One recent afternoon, I went with a friend to pick up her five-year-old from art class. Our progress walking home was slow. Her daughter wanted to examine every leaf. She wanted to say hello to every stranger. She wanted to be in the shade but not walk in the sun to get there. It took 20 minutes to travel a block, even longer to make the next.
My friend did not get frustrated and neither did I. It felt like a privilege to watch them together. A privilege to see this woman, whom I’d known since we were 23 and making bad life decisions, be a really good mom in her late 30s.
On the walk back to the train, I thought, I could do that. And it’s true, I could be a mom. I’m in my 30s. I own a home. My husband is the competent and selfless son of two developmental psychology professors – a man whose baby photos appear in actual textbooks about how to raise kids well.
Others have done more with less. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 19 and dropped out of college to raise me. She got a nursing degree, made sure I did well in school, taught me to be confident, disciplined and unafraid. But she’d also been mercurial throughout my childhood and subsequently developed late-in-life schizophrenia, the emotional and physical consequences of which I would not wish on anyone.
On my ninth birthday, she locked me in my bedroom and didn’t speak to me all day – punishment, she said, for leaving broccoli out on the kitchen counter the night before. She read my journal, then called my grandmother to read my complaints about my social life and daily defeats at school aloud, humiliating me. She beat me with a leather belt for transgressions she made up. She would grow enraged in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. “Some day, you’ll look up and everybody you love will just be gone,” she said to me once. “No one’s gonna call or come by. They’ll all just disappear.” I remember feeling stunned by the implication that, not only would I be abandoned, but that my abandonment was inevitable. I figured whatever made her hate me would make others hate me as well, and so I spent a lot of time alone.
In my 20s, I started taking writing seriously and surrounded myself with other people who did too. I found a mentor, built a career, got good health insurance and a decent therapist. Today my wellbeing depends on routine, work, and outcomes I can – through effort, practice and discipline – predict and control.
Though late-onset schizophrenia occurs relatively rarely, it is thought to carry the same genetic heritability as its early-onset counterpart. The likelihood that I’ll inherit my mother’s disorder, last I checked, sits at 13%.
In spite of this, I’m not ambivalent about having kids because I’m afraid for their mental health. I’m ambivalent because I’m still afraid for my own.
I’m not the first woman to survive a difficult mother only to worry about becoming her. And yet, one by one, the friends I’ve spent years commiserating with on this topic have got pregnant anyway – most of them more than once.
One won a major national prize in classical music composition just before giving birth to a perfect little girl. Afterwards, she told me she loved her infant daughter the way she remembered loving her own mom when she was a baby. It’s a feeling you forget, she said, one she didn’t know she longed for until she felt it again. She told me I should have a kid not in spite of my relationship with my mother, but because of it.
After this conversation, I felt optimistic. But then I thought of other friends’ multiple rounds of IVF, marriages teetering on the brink, careers put on hold. I thought about my mother’s remarriage and subsequent divorce a decade ago, which I’m pretty sure triggered her major psychotic break at the age of 53, the year she stopped leaving her home and started complaining about white men in sunglasses trailing her down the freeway.
I thought of my own lifelong anxiety, so deep-seated that sometimes I feel like its ceaseless, pounding rhythm has replaced my own heartbeat. I self-medicate through writing and when this work is interrupted, usually by my husband, I turn cruel. It’s during these rage spells sparked by anxiety – which therapy has softened but cannot fix – that I most sense my mother in me, and feel my own sanity waiver.
My husband knows not to respond in kind, knows to speak calmly until I can speak calmly back. He has learned to take care of me in the same way I’ve learned to take care of him. But I don’t want a child to take care of me.
“Shouldn’t I know by now?” I ask my current therapist. “How did all my friends come out of the pandemic with one or two children while I still can’t decide?”
It’s not that I think people who carry genes for severe mental illness shouldn’t have children, since by that logic I should never have been born. I don’t see myself as “child-free”, nor am I “childless by choice”. In the conversation around motherhood, I’m not sure where I stand at all.
She tells me there are a lot of reasons not to procreate and then brings up the climate crisis – as if I’m not factoring the planet’s potential to become uninhabitable into my own decision-making. As if everyone I know with kids didn’t factor it in too.
At a party, I strike up a conversation with an attorney who has six-year-old twins. Tipsy on sangria, I tell her about my mother. I ask her if she thinks it makes sense to forego having children to protect my own sanity. In spite of her issues, my mother was brilliant, hardworking, dedicated, curious. I tell her the thought of regretting not having had kids makes me sad.
She listens without nodding along, then speaks in an exacting, lawyery way. “Do the math,” she says. “If you give birth now, you’ll be in menopause when they hit puberty. If you’re worried about psychosis triggers, that’ll be one.”
“Do the math,” I repeat out loud. She sighs. “Look, if you don’t want kids, don’t have them. You don’t need to have a reason. And you can always change your mind.”
But I don’t want the option to change my mind. I want to know, now, whether I should or should not. And now I’m frustrated at this stranger who is only trying to help, who briefly offered the concrete clarity I’d been looking for, only to muddy things up again.
If you aren’t sure, don’t have any, is what my friends always say. But they weren’t sure themselves; they told me so. Why am I the only one who needs to be sure? Shouldn’t I just be stronger, get more therapy, work harder to not succumb to my potential genetic inheritance?
After my mother’s psychotic break, I took a free class offered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness for the loved ones of people with schizophrenia. I wanted to find out what we could have done to anticipate and prevent her mental break.
What I learned was that the way my mother treated me when I was a child wasn’t my fault, but it wasn’t hers either. The same disorder that led her to believe she was being followed by surveillance planes in the sky also led her to punish me for imagined misdeeds.
I learned that schizophrenia chooses its victims in ways researchers don’t fully understand. My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, shows no signs of mental illness and is an excellent mother. The knowledge could have been comforting: there was nothing any of us could have done to stop what happened to her. But it also means there’s nothing I can do to stop it from happening to me.
My husband emerges from play dates with our toddler nieces and nephews cheerful but exhausted and with no discernible longing for his own. I ask him if he ever thinks about regrets. “Sometimes,” he says. “But where would we even put a kid if we had one? And can we really afford it?” And it’s true that we live with two dogs and a rotating population of fosters in a narrow townhouse made up mostly of steep flights of stairs. True also that, due to the contraction of the film and TV industries, neither one of us can predict our income for the foreseeable year.
“Anyway, there’s always adoption,” he sighs. “We don’t have to decide now.” But he knows I don’t want to adopt. That my goodness as a human tops out where fostering dogs ends and fostering people begins. And if I don’t want to adopt, doesn’t that mean I don’t really want to be a mom?
We go back and forth and he plays along; he’s long since stopped asking me why I can’t just let it go. Instead, he’s telling me what he believes I need to hear: There’s nothing wrong with us. And I’m saying back, But what if there is?