“It will never be the perfect time in your career to have kids”
Why I did it anyway
Every so often over the last couple of years, I end up in a conversation where I’m explaining a podcast about vampires.
Specifically, this one, from Slate — Decoder Ring and Hi-Phi Nation’s episode from 2021.
The TLDR (or TLDL, such as it is) of the podcast episode is an overarching look at the philosophy of vampire literature — specifically at how becoming a vampire is so fully transformative and irreversible that you could never logically or rationally decide to do it if it were an option offered to you.
You can’t make a pro/con list about becoming a vampire because the things that might be cons beforehand could become pros after the fact. Your preferences and lifestyle would be so wildly different that to pretend you know what you might want post-vampire turn is a fool’s game.
For example:
Normal you would never want to drink someone’s blood.
Vampire you would literally bite your best friend’s neck open if it meant you got some of that fresh warm A-negative good stuff.
Normal you hangs out during the day and sleeps at night.
Vampire you sleeps during the day and hunts people for sport at night.
The podcast goes on to explain: There are only a few real life analogies to this vampire experience. The host notes (with some entertaining skepticism) that some people say taking psychedelics can have similar transformational effects, but that mostly, the two biggies are religious conversion and becoming a parent.
The latter is why this comes up for me a lot, because as a woman in my mid-30s, I’m often in conversations about the decision to have kids or not.
The analogy is helpful: Much like becoming a vampire, there is no way to make a rational decision about having kids.
For example, as the podcast suggests, before a kid, you might prioritize living near restaurants or bars. As a parent, your ideal neighborhood might include many playgrounds or good schools.
Before kids, you might prioritize sleep. After kids, you might still prioritize sleep, but your relationship to it might be so wildly different, and your desperate lack of it might feel like torture, but at the very least it will cushioned by the burst of love that comes with the soft exhale the baby makes when they fully relax into a nap in your arms.
Try as you might to apply rational thinking, you just can’t. You can’t predict future happiness based on your current interests because your current interests might not persist.
All you can do is decide you’re willing to take the leap and see what happens.
For me, having kids was never a conscious choice. As I’ve written before, I simply always knew I wanted to be a parent. (Getting married or being partnered, on the other hand, I was less sure about — if you’d asked me a decade ago, I might have predicted that by my late 30s, I would have gone the sperm-bank-single-mom-by-choice route. It is only because my husband is the best person I’ve ever known that I changed my tune.)
But deciding when I wanted kids was a different story — there is a clear arc of my journey from “I want kids someday” to “I want them now.”
There were years where I could not imagine it. After my husband and I got engaged in early 2020, I experienced a bit of an existential crisis (on top of or maybe because of everything else in 2020). I knew we wanted to have kids soon after getting married. I also knew my job wouldn’t get any easier, and that any job I took next if I decided to move on from my organization would be similarly all-consuming.
So I did what I always do when I spiral: I committed to research. I read essay after essay, dug deep into Reddit, and reached out to mentors and more senior leaders in the field to get a sense from them what my possible options could be in the years to come, and to hear what they had to say about balancing work and family.
Many of the conversations were helpful; one in particular gave me the answer I needed. I vividly remember sitting at my workspace (aka our kitchen counter) in our old apartment, a half-eaten bowl of cereal pushed aside, talking on the phone with the inimitable Cecile Richards, who sadly passed away earlier this year.
I don’t want to pretend Cecile and I were close; we spoke maybe a few times a year over the years and were friendly enough. But as is her way, she rocked my shit in just a few minutes.
I told her how I was trying to decide what to do with the competing goals of my career and my family. She was a mom who’d had kids while having a hard job — surely she’d have thoughts.
“It will never be the perfect time in your career for you to have kids,” she said bluntly. “There is only the time you do it — then you just figure it out. Your capacity to get shit done will expand,” she went on, explaining that I couldn’t and shouldn’t wait around for a possible pause in my ambition or my work. It won’t come. Just do it and adapt. You can love your kids and love your job, and while it may never be perfect, you will find a way.
In retrospect, per usual, she was right. On paper, late 2021 was probably not the ideal time to think about kids. My husband had just started grad school to become a therapist so we were preparing to live off one income for two years; I was gearing up for a midterm election year that would include a ton of exponential growth for my organization.
But as Cecile said: It would never be the right time. It would only be the time we decided to take the totally irrational leap and shake up our lives, knowing that the years we’d spent as a childless couple were fun but simply not what we wanted the rest of our life together to look like.
Three years and two kids later, we have indeed figured it out. We have routines, divisions of labor, harder days and easier ones, and very little if you’re measuring our savings accounts but a lot if you’re measuring the amount of times a day our kids absolutely crack us up.
Now I’m noticing another change, if not quite as life-shattering, which is that for the first time in my adult life, I am almost certainly done with big transformational changes! (While I should never say never about another baby, unless all of a sudden we become zillionaires, probably never).
That means this is the first time since my husband and I got serious about each other that there is no pregnancy or childbirth or newborn days on the horizon.
My body is mine, instead of feeling like it is on loan to my future progeny. I can plan a year or two or ten years out (theoretically) and not have to factor in a possible maternity leave. If I’m lucky, the next 18 years of my life will be marked by the predictably chaotic rhythms of my daughters growing from baby to toddler to kid to teenager to adult.
In that way — and in many others — I am not the same person I was before my kids. I remember at times feeling like I was living in in a quasi-limbo, just hanging out until the next phase of life began. Now the phase is here. I’m in it! To extend and fully kill this metaphor: I’m full vampire now, with my own tried-and-true techniques for blood sucking.
When I talk to someone thinking about parenthood — especially women, who bear the brunt of the physical and emotional change in the early years — and they ask me about balancing it with work, with finances, with everything else, I come back to that podcast and that phone call.
There is no right or wrong answer re: parenthood, nor right or wrong way to make the decision. And if you decide to go for it, there is no perfect time. That might feel scary. Instead, let it free you. No regrets, no reasoning, no logic. Just whatever you decide and however you adapt. That’s all, and that’s enough.1
I promise, once again: Not every email will be about parenting! But this was a conversation I’ve had a few times in the last few weeks, so it’s top of mind.
Three book recs, all non-fiction this week:
Sucker Punch by Scaachi Koul - I love divorce memoirs. This baffles my husband, who always gut-checks with me that my interest in this genre does not mean I want a divorce — it doesn’t! Rather, the opposite: I find the idea of being so unhappily married that you want to involve lawyers and a judge to be beyond my personal experience, so I want to understand it. Scaachi’s essays are so tenderly written and occasionally very funny as she traces the dissolution of her marriage to an older white man (who, small spoiler, was a real piece of shit.)
The Tell by Amy Griffin - A memoir of a woman living a supposedly perfect life — handsome rich husband, four great kids — who is keeping a secret from herself and everyone else about abuse she experienced as a kid/teenager. Hard to read at times but thoughtful and well-told.
Abundance by Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson - I listen to both their podcasts somewhat regularly (depending on the guest/topic), so this book was not a total revelation, but it’s very readable and interesting, with some good fun facts. I don’t totally understand the controversy around this — like, no duh, we should operate from a place of abundance! I think this lays out a compelling lens thru which to evaluate some policy debates. I also think it particularly resonates for people in blue cities (which is fine - not everything has to be for everyone!)
Other reading recs:
Mostly millennial women are set to inherit around $80 trillion. This could upend the economy and philanthropy. Cool! [The Persistent]
Related to the book on abundance above: What do we buy into when we buy a home? (Or, why the American dream as defined by pop culture is possibly a load of shit.) [The New Yorker]
I have been loving KCRW’s Sam Sanders Show - last week’s episode on whether movie stars still exist was super interesting and hit perfectly on a topic I cover in my upcoming book: The gerontocracy is in Hollywood, too! [KCRW]
“45% of women aged 25–44 are expected to be single by 2030, yet we’re not worried about women’s loneliness. Why? Because few things are lonelier than being unseen and unheard within a relationship.” [I’m sick of hearing about male loneliness.]
Totally agree! There is no “right time,” and no way to plan all the details. You just have to take the leap (if that’s what you want to do - if you don’t, don’t take it) and trust that you’ll figure it out.
Deeply appreciate your takes, thank you for sharing!!
“It will never be the perfect time in your career for you to have kids,” she said bluntly. “There is only the time you do it — then you just figure it out. Your capacity to get shit done will expand,” she went on, explaining that I couldn’t and shouldn’t wait around for a possible pause in my ambition or my work. It won’t come. Just do it and adapt. You can love your kids and love your job, and while it may never be perfect, you will find a way.”