Soon after I gave birth to my daughter three years ago, questions about my well-being started to take a new, unexpected form. Interest seemed to shift away from my physical state — how was I feeling, how much sleep were we getting — toward something else. “So, how’s motherhood?” “How is being a mother?” I had no idea what they were talking about. There were many obvious changes: new tasks, new research assignments, new things — soft things, plastic things — that I could not fit anywhere in the cupboards and closets. But when asked about “motherhood,” I didn’t know where to look.
To have a child, it is often said, is to transform one’s identity. What this might have meant in the past is more or less obvious: With few exceptions, for the better part of history, to have a child meant it was time for a woman to say her final farewells to whatever public existence she managed to forge up to that point. But now there is another, more mysterious change that becoming a mother is understood to imply, more basic than the historical conditions of oppression. This change is supposed to reconfigure the deepest core of one’s being. When the contemporary analytic philosopher L. A. Paul wanted to introduce the idea of a fundamentally transformative experience, one of her central examples was having a child. For women, especially, becoming a parent is frequently described as a total revolution of the self. “Giving birth to a baby is, literally, splitting in two, and it is not always clear which one your ‘I’ goes with,” philosopher Agnes Callard wrote in a reflection on the relief she felt after losing an unplanned pregnancy.
Writing of her own experience of becoming a mother, the writer and artist Darja Filippova likens the physical battering involved in labor — her body lashed, hollowed out, and subsequently made to shed, crack, and ooze — to the ecstatic visions of medieval female mystics, who longed for a divine encounter so powerful that it would shatter them to pieces, dissolve them into unity with the All. But, she insisted, the postpartum devastation of the physical body is only the appearance of the real, mental, drama. New mothers aren’t just torn asunder, they are delivered out of their minds. After birth, Filippova scours “What to Expect” web forums for women wondering whether they are going crazy. One post reads:
I forgot my name. I was at the register making a return at BuyBuyBaby, the guy asked for my name, and I totally blanked. Had to text my husband. Thankfully it happened at a baby store — he said it happens all the time! Haha ma liiiiife.
Musing with fascinated horror about her own postpartum metamorphosis, Filippova writes: “Something has made it out, but I am not sure it is me.”
This is what concerned onlookers wanted to know. They weren’t asking about me at all, they were checking in on my successor. I looked around. The baby was still there — mastering spit bubbles — but no one else. Did I do it wrong? Was I already gone?
Wheeled to the maternity ward with our baby in my arms (a matter of policy, I had offered to walk), there it was: everything just as we had left it the day before. A friend warned I would not be able to think for months after the birth; but I replied to work emails from the hospital bed. They didn’t make less sense; they didn’t seem any less important. The only thing standing in my way was the restricted use of my arms. Strange — all the same things continued to matter to me: the same philosophical questions, the same friends and their same problems, the same politics, the same petty gossip.
Parents, mothers especially, like to claim they have become better people subsequent to the birth of their children. I am not here to call anyone’s bluff or forswear the possibility of my own personal growth in the future. No doubt, I learned new tricks. How to keep milk cold on the go, how to never ask a small child whether they wanted to do something but which of two options they preferred. But I did not unearth new ethical or emotional resources. I am, it is true, far more patient with my daughter than I would be with anyone else exhibiting comparably high levels of incompetence, need, or obstinance. But this tolerance does not extend to anyone else. There is less of it to go around. Nor am I more compassionate. If my heart has genuinely, permanently expanded, it is by the measure of my love for my daughter, not much more.
Chapters
CHAPTERS
Excerpt adapted from What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice, by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press on June 11, 2024.
But what of this love? Is it not unlike anything I’ve ever known? The rumor of this love drives much of the fear of missing out among those debating whether or not to have children. One hears: I am afraid that if I don’t have a child, I will never know what that love is like. But while the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? When I try to focus on it — which feels a little like trying to focus on the transparency of the air — it shows up as something rather basic. Integrating parenting with everything else I happen to care about is a hard, complicated struggle, full of misgivings. But loving my daughter is the easiest thing I’ve ever had to do. It is easy not because this love is unadulterated by other emotions — frustration, resentment, fear — but because to the extent that it is not pure, no love is. Because whatever contradictions my love for her contains, I cannot doubt it any more than I can doubt my own existence. To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it. If you have known love, your love for your child will be very much like what you think it will be. What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.
The assumption that motherhood is transformative is related to the idea that “motherhood” is its own freestanding identity category. For new mothers especially, the temptation to conceive of “motherhood” as identity is intense. Enterprising middle-class mothers are organizing self-help communities online to help women deal with “matrescence”: a “groundbreaking new science that captures the physical, psychological, social, and emotional changes women go through during the monumental transformation that motherhood evokes.” Mom-advice forums feature more shibboleths and obscure acronyms than an incel subreddit. In a representative 2020 New York Times piece titled “When Your Name Becomes ‘Mom,’ Do Your Other Identities Matter?” the writer Rachel Bertsche confessed to finding herself “mourning the person I was before parenthood.” She explained, “I get nostalgic for the woman who took vacations to exotic countries or went out to dinner with friends at a moment’s notice.” Although she had longed for the “mom” title, it now diluted all the others:
I wasn’t working out like I used to, and I couldn’t find the time to string a sentence together on a page, let alone write — or even read — a book. I didn’t have time (or didn’t make time) for friends, and as for pop culture, well, I didn’t stop watching TV — what else is there to do when you’re pumping incessantly? — but I wasn’t a wealth of useless entertainment knowledge anymore, either.
I know what Bertsche means. For years, I used to go to the cinema on a weekly basis. I believe we are meant to watch films just like that, together, in a collective dream. I love watching trailers, eating popcorn, drinking soda watered down by melting ice; I love a huge screen and immersive sound. Since my daughter was born, I’ve been to the movies twice. But I also find myself wanting to insist that how you watch films — just like how much you work out, how exotic your vacations are, or how freely you can schedule impromptu dinner dates — does not constitute an identity. No one has died, you’ve just grown up. Or rather, if someone has died, it’s because growing up involves these kinds of deaths all along the way.
Treating motherhood — or its inverse, being “child-free” — as an identity category can help women make sense of their experience, broadcast its challenges effectively, and find the support they need to navigate it. But it comes at a cost to mothers and non-mothers alike. The assumption of obligatory identity change can imply that our myriad other identities will necessarily be flattened or even lost. For prospective mothers, this can make the decision whether to have children that much more daunting. In such cases, the motherhood “identity” becomes not a liberatory category of self-understanding but yet another source of anxiety.
At the same time, for mothers, conceptualizing parenting as an identity can render the experience more, not less, fraught than it already is. On top of all the practical requirements that tether parents to the home, literally and figuratively, the expectation implied in the idea of “being a mother” can add to the pressure to withdraw. Sheila Heti laments in Motherhood, “When a person has a child, they are turned toward their child. The rest of us are left in the cold.” But treating motherhood as an identity not only encourages a mother to turn away from the world, it also encourages the world to turn away from her. Concerns arising from one’s identity are best, we often assume, addressed “in-group.” And then, when a woman is told to expect a momentous change in her sense of self and it fails to occur, she can come to feel like she is doing things wrong: not giving herself over sufficiently to the experience, lacking in commitment if not in feeling, selfish. When I looked in the mirror, I sometimes saw a more tired person, one covered in more food, but never a new one.
If you are the sort of person for whom my tale of survival and perseverance appeals, let me assure you: Resisting transformation comes at a cost. Whatever success I may have enjoyed in my dogged efforts to hold myself together, it made the impossibility of carrying on as before all the more frustrating. The first night we brought our baby back from the hospital, I saw a dark glimmer of what life would look like from then on, an inkling of the extent to which my hopes of carrying on as before — or better! — were absurd. “What have we done?” I heard myself weeping. “What have we done? Our life was good.” Sitting across from me, my husband said, “It’s a good thing that our life was good. It does not make more sense to have a baby when it isn’t.” He was right; but the more you have, the more you stand to lose. The more you like your life, the more often you might find yourself wondering what life would have looked like had you not had children.
Writing about the possible advantages of having children young, Elizabeth Bruenig assured those who still haven’t had children that doing so is “not the end of freedom as you know it but the beginning of a kind of liberty you can’t imagine.” I have a child and I still can’t quite imagine it. I have spent my entire life tracking excellence like a hound dog. Finding what I could do best has become a habit for me as much by temperament as by circumstance — my family life was so unstable, and the financial resources available to me so limited, that it became clear very early on that whether I would attain any measure of success beyond mere survival depended on my ability to excel. Excelling opened access to the scholarships I relied on for my education, which was in turn the basis of nearly every relationship and opportunity I have enjoyed since. The problem wasn’t that having a child kept me from excelling at my job. It didn’t help, but the real issue was that for most of my time spent with her in those early years, I wasn’t giving expression to any talent or ability whatsoever. I wasn’t growing, I wasn’t learning. So often I was barely doing anything at all.
This is the maddening paradox of parenting: It both had to be me and it absolutely didn’t. It had to be me: I wanted to offer my daughter the benefits of having a loving mother stably present in her life, there with her, attentively, day in and day out, deadlines permitting. But often it seemed like it really didn’t have to be me at all. Nothing about me — my ideas, my personality, my judgment, my sense of humor — really mattered. She wants her mother to sit next to her while she’s on the potty, or in the bath, or in bed, or in the car, but I’m at best just okay at sitting. She wants her mother to follow her on the playground, but I have no unique talent for the seesaw or pushing a child on a swing. I’ve always considered myself to be rather whimsical, silly, playful, but I did not consider how much time small children spend struggling to process discomfort, frustration, and disappointment; how much time I would have nothing to do but stand there and absorb a baby’s vociferous expressions of displeasure. It needed to be me but a me not so much transformed as reduced to very basic functions. This is not what I think of when I think of freedom.
Lila is 2 years and 2 months old, and I take her to the museum. At the café, I find us a table next to two old men. Out of courtesy, I move our table a little farther away from them, but we are still close enough to overhear the conversation. It is, to my surprise, tantalizing. They are discussing the art world, or rather the art world as they knew it once, when they were at the very center of it. They are speaking German, exchanging glamorous, scandalous gossip as if trading war stories, too sensitive to be aired in public. I am speaking English to Lila and they assume I do not understand them. The one who does most of the talking is a painter. Back in the day, he exhibited his work all over Europe, all over the world.
The painter explains what one used to do when trying to sell a painting to the royal family (I can’t make out which). He walks his interlocutor through the process as though explaining how to change a tire, but when he tells the story of how he had to meet the queen in person, he adds, matter-of-factly, that as soon as he left her company, he threw up. He says it wasn’t the drugs. If his friend — or is it his interviewer, I can’t tell — is himself an artist, he is keeping it to himself. He is mostly asking questions and sharing third-hand information.
Suddenly, the topic changes and they move on to discuss their children. I don’t care about your children, I think, preferring the shop talk. “Our youngest boy has type-one diabetes,” the painter says. “The other day, we found out he went into hospital, but he didn’t say anything to us. He didn’t want to worry us,” he grumbles. “And he’s 55 now, mind you.” At this, the milder-mannered man lights up. The awkward form his eagerness to speak takes reveals just how reticent he usually is. But he knows exactly what the painter is talking about, and he cannot help himself: “Yes, yes, that awful phrase, I didn’t want to worry you! I hear it all the time. I’m sick of it.” And then he says something that catches me even more off guard than the royal deal: “What do I get up for in the morning,” he demands, “what do I live for if not for these worries?” The other nods.
What do I get up for in the morning? I look at my daughter and think, he doesn’t mean that his life has lacked in purpose. He has not lived vicariously through his children. At that moment, I understand why they moved from tales of their prime to their children. They were answering a question. It was: What now? At the very far end of life, when getting up in the morning was not as easy as it used to be, this man was saying that he did not need his children for support or company or care, though I was certain he got those, too. Whether or not it is true that people ever had children solely so that there would be someone to support them in old age, it is now understood that this is no longer a particularly legitimate or reliable strategy. But what this man said was even stranger. He was not saying that his children were there to take care of him. He thought, still, that he was there to take care of them.
Parents stand to gain many things from parenting a child — some will enjoy ethical growth, others artistic inspiration and intellectual insights; some will find spiritual liberation or just the permission to really take time off of work; others will find the pleasures of play, pride, love. At the same time, children can take away from us as much or more, turning us haggard, bitter, and resentful. What one’s children will give and take is not for anyone to know in advance. But to have children is to allow yourself to stand in a relationship whose essence is not determined by the benefits it confers or the prices it exacts.
To choose to be a parent is a strange thing: It is to choose to become inalienably vulnerable. People say children give you a kind of immortality because you live in the memories of those who love you, or maybe they carry something of you, something of the things that you cared about and loved, in their own practices and actions. But there is another, less comforting, kind of death-transcendence in parenting. When you have a child, you bind your fate, how well things fare for you, with that of another being as infinitely vulnerable as you. This means that when you die, even if all goes well, you die with your own fate still unsettled, up in the air. That, too, is a kind of immortality.
Anastasia Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, and editor of The Point. She is the co-author, with Rachel Wiseman, of the book What Are Children For?: On Ambivalence and Choice. This essay is adapted from its conclusion. Copyright 2024 by the author and reprinted by permission of St. Martin’s Press.
