From Zero to Two

Just a few years ago, I was convinced that I didn't want children.

In my first relationship, which began when I was just 16 and ended when I was 22, we started talking in the last year or so about the option of being childfree. It just wasn't something we'd ever considered. You just expect, even as a kid, that one day you'll grow up and be a parent yourself. In college, when it was all just dreams, I ached for a baby. I couldn't wait for that day to come, and I fantasized about the life we would have. Then as I got older and started creating a real identity for myself, I began to fear that parenthood would interfere with everything I wanted to do. I had begun to realize my passion for travel, and at the same time, I had begun to realize the enormity of the student loan debt I was accruing in graduate school and the income bracket I could expect as a social worker. I couldn't reconcile the two with the idea of having children in a few years. I could barely feed myself and pay my bills as it was, and I knew it'd take me years to be settled enough that I could save up money for travel.

Both my partner and I began to feel the constraints of potential parenthood. As teenagers, everything was a distant dream; as young 20-somethings with our whole lives ahead of us, with all the freedoms and independence that life was bringing us with adulthood, the idea of having a time limit on enjoying that was unbearable. I feared that I'd barely be caught up and starting to afford a decent life before I'd have to sacrifice it all. We had just started this conversation, without having to talk about it too seriously, before we broke up. (It wasn't just the idea of parenting that made me feel constrained anymore...my relationship with my high-school sweetheart, which had become less and less fulfilling and quite unhealthy, had to be shed.)

Within the next year, I decided to stay in New York City despite coming to the end of my two-year graduate school experience. I didn't feel ready to return to South Carolina. With my new sense of freedom and personal agency, New York offered so much promise and possibility. I knew this was my time, and I needed to enjoy it now. In this same year, I realized I was gay and came out almost immediately, and I fell madly in love with one of my closest friends. She moved from South Carolina to be with me, and we moved in together pretty quickly afterward. This went against my value system, but I was desperate to be with her after having had a crush on her for so long, after having felt she was unobtainable, and I would have rationalized a lot to make our relationship work. However, I still wouldn't have agreed to move in together if she hadn't already been talking marriage. For me, moving in isn't something I would just do because we're dating and want to be around each other more. In my mind, moving in was a lifelong commitment; I didn't ever want to have to move OUT.

Pretty early in our relationship, my partner made it clear that she didn't want children. She loved them and completely doted on her little cousins, but had no desire to have children of her own. Because I'd started to think along this route in my last relationship, it wasn't difficult for me to be swayed to her side of the issue. Her clear and unwavering position made it easy for me to resolve my ambivalence.

After a year or so, however, I started to feel a little regret, disappointment, and even sadness. My partner had gotten pregnant at 17 and had given the baby up for adoption, and I found myself resenting her for having had the experience of pregnancy when I never would. This wasn't fair to her at all, and I knew this. I knew that there was nothing exciting or romantic for her about the experience of being pregnant and giving birth. However, that seemed to fuel my envy; she had gotten to have an experience that I craved in a raw, biological way, and she hadn't even appreciated it. I felt incredibly guilty about feeling this way, and hated that I had this internal struggle that never seemed to die down.

Whenever I alluded to my ambivalence, my partner would express her own guilt that she was keeping me from being a mother, and anxiety that I might someday regret that and resent her for it. I assured her that I had already been going down this path when we met, and that she had just solidified it for me, that she wasn't keeping me from something I felt compelled to do. However, when my first partner and I had discussed the option of being childfree, it was exactly that--an option. In my new partnership, I was realizing the decision was already made, regardless of my own wishes, and that there was no room for changing my mind. In order to deal with this loss, I had convinced myself that this was indeed the best thing for me, that I would be happiest this way. Think of all the traveling I could do! (Yes, having babies vs. not having babies almost always comes down to travel for me...it is my biggest passion, and will be my biggest sacrifice.)

I had convinced myself so fully that this was what I wanted for myself, that when I began dating Nicole and she spoke about wanting children someday, I became very anxious. I told her that I really liked her but that I wondered whether we should pursue a romantic relationship because I really didn't think I wanted children and I didn't want to hold her back from her dreams of a family. I remember well the weight of Nicole's resignation. She said that it wasn't a dealbreaker for her because she had been in a relationship before where her partner didn't want children, so she'd had practice adjusting to that reality.

I felt very conflicted, and I began to understand my ex-partner's struggle. It's an awful weight to feel like someone might be giving up a dream in order to be with you...that you could be responsible for that, that there is a limited window of opportunity, and that they could end up regretting it forever once that window has closed. I hated that feeling, but we had only been on a few dates and I didn't want our new relationship consumed with this discussion, so I let it drop for a while. Then before I knew it, my old maternal instinct came roaring back. My suppressed doubts and hopes found new life in the possibility of this relationship.

Did I still have my doubts, my struggles with all that I would have to sacrifice? Sure I did. But that's a whole other post, now, isn't it!