The Question in Question

On Wanting a Child

The Lost Daughter, 2021

When people are asked whether they want children, most will respond “yes,” “no,” or “I don’t know.” My answer is yet another question: how do I know the question is sincere?

I make sense of everything that happens to me, or around me, by questioning, internalizing, intellectualizing. It has made my therapist’s job easier, but it has also prevented me from feeling some of the things that cannot be fully lived through intellect alone. I can think myself into a deep hole of not doing, not moving forward. When every thought or idea is deconstructed to its smallest particle, it sometimes has the opposite effect of arriving at a core. It arrives at nothing.

I was a curious child who turned into an inquisitive adult. I like digging for answers, which is likely why I prefer to spend my time reading and writing more than anything else. But lately, this way of existing in the world has failed to achieve its main purpose: making me feel in control.

The questioning is armor. If I don’t know whether the question is sincere, it leaves open the possibility of maybe not fully wanting something and therefore not suffering so much if I don’t get to have it. Being certain of one’s desires and wants implies a level of risk-taking, of grabbing hold of a slice of the world and claiming it as your own. Paradoxically, I am a decisive person. I can easily point to things I don’t like or don’t want. But when the stakes are high—a child, creating something and putting it into the world—evasiveness seems easier.

After my miscarriages—two of them—this protection mechanism went into overdrive. I found myself thinking, Maybe I don’t even want this. I was pre-grieving, pre-disappointing myself, building a moat around the vulnerability of wanting. The body remembers loss even when the mind tries to outthink it. Losing two pregnancies, going through endless medical investigations that yielded no answers or resolutions, created a pain I had no idea how to simply feel. So I did what I always do: I questioned whether I wanted it in the first place.

But here’s what the questioning couldn’t do: make the grief feel theoretical. The body had already answered. I spent a good part of Christmas Day, mere weeks after my second miscarriage, sobbing—the kind of crying small children perform: uncontrollable, feral, ugly. You don’t grieve that intensely for something you don’t want. I’ve had trouble sleeping since, my anxiety so palpable I can feel it as if there’s another presence in the room I could touch. The questioning was trying to protect me from a wanting that had already announced itself through loss. But I don’t know how to go beyond that—how to “feel” my feelings, or, in pop therapy’s favorite word, “process” them. I resort to questioning.

What if having a child will squander whatever shred of unfulfilled potential I have left? What if it reveals that I’m a horrible mother—selfish, afraid, hollow?

The real fear is more specific than that. Right now, despite my lack of discipline, I still have desire. I wake up wanting to write. I have ideas that feel urgent, a creative impulse that won’t leave me alone. What if motherhood erases that? Not just because I’ll be exhausted—though there’s that too—but because the sharpness will dull. Because the part of my mind that reaches for language, that notices things, that needs to make sense of the world through writing, will quiet. Or worse: what if it stays alive enough to taunt me, but I can no longer justify spending time on it? What if motherhood provides such a complete, socially sanctioned answer to the question of how to spend my days that writing starts to feel beside the point?

And then there’s the other fear, the one that makes me most ashamed: what if I let it? What if I use motherhood as the final, noble reason I never had to find out what I’m capable of? This isn’t like the projects I’ve started and stopped, or the ideas I’ve let trail off. This is choosing something that could give me a lifetime’s worth of excuses for never finishing anything again. The most socially acceptable form of giving up. Who could argue with a mother who says she doesn’t have time to write?

There’s tension, too, in wanting to model something for my child—someone who makes things, who finishes things—while being perfectly aware that having that child might be what prevents me from becoming that person.

I keep looking for permission in other women’s words—writers who’ve grappled with this same fear. Sheila Heti spent years interrogating her own desire for children, writing: “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself—it is the greatest secret I keep from myself.” Her narrator in Motherhood uses coin tosses and tarot cards to answer the question, as if outsourcing the decision might make it less terrifying. What struck me wasn’t her eventual answer but her admission that the questioning itself was the point—a way to avoid the vulnerability of sincere wanting.

In Alba de Céspedes’s Forbidden Notebook, Valeria Cossati buys a notebook on a Sunday in postwar Rome—an illegal purchase from a tobacconist—and begins writing in secret. She hides it in a sack of rags, an old trunk, an empty biscuit tin, always at risk of discovery by her family, who would laugh at the idea that her life is interesting enough to write about. To be a good mother and wife, she must pretend she wants nothing else.

Elena Ferrante’s Lenu, brilliant and striving, fears that motherhood will dilute her work, make her ordinary—that the intellectual life she fought so hard for will be reduced to the mundane. And in The Lost Daughter, the narrator Leda describes herself as an “unnatural mother,” someone who briefly abandoned her children to pursue her own work, and who carries the guilt and relief of that choice in equal measure.

Leslie Jamison, writing in Splinters, describes the opposite impulse. Where I stay frozen in questioning, she forced herself into certainty: “I wanted my whole self to want something, no questions asked.” She made promises before figuring out if they were promises she wanted to make. But that false certainty, she writes, is what she’ll have to keep answering for. Maybe there’s no safe version of wanting—not the over-questioning, not the forced certainty. Just the vulnerability of letting yourself want what you want.

These women refuse to resolve the ambivalence. They don’t offer certainty or clear paths forward. What they show me is that the questioning itself—whether it’s Heti’s coin tosses, Valeria’s hidden notebook, or Jamison’s forced certainty—is always a response to fear. Fear of wanting something you might not get. Fear of losing yourself. Fear that the choice will reveal something unbearable about who you are or what you’re capable of.

They also show me that the questioning has to end somewhere. Not in certainty, but in acknowledgment. In letting the desire exist without the intellectualization or pre-disclaimers. In committing to the compromised, complicated version instead of waiting for the pure feeling that will never come.

I want a child. I don’t know if I can trust this wanting, but I don’t think I can trust my questioning either. So I pay attention instead. To the cold winter walk when I saw a baby bundled in a stroller, plump cheeks flushed, and felt something catch in my throat—the thump in my belly that was just wanting, wanting to be the one pushing that stroller. Or when I put music on and dance around the house, my head filled with memories of dancing with my mom when I was little, and feel—so instantly, without warning—an anticipatory joy at the thought of doing the same with my own child.

These moments don’t require certainty. They just are. And maybe that’s enough to begin with.