Regretting Having Children

Are we allowed to talk about it?

My daughter’s crying drones on as I rock her sick little body. My son starts blasting the show on his tablet and lets out a roar… which sets her to crying even harder. Loud facts about dinosaurs punctuate my attention so I coax earphones over my son so I can think. Finally it’s just her crying and I breastfeed her for the bajillionth time, even though I definitely don’t have breastmilk, just to get her to please for the love of God shut up. I’ve run out of my kindness for the day long ago after a sleepless night of tending to her fever. I stare out the window and for a moment my attention lands on the sunlight atop the Rhododendron leaves swaying in the wind… and I fantasize about what my life would be like if I didn’t have children.

I can’t tell which is more taboo - publicly sharing about regretting having your children or about your birth mother’s awfulness. I’ve done the latter on this platform (though since removed it) so why not go for the former as well!

Maybe other people never regret having kids and only cherish moments together, or sometimes feel deeply stressed but in a way that doesn’t make them question their life choices. Maybe regretting having children is something we all keep hidden in our culture because we don’t want our children to one day find this out. Are we all keeping this myth up together, like some sick parenting version of Santa Claus? Hiding our challenges like wrapped presents in the night so our kids can experience a childhood with the illusion that it was thoroughly enjoyable to give? I’m not sure what age one of my children would be before they would want to read my Substacks* (if ever) but I’m going to guess 16ish. Is that not exactly the age we should be scaring our kids away from having kids?

*It is totally Substack’s wet dream that they will still be the hit writing platform in 2034… but I guess technically possible.

Who Could Give Away This Face? … Me earlier this afternoon.

If you think it’s possible to scare people away from having kids (who weren’t already scared off), you’re wrong. Also, the last person you want to scare you away from having kids is your Mom. How do I know? My mom tried to do it to me.

I was about 29 years old vacationing at our family friend’s house when my Mom and her good Mom friend sat all of us (their adult kids) down and told us how hard and awful it is to have kids. As in, how awful it was to be our parents. Maybe it could have been delivered better. It definitely wasn’t in a compliment sandwich. Like, “You are the treasure of my life and I never would give you back, but….” It was just like, “it’s stressful, it’s tedious, it’s thankless, its so hard - don’t think it’s not hard.”

At the time I was still deeply ambivalent about having kids. Maybe I knew something about what I’m writing to you now. While I wasn’t in a stable enough place to have them at that point, I was a few years later. To resolve my ambivalence then, I used to interview all the mothers around me - “How did you know you wanted kids? Did you feel it in your body? Which organ(s)?” I even pressed my mother about her wanting to have us as kids. “How did you know?” “When did your clock tick?” She evaded with non answers and I pushed and pushed. Finally she barked at me which led me to the conclusion that her clock never did tick. But she had kids anyway.

Talking about regretting not having kids is easy and common in our culture. Perhaps because it’s something you can regret that doesn’t hurt anybody else. In this episode from one of my old favorite podcasts about parenting “The Longest Shortest Time” Terry Gross gets interviewed about not having kids and finally in the most poignant part of the interview, turns the question back on the host “Do you regret having kids?” she asks Hillary Frank who starts to cry and stumble and share some of her moments like mine. Her pain and questioning is a lot of what I think we don’t get to talk about together as parents but SHOULD.

In the end, how could regretting having kids not be a big part of the parenting experience? It’s like suicidal ideation…. way more common than we tend to think (unless you’re a therapist). Out fantasies are comforting when you’re stuck in a particular kind of hell.

This reminds me of the excellent article The Wedding Toast I’ll Never Give in which Ada Calhoun talks about wanting to warn newlyweds of what’s coming their way. In this essay, she takes the reader through all her thoughts about her husband during a 24 hour period from deep gratitude and love for him to fantasizing about divorcing him. This is the kind of public service announcement I want (and sometimes try) to give at cocktail parties to baby gays picking out donors and even to my own clients, many of whom are family planning right now. I want to show them giggling and laughing while playing chase and also I want them to see me shout “Why did we think this was a good idea?!” at my wife one stressful morning last week.

I was recently talking about having kids with our friend who’s not interested, “It just doesn’t seem like a good return on your investment,” he chuckled. “Well, it is on a soul level,” I said in retort. What did I even mean? I think I mean, there is something gratifying in all this, although I think it’s often felt in looking back or looking at photos on my phone when those bastards are asleep. It’s the daily grind of intimacy which involves beautiful moments as well as many hard ones, just like the sky involves beautiful sunsets but sometimes its windy and rainy in your face and hurts like hell and that’s part of “sky” too.

“Rainy day Painting” by Olga Ibadullayeva

I just wish we could all be more honest. And real. I wish I liked the middle of things as much as I like the beginning but the truth is I don’t. I’m like Don Draper trapped inside an empathic, committed therapatized middle-aged white woman therapist body and life. So my solution is to stay and write secret Substacks at night. To hope my children won’t read them or at least when they do I’ll still be able to feel like I’m a good-enough parent.

I was going to send this article out as-is but I had the good fortune to hang out with my sister and her young children the weekend after I wrote this which helped absolve my guilt. That morning our monsters were running and crawling around at a Children’s Museum in exactly the sort of fantasy I had about having children before I had them. It was mildly fun and enjoyable but also exhausting and way over-stimulating (which is a good description for having children (PSA!)) I asked her if she ever regretted having children and she said, “of course!” I felt relief flood my body. “Really?!” I asked in disbelief because my sister has neurotypical and seemingly “easier” children than mine. “Well, it's not quite regret, it's mourning the loss of the life not chosen,” she explained. In that moment I realized what my regret is: me with my face pressed up against the glass of my life looking at what could have been my different choice. And I remembered something that my training analyst taught me long ago: There is no choice without loss. We try to make our life choices into the “right” choice, but really they are the just the choice we make (or sometimes - in the case with children - the ones we COULD make or life makes for us). Making a choice involves the good of what we choose but also losing the good of the not-chosen life. And making a choice involves the acceptance of the bad of what we have chosen.