“How was your sister’s baby shower?” I asked my friend Steph. She was gathering muddy clothes off the floor and wiping dried yogurt from the table while our 4-year-old sons hammered a plank of wood to bits in the front yard.
“Meh. All Jen wanted was one last hurrah as a childless adult. Instead, everyone talked about their kids and how they just ‘can’t imagine’ their lives without them.”
“I mean,” she continued, holding a pair of crusty underpants with one finger, “give me a break. You seriously can’t imagine your life without kids?” And we rolled our eyes at the fact that people actually say things like that.
O.K. — I can’t imagine my life without my son, Leo, either. My husband, Ben, and I are so wound up in him that it’s impossible to extricate ourselves.
A lot of this is logistical: A competent grown-up needs to be with him at all times, which means a constant juggling of child care and work commitments and family. If I want to grocery shop on a Wednesday afternoon, I have to contend with the Leo Factor — will a bagel appease him, or will this mission require juice?
On another level, it’s psychosocial: “Mom” is my primary identity now, something I list proudly on my Twitter profile along with “writer” and “teacher.” And it’s emotional: He’s the best thing that ever happened to me, and I lie awake nights praying no hardship ever befalls him. Of course I can’t imagine my life without Leo. But sometimes I fantasize about a life that doesn’t include him. And I know I’m not the only mother in the world who does that.
“I can’t imagine my life without kids” is like “Having kids was the best decision I ever made” and “All that matters is that you have a healthy baby.” The problem with statements like these is that they are riddled with judgment. Shame on you for thinking you wouldn’t have kids (selfish!). Shame on you for even worrying about your child’s harrowing birth — what really matters is that the baby made it out alive. Sure, a healthy, happy child is every mother’s goal. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be traumatized by motherhood — labor, mastitis, postpartum depression and a looming sense of doom about the next 18 years.
I’m lucky: My son is fantastic (and, knock wood, healthy). He’s smart, funny, strange, introverted in a way that fascinates me — and he has edible cheeks. But a terrific boredom sets in around 4:30 on the afternoons we’re home together, and he loves to blame me for every lost Lego, torn picture or missed play date. I resent some choices I’ve made since I had him. Of course if anything happened to him my life would end. But I sometimes wish he would move out to a nice farm in the country for a week or two.
Unfortunately, one isn’t allowed to say this in polite company. Strangers admonish us to savor every moment. “They grow up so fast!” they cluck, as I watch Leo’s pants become high waters and pray he never stops lisping. I get it, I want to say to them. Hush now. Sometimes, the existentialism of parenthood is too much for me: Someday, Leo won’t need me anymore, and I’ll look back on his childhood and feel old, lonely and very wise about the passage of time.
Leo’s growing up is extra fraught, because I have been trying to have another baby since he was 1. Some people look at me differently when I gripe, as though I don’t have the right. How can you want another baby so badly, they seem to think, if you’re not grateful for every moment with this one? I want to remind them that parenting is not black and white, that all of us with children have created a set of problems that are impossible to solve. Grateful, I am. But human, too.
These Pollyannas who claim they can’t imagine their lives without kids — what, exactly, do they mean? I think it’s a humblebrag: “Are you aware of what a selfless mother I am, that I don’t even stand alone as a person anymore?”
But I am not that selfless, perfect mother; I’m an imperfect one, with my own desires and disappointments. So I won’t say “I can’t imagine my life without kids,” because in that statement there is no room for admitting that after a 40-minute tantrum when Leo repeatedly tells me how much he dislikes me, I’ve had a terrible day at work, and I’m just trying to get dinner on the table for my family — I might, just for a minute, imagine an easy, unencumbered life without my kid.
And that imagining does not make me a bad mother.