exquisiteflame

My husband and I also felt ambivalent about whether to have kids. When I got pregnant unexpectedly at 33 with an IUD, we ultimately decided to roll with it. We saw it as an opportunity for challenge and growth (‘for the XP’). I don’t know that I would make the same decision again, but this is also an impossible thing to consider, because I now can’t bring myself to imagine my almost-3-yr-old daughter not existing. She makes my heart explode with love and joy (and my brain explode with frustration and overstimulation). I think that’s why people can’t tell you whether they regret having kids. For me, becoming a parent was such a transformative experience that the “me” on the other side of that transformation is a different person with different priorities who would make different choices than pre-transformation “me”. Parent “me” would always choose to be a parent. Pre-parent “me”, if she was in a position to make a truly informed decision, might not. It’s hard to know now because that person feels so different from me.
By far the biggest stressor over the past 3 years has been relationship conflict with my partner. During my pregnancy, we had many serious and sincere conversations about how we’d tackle the responsibilities together as equal partners. We felt we were a great team who had successfully navigated many challenges together in the past. We consider ourselves to be progressive and feminist and did not imagine being impacted by outdated gender roles. In retrospect, we were naive. We underestimated the sheer volume of labour associated with having a kid, and the extent to which our different family backgrounds would impact our automatic assumptions about parenting roles and family life. We didn’t adequately account for the ways that we were taught to differently value and prioritize career and family. As much as my husband was an equal partner in the day-to-day tasks (when he wasn’t away for work), my perceived unfairness about the uneven amount of invisible labour led to simmering resentment and rage and conflict. This seems to be such a common experience for women, yet part of me is still bewildered as to how it happened to *me*. 
I’ve done many challenging things in life – joined the military at 17, moved across the country alone, tackled strenuous physical challenges, deployed overseas, completed a graduate degree – and that first year with my daughter was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I struggled with mental health, identity, loneliness, and asking for help. My birth experience was difficult, my baby was underweight and wouldn’t latch, and I stressed about breastfeeding and her weight. She was a difficult infant who cried all the time, didn’t sleep well, and was never calm. (Sometime in the 2nd year, I bawled after babysitting for a friend whose baby cooed peacefully for hours on a play mat). My husband deployed for 3 months when our daughter was 4 months old, I don’t have family in town, and there were ongoing lockdowns and restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. I drifted apart from my friends and sister who don’t have kids and who didn’t seem to understand what I was going through or the drastically reduced amount of free time I had, and experienced that as heartbreaking and isolating. I made a huge career transition because I found myself completely and unsustainably overwhelmed by the workload of having a toddler, a stressful full-time job with a lot of responsibility, and frequently managing the household and parenting alone while my husband was away for work. 
Whatever you choose, your life has the potential to be rich and joyful and challenging. I don’t agree with others who argue that a childfree life is selfish or short-sighted. There are plenty of ways to challenge yourself, engage with community and family, and experience joy, love, and meaning as an adult that don’t involve having kids. Becoming a parent can be a path to those things, but choosing not to become a parent would give you more freedom and flexibility. The hardest thing about parenting is how relentless it is. I miss concerts, traveling, nice restaurants, and sex. My partner and I still occasionally do those things, but with a prerequisite amount of logistical coordination and baseline level of exhaustion that it almost doesn’t feel worth it (I hear this gets better as kids get older). I miss having the freedom to roll out of bed in the morning, brush my teeth, put my shoes on, and walk out the door. 
I experience parenting as joyful, meaningful, challenging, and exhausting. I’m grateful for my daughter and for the opportunity for growth that parenting has brought to my life. I have definitely leveled up as a result of the experience. I am more compassionate, more patient, more confident, and more courageous. I love the way I feel deeply engaged with life in a way that I wasn’t before. My daily life is rich with joy, laughter, affection, and delight – and also frustration, annoyance, boredom, overstimulation, and fatigue. Parenting is intense.