Essays

September 8, 2022

Being a Mom is the Best Decision I Never Made

Image via iStock.

By Jesse Sposato 

 First shock, then utter confusion. This is how I would describe the look on my friend’s face when I told her I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have kids or not. We were in our early 30s then, and this friend knew, despite being single for years, that she definitely wanted kids. I had friends on the other side, too, who’d always seemed to know that they didn’t want to become parents. I envied (and was confounded by) them both. I had never been sure; I was the type to be indecisive about everything, from what to wear to what to make for dinner. 

For one, I wasn’t much of a kid person. When colleagues brought their babies to work, I would linger at my desk for as long as I could before it would seem weird if anyone noticed me there, and only then would I get up and offer an “Omg so cute!” or two before surreptitiously slinking back. In junior high, I went through a brief babysitting phase, less because I was particularly good with children and more because, what else can you really do for money at that age?

It’s not even that I was single and waiting for the right person to embark on this journey with. I was still in my 20s when I got together with my partner, affording us plenty of time to decide to have kids — I just didn’t know if I wanted to, and neither did he.

Besides not having a natural affinity for kids, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to have them for all the usual reasons people aren’t sure. I like alone time, reading for hours on end, traveling on a whim, making last-minute plans to see friends (or any plans at all with little effort). I have a long list of time-consuming goals that includes things like: finish books I’ve started and write new ones. In short, I liked my life the way it was and wasn’t sure if I wanted to change it. 

But there were other reasons, too. As a person who makes sense of things through reading, I had consulted countless websites and magazines while grappling with this decision. My searches turned up quite a few stories that were both compelling and discouraging: about postpartum depression, postpartum depression that lingers, and parents who regret becoming parents. I’m all for writers sharing the very things you’re not “supposed” to say (clearly), but reading about these experiences scared me. What if that happened to me? Plus, a lot of my friends had struggled with getting pregnant, sometimes undergoing years of fertility treatments without success — that scared me, too. Did I want this enough to go on that kind of roller-coaster ride?

Not to mention that, in the years I was contemplating trying, my partner and I lived in a tiny, rent-stabilized railroad apartment (with no bathroom sink, mind you). I couldn’t imagine raising a kid in that place, at least not for very long, but leaving a good New York City rental situation for a bigger, more expensive place felt unfathomable. Prices had climbed since I’d first moved to the city, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to take my chances out there. Having a kid meant extra costs of other sorts, too: daycare, a college fund, an extra ticket for every plane trip in the foreseeable future, plus all the things they would need and ask for.

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My cons list was long, but my pros list only consisted of two bullet points: I wanted someone to help take care of me when I was older, a reason I knew was selfish and couldn’t stand on its own, and the better, bigger reason: boundless love. This was a thing my mom had gushed to me about on every one of my birthdays for as long as I could remember: how wonderful it felt to love someone else, someone you had a hand in creating, so incredibly much. The possibility of that feeling carried a lot of weight. 

And there were little things that made me inch toward maybe, like how I appreciated the kid talk I’d overhear from coworkers at an old job. When they deemed me next, due to the close proximity of our desks, I thought it sounded nice. But of course, that wasn’t reason enough to try.

As I approached my late 30s and felt the time to make a decision creeping up, well, I still didn’t really make one. Nothing ever felt like enough to decide I wanted to directly pursue becoming a mom, but there was one conversation that finally pushed me over the edge to not not try. 

While picking my gynecologist’s brain on a routine visit — I had been roping her into helping me make The Decision for years at that point — she gave me the zen advice I needed to hear. She said something to the effect of, “You seem to be in a healthy relationship and I have a feeling you’d be good either way, why not just give it a shot! If it doesn’t happen, that’ll be okay, too.” 

So, after years of hemming and hawing, my partner and I decided to do just that. I didn’t count the days until ovulation or track when we had sex, but I stopped taking birth control and ordered a prenatal vitamin. No route would be the wrong one. 

One night shortly after this, while out to a lovely late-night dinner, my partner confessed that he was happy with our life just the way it was, and maybe this was the way things were meant to stay. Naturally, I found out I was pregnant just a few weeks later. I was happy, I was pretty sure, but even still, I wondered if it was the right thing. 

Only once my daughter was born did I really know that it was. As I felt that little bundle in my arms, as I nursed her and sang her to sleep, and as I looked at her face in search of my own, it was clear. Now that I had experienced the very kind of immeasurable love that my mom had described, I was glad things had ended up the way they had. Caring for our daughter felt instinctual, which surprised me. I had a well of patience I couldn’t have predicted, and I found myself gushing about all the mundane things I never understood (or cared about) before: tiny feet, first giggles, miniature burps. I didn’t mind cleaning up her smelly, runny poop, and found it kind of amusing when she spit up all over my favorite sweater.

For a while, I was subconsciously waiting for the other shoe to drop, for postpartum depression or regret or something worse to kick in, but it never did. (Which by all means doesn’t mean that parenting didn’t come with a thousand difficulties, but they weren’t the headline.) A little over two years in, caring for and loving Frances brings me so much joy on a daily basis — the goblin stories she tells, the one-second “massages” she gives, the way she kisses every animal she meets. It’s impossible to imagine my life without her, and I wouldn’t want to. But of course, I can only say that with hindsight. 

Perhaps it could have gone another way. Maybe I wouldn’t have liked being a mom. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to get pregnant and just like my doctor suspected, that would have been fine, too. In the end, I took a chance and got lucky, and I’m so glad I did. But leaving this monumental decision up to semi-fate was still the best approach for me because I simply didn’t know what I wanted. Sometimes making (or not making) decisions in the in-between is just the way we make decisions.

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