, multiplied by a nearly infinite number of circumstances and decisions that are not always yours to make, and that yet define your life and the lives of the ones you think you would die for. It’s how-was-I-supposed-to-know, back in 2017 when she asked me to coparent a child with her two years after we had broken up, that I would live to regret saying no when she took the plunge with someone else? Someone whose unmissable meeting led my bestie to ask me to re-up the role I had rejected six years ago?
There is no winning this, moreover, because of the complications you can neither foresee nor control. You can’t know how you’re going to feel. A couple of years ago, when I first thought I might end up childfree by something like choice, I joined a Facebook group for regretful parents. I wanted to see who was winning this. Many parents, especially moms, sure aren’t. Exhausted by 24/7 childcare, a desperate lack of work-life balance, and husbands who don’t pull their weight, many wish they could undo their choice to reproduce. And, of course, once the child is in the world, there is no going back. No matter what happens, good bad or teeth-grindingly tedious, you’re tied to the being you created forever.
“I think you want a partner more than a child,” my mother told me on my 40th birthday, when I was vaguely considering single motherhood. It was during the pandemic and she and my father had made a special exception to their septuagenarian’s “no guests” rule to have me over. We were outside on the back deck in late June. Champagne bubbled in my glass; a glossy fruit torte sat to my left; I wore a fabric lei that I had found at the dollar store near my apartment and whose rainbow-colored blooms I just could not resist. I thought about doing this with my own child someday, and I felt like I was glowing. But oh, the 40-year journey to get there? I know that at least sometimes, for my parents as for so many others, it felt like wandering in the desert.
My parents had always been avoidant on the subject of grandchildren; I had never felt overt expectation to procreate in order to satisfy the destiny of the family line. Still, the unspoken pressure was present, in the house and in the culture—the assumption from the beginning was that I would grow up, get a good job, marry, and make nice secular Jewish babies. By 40, I had only made good on the first two terms of the agreement. And even those benchmarks were arguable.
In a variation on my parents’ theme of silence, my beloved grandmother told me when I was 26: “The domestic life isn’t for everyone. You don’t need to worry about settling down.” Her tone of voice was frustrated, as if I were willfully ignoring the obvious: that a married-with-children life was not what I should be aiming for, and instead should set my sights on broader adventures, deeper personal growth. Later that year I gave a talk at an arts residency for Jewish 20-somethings, and I quoted her. My audience was amazed at her unconventionality, if not what I was doing with her advice.
About 15 years and a waterfalls’ worth of ambivalence later, I have finally heeded that advice. The decision is as final as it will ever be. We came to it as we come to so many major decisions: in the kitchen, while doing post-dinner dishes and holding casual conversation about seemingly unrelated topics, after months of prior discussion and gestating thought. I am now in the process of accepting that there will continue to be sporadic moments of sadness, of regret for the road not taken, for the ghost ship in the night—perhaps for the rest of my life.
Instead of actually childrearing, my husband and I have taken to telling each other stories of what life might have been like with a child:
“It’s 5 AM on Saturday,” he says on a Tuesday night, as we lie in each other’s arms. “We’re awakened by screaming coming from the other side of the room.” In these fictions, our toddler sleeps with us because, thanks to their arrival, we haven’t been able to afford to move out of our 1-bedroom apartment. “The tiny demands to watch cartoons, and there are three hours until we go to Shabbat morning services. You get up and try to feed the tiny Cheerios for breakfast. Amidst further screaming, the tiny flings the bowl of Cheerios across the kitchen floor. You have a headache.”
“It’s 7:30 AM on a Monday,” he says on a Thursday afternoon, while we’re taking an afternoon walk in the sun. “Our tiny is now a 14-year-old boy who hasn’t spoken to us in a week. Our attempts at reaching out with a weekday breakfast of bagels and lox are thwarted and he skips school to make out with an 11-year-old named Gina in the 7-11 across the street from his magnet high school, where he aces all his tests but fails to turn in any assignments.”
We laugh and shake our heads and marvel at the good life we have together. But even in the telling of our imagined pains of parenthood, there are moments where we are laughing in recognition, seeing each other through the stories, and wishing these tales we spin, however nightmarish to our child-free ears, would come true. Technically, we may be child-free by choice, but it feels like a choice made under duress: the damning factors of my health, his infertility, our financial future in a city of constantly rising costs, and the sky-high expectations for parenting practices in North America.
While my husband spins the tales of the tiny that could have been, I think of the young woman I saw on the bus, surrounded by support and love, but looking exhausted. It is as if I am looking into a mirror that reflects an unlived life, one part relief and one part desire; the ship of ambivalence where I might have rested forever, if the North Star had not pulled my boat toward open seas.
About the Author
Susannah Dainow (she/they) is an award-winning writer who has also worked as a public interest lawyer in Toronto / Tkaronto. She is a recipient of a 2024 Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Research Award from Brandeis University for her work on the poetry manuscript, “Mezuzot.” They have also published poetry in journals including Acta Victoriana, Misunderstandings Magazine, Hart House Review, and the upcoming anthology Thriving. Their poetry can be found in the American Jewish Historical Society archives and the Riot Grrrrl Collection at Fales Library, New York University.
Dainow has published essays in Ms., and the dearly departed feminist forums The Toast and Bitch, and is an ongoing contributor of personal essays to the international news outlet, the Times of Israel. She has received funding for a workshop intensive at the Community of Writers and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. Last spring, they were the inaugural Jennifer Egan Fellow at the Mesa Refuge writing residency. She has won the Hamilton Grit Lit festival fiction prize and has received an Honorable Mention for short fiction in Glimmer Train. Currently, they are a creative nonfiction reader for the literary journal, Identity Theory.
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