The Washington Post: From the day your baby is born until the day they turn 18, your family will spend about $310,605.
There are calculators for how much it costs to raise your child. Calculators, for some, to see if they and their child can survive. Survive without the latest montessori toy, survive on food stamps.
There are no calculators to add up if you are a good mother.
I think of my mother. Of an email from her series, “Mowing Musings.”
One said, “I see three adults who are so generous, who love people, who have grown into strong individuals…and I think about how many things I wish I could have changed as a Mom. The biggest being impatience and becoming easily angered. I see God having helped me work on that, but I so wish that I had realized it years ago.”
There are bad moms. There are good moms. I calculate that I have one of the best.
August 2020 Census Data: Working Moms Bear Brunt of Home Schooling While Working During Covid-19
A friend’s Instagram story: The kids are going through sleep training and this has genuinely been one of the hardest weeks of my life.
I raise my voice to my mother: Why can’t we ever talk about the hard things about having kids without putting a positive spin on it?! There’s a sense of missing each other. She offers me an apology: Okay. I didn’t mean to invalidate what you’ve been feeling.
A huffy silence.
A weathered mother hand searches for a weathering child hand.
They clasp.
We walk on together.
A FaceTime call from a best friend: We lost the baby.
A run-in with my neighbor: The adoption was approved!
An invitation from my friend: Would you like to come to the hospital to meet our newborn?
A hand to my stomach: I imagine a baby inside.
A hand to my sister’s stomach: I feel a baby inside.
An app that we downloaded during the start of the pandemic that merges my husband’s face and mine to show what our baby would look like: We are horrified.
My husband and I have not replicated any of those terrifying creatures ourselves. Still, I have little hands that wrap their arms around me. I bend so they can reach around my neck and I can scoop them in. “I love you, Caroline.” they say. “I love you so much,” I reply. I have been to baby dedications and playground dates; read bedtime stories scrunched into the top of bunk beds surrounded by stuffies, changed rancid diapers, and held them when they have felt a “quick poke” at the doctor.
It takes a village, they say. I am a villager in my friends’ villages and that feels like sacred and hard and honest and beautiful choice work. But also, what would it feel like to have one of those tiny, grubby hands call me “Mommy” instead?
Do I want that?
Test results from my doctor: Your history of eating disorders should not inhibit your ability to get pregnant.
A text from number 22422: A federal judge’s decision poses a threat to birth control access.
A tiktok: Two women are giving themselves hormone shots. They are documenting their journey of freezing their eggs.
The plan was that I would get pregnant the second year of grad school. Instead, my dad died, I quit grad school, I entered treatment. I rethought life. And babies weren’t part of that.
Maybe if biological clocks and cisgender female expectations weren’t a thing, maybe I wouldn’t even have to have this monologue. Tick tock, tick tock, they say to my uterus, my ovaries.
For now, we do not have children. We have not tried to have children. I have cried when I have worried that I might be pregnant. I have cried with relief when I was not. I have cried when I have thought that I wouldn’t be able to get pregnant.
One day, I may want to be a mother. Right now, I do not.
A text from my husband after a weekend with our nephew: I’m so glad we don’t have kids.
My young adulthood and adulthood and whatever hood I’m in now have been marked by reconsidering. And so, with motherhood too. I reconsider what it is to be a mother. Or how to be a mother. There is a constant barrage of information on the experience of being a mother. I consider and reconsider. My husband and I talk and check-in. I peep outside the window of the cabin, he’s sitting under a tree reading to our nephew, “Dear god, he is so tender with him.”
I wonder if the mothers want to correct my thoughts. No no, it is so much more than that. Or, no no, don’t let that hold you back. I do not let it hold me back, but I do hold it. And surely, of all the people in the world, it is the mothers that know grief intimately.
One day I may grieve that I did not become a mother. Or that I did not become a mother how I thought I might. One day I may grieve for what I have given up to become a mother. One day I may grieve, and the next, cry from pure ecstasy that my life has unfolded in the beautiful way that it has — child-free! Or! child of mine sitting at their tiny little table picking their nose! One day grief. One day joy. One moment grief. One moment joy. One moment grief and joy. Most moments, I think, contentment.