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In this episode, we discuss:
Do you want to have children?
Does having children give your life purpose?
Enneagram types
Memoirs about women who didn’t rush into having children
Do you think you’ll change your mind?
Items mentioned:
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney (Interesting quotes below)
Podcast discussion on “Pop Fiction Women” of “The Lost Daughter”
Jamie Chung says she chose surrogacy to welcome twins due to career concerns
What I Was Doing While You Were Breeding by Kristin Newman
Thanks for Waiting: The Joy (& Weirdness) of Being a Late Bloomer by Doree Shafrir
Motherhood quotes from Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney":
Unrelatedly, and in fact so unrelatedly that it comes in at a sharp ninety-degree angle to my last paragraph, do you ever think about your biological clock? Not that I’m saying you should, I’m just wondering if you do. We are still pretty young, obviously. But the fact is that the vast majority of women throughout human history had already had several children by the time they reached our age. Right? I guess there’s no good way of checking that. I’m not even sure if you want to have children, now that I think of it. Do you? Or maybe you don’t know one way or another. As a teenager I thought I would rather die than have babies, and then in my twenties I vaguely assumed it was something that would just happen to me eventually, and now that I’m about to turn thirty, I’m starting to think: well? There isn’t anyone queuing up to help me fulfill this biological function, needless to say. And I also have a weird and completely unexplained suspicion that I might not be fertile. There is no medical reason for me to think this.
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I told him I wanted to have the baby. He cried then and said he was very happy. And I believed him, because I was very happy too. Alice, is this the worst idea I’ve ever had? In one sense, maybe yes. If everything goes right with the pregnancy, the baby will probably be due around the start of July next year, at which point we may still be in lockdown, and I would have to give birth alone in a hospital ward during a global pandemic. Even shelving that more immediate concern, neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes. But then again, no matter what I do, hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine. Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them. I’m not saying, by the way, that I think that’s important for everyone. I only think, and I can’t explain why, that it’s important for me. Also, I could not stomach the idea of having an abortion just because I’m afraid of climate change. For me (and maybe only for me) it would be a sort of sick, insane thing to do, a way of mutilating my real life as a gesture of submission to an imagined future.
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“I agree it seems vulgar, decadent, even epistemically violent, to invest energy in the trivialities of sex and friendship when human civilization is facing collapse. But at the same time, that is what I do every day.” She goes on to say: “After all, when people are lying on their deathbeds, don’t they always start talking about their spouses and children? And isn’t death just the apocalypse in the first person?”
Tags - Books, Family, Fear, Feminism, Inspiration, Motherhood
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