Ann Friedman - I Shock Myself

I’m on leave until March and sending pre-written newsletters until then. This is the final installment of a serialized essay. If you’re just jumping in now, I suggest you go back and catch up. Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, and Part 9 of this essay.

My friend who is six weeks into motherhood occasionally pops up in my messages, wavering like a hologram from my future to tell me about how her stitches are healing and the agonizing details of milk production and how she is obsessed with her newborn but also disgusted sometimes. One day while I’m eating lunch, I text her that I already miss my childfree life.
 
She responds, “I am learning the difference between grief and regret.”
 
This jolts me. I put down my fork and stare at her text. I remember, for the first time, that this is what Will and I were talking about right before the car hit me. Waves of grief crashing into moments of joy.
 
I also recall several years ago, the last time when the to-parent-or-not-to-parent question felt really alive for me. My friend’s comment reminds me that, back then, I was fixated on the idea of regret, always wondering which parents secretly wished they’d chosen another path. I was convinced that regret hovered beneath the surface of all those comments and essays and books about how hard it is to parent, much harder than anyone ever talks about. (Trust me: Everyone is always talking about it!!)
 
In my 20s and into my 30s, every choice seemed so determinative, so final. To break up or not, to take this job or not, to move to a new city or not: It would all set me in an irrevocable direction. The stakes always felt so high. Every decision had to be made with utmost care because it said something about who I was, about where I was going, about where I’d end up. There was a right and a wrong path, and I intuitively understood that you cannot retrace your steps. You can’t go back to some crossroads.
 
Age has mellowed the intensity of even big decisions, though. Life feels more like hundreds of tiny forks rather than a few major intersections. Even the big choices don’t feel so tied to right and wrong anymore, just different configurations of joy and grief.
 
My first major brush with joy-grief came when I first met Will a decade ago, and it became clear that I wanted to tether my life to his: Excitement, pocked with dread that I was slipping into a gender-coded normie future. Limerence with an underlying sadness at leaving my fully self-controlled, independent world behind. Departing a known happiness for the possibilities of an unknown one.
 
Parenthood feels like a similar defection. Now, I wonder why my lens on the parenting question was always regret, why I never thought to frame the much-feared feeling as grief. As a sadness that is not about wanting a different outcome, but about letting go of a few tantalizing hypotheticals in order to live one flawed reality.
 
I think it’s because regret implies sureness. This is a much cleaner narrative than ambivalence, which is more like, “I wasn’t sure then and I’m still not sure now, and there has been a lot of joy and sadness bound up together in between.” Even though it can appear like they all end one of two ways—kids or no kids—every story in this category is a tale of not-knowing, of some amount of ambivalence, of joy-grief.
 
My own story has a clear outcome. I’m writing this deep in week 38. The days between before and after are rapidly disappearing. You know how I feel about a to-do list, and I have (check) washed the hand-me-downs, (check) filled the freezer, (check) sent the MealTrain, and (almost-check) scheduled this newsletter to reach you in the future.
 
But emotionally? I remain pretty ambivalent. I worry there has been no evolution. I started this year unsure, I remain unsure.
 
I have realized something about my year of indecision, though. It hasn’t just been about adapting to circumstances I cannot control. When I did have a choice, I moved toward the unknown. This is the only way to really explain how I ended up on the verge of parenthood, poised to belly-flop even further into the void.
 
This is a weird inversion for me. For most of my adult life, the unknown has been tantalizingly characterized by not having children. I’ve felt a strong pull toward a certain idea of freedom and agency, away from the traditional family structure modeled for me. At some point, though, I found myself more comfortable with my childfree life than I ever thought possible. It started to feel more known than unknown. Even if I wasn’t eager to initiate it myself, I was ready for a plot twist.
 
And life just… twisted.
 
Do you know about the sculptor Beatrice Wood? She titled her autobiography I Shock Myself. I remember seeing the cover for the first time and thinking, “Yes. THIS.” More than any bucket-list achievement or milestone, self-shock is deeply aspirational to me. I’m a woman of spreadsheets and calendars, whose hobbies haven’t changed in decades, who likes to keep friends and addresses for as long as possible. A person of clarity and steadfastness. No wonder the concept of shocking oneself seemed so exotic and distant.
 
This is what my year of indecision has really been about. Not the surprising things that have happened to my body, or the circumstances out of my control, or even the fictitiously clear outcome of impending parenthood. But the fact that I can shock myself.
 
The fact that I did.
 
Thanks for reading this essay—especially if you've made it this far! I’m on leave until early March. Starting next week, I’ll be sending you some fantastic work by other writers, inspired by the themes in this essay: bodies, plot twists, liminal spaces, the unknown. Enjoy, and I’ll see you on the other side.

"I am a stranger
learning to worship the strangers
around me
whoever you are
whoever I may become."

-June Jordan