By Laura Norkin
Kristina Wright, of Richmond, VA, married young and was positive she didn’t want kids. “People would say, ‘you gotta have them,’ but I would see that they were not necessarily the happiest people in the world,” she says. And on her husband’s Navy salary, they couldn’t really afford it. When an unplanned pregnancy in her 30s ended in miscarriage, she says she felt even more resolute. Then, she turned 40.
That year she completed grad school and her mother died. “I remember waking up and going, okay, I’m 40, I don’t have a mother anymore, and thinking, ‘The window really is closing. Maybe let’s try this.’”
Parenthood is one of the most talked-about identity shifts in a person’s life, with full-throated declarations coming from both “pro” and “con” camps. Ambivalence is often missing from the conversation.
Though Wright came closer to yes than no, it was more of a “let’s see what happens.” She decided if it was meant to be it would, and though she did get pregnant, it ended in miscarriage again. “The one at 30 I thought was a sign I was supposed to stop,” she says. “At 40, I felt like, if I stop now it’s not going to happen.” She had a son at 42, and about a year later was pregnant with another.
“To go from ‘I don’t ever want kids’ to two under two was dramatic,” she says, which only reaffirmed her process to get to that yes. “I needed to be really sure it was my decision. I needed to know it was from me, and it was not until I was 40 that I finally felt like, ‘okay, this is something I can do. I’m ready to do it.’”
Sharing experiences of women whose no turned to a yes is not to further the stereotype that all women will eventually crave motherhood – and certainly shouldn’t encourage the kind of peer pressure that the women in this story all say contributed to their uncertainty. A 2023 study from Michigan State University found the percentage of U.S. adults without children who say they never want kids doubled, from 14% in 2002 to 29% in 2023. A no is as legitimate a choice as a yes, and an increasingly popular one. Interrogating uncertainty doesn’t mean there’s a yes to find under the rubble of your mind. Maybe it’s a no.
“It’s not about pros and cons of parenthood because if that worked you’d make a decision and move on.” — Ann Davidman
According to Ann Davidman, who co-wrote the self-help book Motherhood, Is It for Me? in 1991 and has been counseling people on that question ever since, “there’s a lot of unexplored certainty” around wanting or not wanting children.
“I work with people who don’t know, who want to feel certain,” she says. “In some ways they are a luckier group. [Uncertainty] forces them to look at something they didn’t know they needed to look at, to identify something that will help them have a fuller, bigger life no matter what they decide.” Important to this work is helping people distinguish what they want from what they choose. “What you want has to be identified between you and you; what you do with it is a separate process,” she says.
For example, she says it’s not uncommon for someone to understand they would have wanted to be a parent but decide if certain conditions are not met — be they romantic, financial, familial, or otherwise — they won’t pursue having a child. Her process involves writing prompts, counseling, and meditations that she says can shake loose some internal knowing or reveal early-life trauma getting in its way. At that point, “[clients] don’t have anxiety attached to the indecision because they have clarity for what they want, and the decisionmaking process is easier.” If it were as simple as writing a pro- and con list, she says, you’d already know.
While Kristina Wright’s decision to have a child came after many years of certainty that only changed when her conditions did, Katherine Kunz faced midlife ambivalence based squarely in fear and anxiety around the decision itself, “twin stuff,” and trying to disentangle these stressors from her identity while building a life she was proud of sans kids. Kunz got married at 39, started a PhD program at 41, and moved to Switzerland for a year for research. A lilt in her voice talking about this period reveals how much she enjoyed it, even though she says she felt a “nagging” that she was giving up something else to be there.
“Some people could’ve had a kid at 39 or 40 and then done a PhD. I’m not one of them. I threw myself into the PhD experience and it really served me,” she says. She flourished professionally but was paralyzed by a certain uncertainty. Based in the Bay Area like Davidman, she sought her help.
The second-born in a surprise set of twins, Kunz says she always felt like “an extra.” She grew up in a military family that was constantly uprooted with a mother who loved the freedom to travel. She felt like a burden just being there. Pursuing an advanced degree and often solitary career was a way for Kunz to find, explore, and come to know herself. She stopped taking birth control before going abroad; in Davidman’s vernacular, she’d made a decision but wasn’t completely aligned with her desire. “I had a lot of anxiety about that. I kind of wanted to [get pregnant] but was anxious that it would happen,” she says. When she came back to the States, she wanted to feel emphatic in her yes or no — and that’s when she joined Davidman’s course. Embracing the anxiety and unknowable what-ifs, she had her son at 45.
“You suddenly have a baby and are like, what the hell, I actually loved my alone time,” she says. “I really did like my life before and now I don’t have that, you know? Some of the things I feared did happen: I wasn’t able to do my career the same way, I didn’t feel like I had the same alone time which supported me – also I had my son which is wonderful! It’s both/and.” Acknowledging this was validating. “It confirmed why I was ambivalent and made me feel less like there’s something wrong with me,” she says.
Both Kunz and Wright bring up the fact that their grandmothers were having babies into their 40s. “It’s not historically inaccurate to say women have always had babies in their 40s,” the latter says. Even if those were fourth, seventh, or 12th babies. A CDC report, “Trends in Mean Age of Mothers in the United States,” reveals that the average age of first-time mothers has crept up from 26.6 in 2016 to a still-spritely 27.5 in 2023. In her Northern California city, Kunz says she isn’t the oldest mom at the playground, though people always assume she needed IVF to conceive, “which, I don’t know why it matters.”
What matters is having a life you want. For Kunz, that means being all-in on parenting her now five year old. “Being an older parent, I did want to have more time with my son when he was young, especially because I’m going to have less time than if I had a kid when I was younger,” she says. “I won’t be around as long.”
Wright’s husband retired from the Navy and now teaches at the school their two teenage sons attend. “This is what I wanted,” she says. “I wanted him to be actively involved.” She has also enjoyed getting to know him in a new way, a perhaps uncelebrated angle of late-parenthood: “It’s funny to be with somebody for almost 20 years and have no sense of who they are as a parent. It’s like we had a whole relationship before kids and we have another relationship now.”
Jenny Altman had the life she wanted without kids. In her 20s, she was broke, working in fashion in New York City, and loving every minute of her untethered existence. Her friends married one by one, and she was “living the 27 Dresses life,” wedding hopping between adventures. As they had kids and moved to the suburbs, she felt a sense of defensive judgement. “They looked at me like, why don’t you want these things, and I always looked at it like, why do you?” she says. “I didn’t need any of those forced commitments,” she adds, sharing that she and her partner, whom she met at 30, have never married. He had a daughter when they met, who added just enough kid to Altman’s life, and she had the kind of job where family leaked into the workday at your peril.
At 38, she started her own business as a brand marketer for, coincidentally, a lot of mom and baby companies. Then, she felt, “if I’m ever going to have a baby, this is kind of it.” But she and her partner agreed that if it ever got hard, they’d stop trying. It was, “If we’re lucky enough to have a baby, great. But if [not], also great. I guess that is ambivalence?”
Cut to today, and she’s in her 50s with a 14-year-old “travel buddy,” and building Midlife Mom, a website for everyone who made it past the media-saturated pregnancy and baby phase to the truly WTF era of perimenopause-plus-puberty in one household. “If it had gone the other way, I would still be great and living a life with travel, which now I do with her,” she says.
Ultimately, Davidman says, making this choice “is about knowing yourself better, because if you’re going to be a parent, [this will] only make you be a better parent. And if you decide to live a child-free life, it’s only going to add quality to your life.”