OLast afternoon I went with a friend to pick up her five-year-old child from art class. Our progress 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 complete one block, and even longer to complete the next block.
My friend didn’t get frustrated and neither did I. It felt like a privilege to see them together. A privilege to see this woman, who I knew since we were 23 and who made bad decisions in life, be a very good mother in her late 30s.
As I walked back to the train I thought: I could do that. And it’s true, I could be a mother. I’m in my thirties. I own a house. My husband is the competent and selfless son of two developmental psychology professors—a man whose baby photos appear in actual textbooks on how to properly raise children.
Others have done more with less. My mother got pregnant with me when she was 19 and dropped out of college to raise me. She earned a nursing degree, made sure I did well in school, taught me to be confident, disciplined, and unafraid. But she had also been erratic throughout my childhood and then developed schizophrenia later in life, the emotional and physical consequences of which I wouldn’t wish on anyone.
On my ninth birthday, she locked me in my bedroom and didn’t speak to me all day. A punishment, she said, for leaving broccoli on the counter the night before. She read my diary and then called my grandmother to read aloud my complaints about my social life and daily defeats at school, humiliating me. She beat me with a leather belt for the offenses she made up. In the middle of an otherwise normal conversation, she became furious. “One day you will look up and everyone you love will simply be gone,” she once said to me. ‘Nobody will call or come by. They will all just disappear.” I remember being stunned by the implication that not only would I be abandoned, but that my abandonment was inevitable. I thought that whatever made her hate it would make others hate me too, so I spent a lot of time alone.
In my 20s, I started taking writing seriously and surrounded myself with other people who did the same. I found a mentor, built a career, got good health insurance and a decent therapist. Today, my well-being depends on routine, work and results that – through effort, practice and discipline – I can predict and control.
Although late-onset schizophrenia is relatively rare, it is believed to carry the same genetic inheritance as its early-onset counterpart. The chance that I will inherit the condition from my mother is 13% according to the last check.
Despite this, I am not ambivalent about having children because I fear for their mental health. I’m ambivalent because I’m still afraid of mine.
II’m not the first woman to be a difficult mother and only worry about becoming one. And yet, one by one, the friends I’ve spent years with on this subject have gotten pregnant—most of them more than once.
One won a major national award for composing classical music just before she gave birth to a perfect little girl. Afterwards she told me that she loved her daughter the way she remembered loving her own mother when she was a baby. It’s a feeling you forget, she said, a feeling she didn’t know she wanted until she felt it again. She told me that I should have a child, not in spite of my relationship with my mother, but because of it.
After this conversation I felt optimistic. But then I thought about other friends’ many rounds of IVF, marriages on the brink, careers on hold. I thought about my mother’s remarriage and subsequent divorce ten years ago, which I’m pretty sure caused her major psychotic breakdown at age 53, the year she stopped leaving her house and started complaining about white men in sunglasses following her down the highway. .
I thought about my own lifelong fear, so deeply ingrained that I sometimes feel as if the incessant, pounding rhythm has replaced my own heartbeat. I self-medicate by writing and when this work is interrupted, usually by my husband, I become cruel. It is during these outbursts of anger fueled by fear—which therapy has soothed but cannot resolve—that I most feel my mother within me, and my own sanity disappearing.
My husband knows not to react the same way, knows to talk calmly until I can talk back calmly. He has learned to care for me the same way I learned to care for him. But I don’t want a child to take care of me.
“Shouldn’t I know that by now?” I ask my current therapist. “How did all my friends come out of the pandemic with one or two kids while I still can’t decide?”
It’s not that I think people who carry genes for serious mental illness shouldn’t have children, since by that logic I should never have been born. I do not consider myself “childfree,” nor am I “childless by choice.” I don’t know where I stand in the conversation surrounding motherhood.
She tells me there are many reasons not to reproduce and then brings up the climate crisis – as if I’m not factoring the planet’s potential to become uninhabitable in my own decision-making. As if everyone I know with children hasn’t taken that into account.
At a party I start a conversation with a lawyer who has six-year-old twins. Tipsy from the sangria, I tell her about my mother. I ask her if she thinks it makes sense to forego having children to protect my own mental health. Despite her problems, my mother was brilliant, hardworking, dedicated and curious. I tell her that the thought of regretting not having children makes me sad.
She listens without nodding and then speaks in a demanding, legal manner. “Do the math,” she says. “If you give birth now, you will be in menopause when they hit puberty. If you’re worried about psychosis triggers, that’s one.
“Do the math,” I repeat out loud. She sighs. ‘Look, if you don’t want children, don’t have them. You don’t have to have a reason. And you can always change your mind.”
But I don’t want to be able to change my mind. Now I want to know whether I should do that or not. And now I’m frustrated with this stranger who is only trying to help, who briefly provided the concrete clarity I was looking for, only to muddy the waters again.
If you’re not sure, don’t have onemy friends always say. But they themselves were not sure; that’s what they told me. Why am I the only one who needs to know for sure? Shouldn’t I just be stronger, get more therapy, work harder to avoid succumbing to my potential genetic inheritance?
AAfter my mother’s psychotic episode, I took a free course offered by the National Alliance on Mental Illness for the loved ones of people with schizophrenia. I wanted to know what we could have done to anticipate and prevent her mental breakdown.
What I learned was that the way my mother treated me when I was a child was not my fault, but it was not 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 that 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 reassuring: 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 prevent this from happening to me.
MMy husband emerges from playdates with our toddler nieces and nephews happy but exhausted and with no discernible desire for his. I ask him if he ever thinks about regret. “Sometimes,” he says. “But where would we even put a child 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 foster parents in a narrow townhouse that consists mostly of steep stairs. It is also true that, due to the contraction of the film and TV industries, neither of us can predict our income for the coming year.
“Anyway, there is 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 being reaches the highest point where raising dogs ends and raising people begins. And just because I don’t want to adopt doesn’t mean I won’t Real do you want to be a mother?
We go back and forth and he plays along; He hasn’t asked me for a long time why I can’t just let it go. Instead, he tells me what he thinks I need to hear: There’s nothing wrong with us. And I say back: But what if it is?