Ann Friedman - Going Nuclear

I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. This is Part 3 of a serialized essay. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. Read Part 1 and Part 2.
 

I have dinner with a friend who’s been doing IVF. I awkwardly offer that I’m ordering a mocktail because of the heat (she wouldn’t have cared or even asked). We talk about the false narrative that we all get to choose our reproductive fate. The buried stories of people whose IVF treatments didn’t work. The people who wish they were parents but aren’t. The people who were only 80% sure, but had the abortion anyway, or 50% sure but carried to term. We all know an “oops” baby, but not the narrative about what happened between the positive test and their birthday.
 
As time passes, I realize this has been a selective-hearing problem on my part. For much of my life, I was so firm in my knowledge I didn’t want kids that I projected a lack of ambivalence onto everyone else, too. If a friend told me they were having a baby, even if they described the choice with trepidation, I heard their announcement with a projected layer of sureness. Or maybe it a political illusion: the framing of this as a two-sided issue had seeped down to a perception level. I’d become unable to see indecision, only able to shout for the right to choose.

A report from the trenches of ambivalence: The couples’ therapist asks me and Will to fill out a matrix of positives and negatives. Have the kid, don’t have the kid, pros, cons. We are so focused on the downsides that the therapist has to prod us to discuss the “have a kid, pros” quadrant, in which I have written “Maybe we’d like each other?” Meaning, me and the kid.

I know I would love this hypothetical child so fiercely I actually cannot comprehend it from where I sit now. (Right?? I have to take parents at their word about this.) But I also know that loving and liking don’t always go together. Just because I would love this kid does not mean they would like me enough to enjoy the time we spend together. To later include me in their harrowing adult decisions. Being the sort of family who would choose each other even if not tied by biology? That seems like way too much to hope for. A wild outlier event, not a predictable outcome.
 
The negative quadrants are full to bursting. Throughout the pandemic, as the parents I know crumbled under the weight of their inwardly collapsing nuclear families, I was a smug asshole. “This is what I always thought parenthood would be,” I thought. Sure, you can tell yourself that daycare and nearby relatives and nannies will make things doable. But really, you have to expect the very worst. This country forces you into domestic isolation when you have kids, pandemic or not. You’re siloed and fending for your own.
 
The dominant narrative is that it’s morally icky to have an abortion if you’re financially and emotionally capable of raising a child. I feel the opposite: that it’s always more selfish to have a kid. Not just because this planet and this country are on the brink of collapse, but because if I become a mother, I will have less time to show up for everyone (and everything) else I care about. A friend with two kids tells me that she absolutely relies on her childfree friends more than her own family, which is mostly far away. She can’t imagine parenting without these friends. What would happen if they all turned inward, too? If they went nuclear?
 
I ask her if kids ruin relationships. When I try to think of parents of young children who are happily partnered, she and her husband are on what turns out to be a very short list. She tells me she thinks that solid couples are solid, and unhappy couples are unhappy—with or without kids. Parenting only makes the cracks more obvious. "Just make sure you don’t stop having sex," she says. "You need something for the two of you."
 
I'm sure this is easier said than done. “I had plunged into the pit of urban middle-class Nuclear Familydom and its seemingly inexorable logic,” wrote Ellen Willis in 1989, when she was parenting a toddler and daily life had become “a Sisyphean struggle to keep a love affair from dissolving into a mom-and-pop sandmovers’ combine.” I am very invested in my love affair with Will. I don’t want to spend our lives shoveling shit side by side. I want to keep the delicate balance of independence and togetherness that we’ve managed to strike. The titles of parenting books flash through my mind like a warning reel. All Joy and No Fun. Screaming on the Inside. All the Rage.
 
Then there is the fact that I was raised in a kind of gendered traditionalism that says women do most of the daily kid stuff, and men do the out-in-the-world stuff. These days, among friends who have children, gender still matters, but structure matters more. Whoever has the more flexible job does more parenting. Will and I would have a verbal commitment to equity, but the fact remains: I have a malleable career. And the crushing weight of gendered expectations sitting atop it.
 
I’m trying so hard not to just react to the values I was raised with. To remind myself that I have achieved some escape velocity from the most extreme gender traditionalism, and, by this point, I stand firm in my identity and values and priorities. To make this decision based on who I am, who I’m partnered with, where we live, what’s happening right now. I don’t want it to matter that I’ve spent a lifetime saying I don’t want kids. I don’t want the statistics to factor in. I want to decide with a fresh spirit.
 
The news won’t let me. It keeps pulling my back into a liquid core of anger, reminding me that the force that propelled me so far from home remains active, even after so many years. Reminding me that the gendered expectations of the past are not relegated there. I try to find serene perspective, and all that’s there is rage.
 
This was Part 3 of a 10-part serialized essay. I’m on leave until early March, which means I will not be reading replies to this newsletter. However, it will continue to arrive every Friday. Next week, Part 4: Unintended.

"This is why people get married and have kids. The nuclear family is just a flaccid imitation of the twisted capitalist microcosms that we all deserve to micromanage." -Heather Havrilesky