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  My mother loved her job. She was on the front lines of an actual health-care revolution, breaking all the rules by talking openly about human sexuality, trying to get a Planned Parenthood clinic launched in every county across the state, empowering young women to make their own choices about their bodies, debunking myths and rumors about pregnancy and venereal disease, fighting prudish laws, and—most of all—offering options to tired mothers (and to tired fathers, for that matter) that had never before been available. It was as though through her work she found a way to pay back all those cousins and aunts and female friends and neighbors who had suffered in the past for their absence of choices. My mom had been a hard worker her whole life, but this job—this career—became an expression of her very being, and she loved every minute of it.

  But then, in 1976, she quit.

  Her decision was sealed the week that she had an important conference to attend in Hartford, and my sister and I both fell sick with the chicken pox. We were ten and seven years old at the time, and of course we had to stay home from school. My mom asked my father if he would take off two days from work to stay home with us so she could attend the conference. He wouldn’t do it.

  Listen, I don’t want to chastise my father here. I love that man with all my heart, and I must say in his defense: Regrets have since been expressed . But just as my mother had been a 1950s bride, my father was a 1950s groom. He had never asked for, nor had he ever expected, a wife who would work outside the home. He didn’t ask for the feminist movement to arrive on his watch, and he wasn’t particularly passionate about women’s sexual health issues. He wasn’t all that excited about my mother’s job, when it all came down to it. What she saw as a career, he saw as a hobby. He didn’t object to her having this hobby—just as long as it didn’t interfere with his life in any measure. She could have her job, then, as long as she still took care of everything else at home. And there was a lot to be taken care of at our home, too, because my parents were not just raising a family but also running a small farm. Somehow though, until the chicken pox incident, my mother had managed to do everything. She had been working full-time, keeping the garden going, tending to the housework, making the meals, raising the children, milking the goats, and still being fully available to my father when he got home every night at five-thirty. But when the chicken pox hit and my dad would not give up two days of his life to help out with his kids, suddenly it was too much.

  My mother made her choice that week. She quit her job and decided to stay home with my sister and me. It wasn’t like she would never work outside the home again (she would always have some part-time job or another while we were growing up), but as for her career? That was finished. As she explained to me later, she came to feel she had a choice: She could either have a family or she could have a calling, but she couldn’t figure how to do both without support and encouragement from her husband. So she quit.

  Needless to say, it was a low point in her marriage. In the hands of a different woman, this incident could have spelled out the end of the marriage altogether. Certainly a lot of other women in my mother’s circle seemed to be getting divorced around 1976, and for similar sorts of reasons. But my mother is not one for rash decisions. She carefully and quietly studied the working mothers who were getting divorces, and tried to gauge whether their lives were any better off. She didn’t always see tremendous improvement, to be honest. These women had been tired and conflicted when they were married, and now, divorced, they still seemed tired and conflicted. It appeared to my mother that they had maybe only replaced their old troubles with a whole new set of troubles—including new boyfriends and new husbands who perhaps weren’t such a big trade-up anyhow. Beyond all this, though, my mother was (and is) at her core a conservative person. She believed in the sanctity of marriage. What’s more, she still happened to love my dad, even though she was angry at him and even though he had disappointed her deeply.

  So she made her decision, stuck with her vows, and this is how she framed it: “I chose my family.”

  Am I making far too obvious a point here if I say that many, many women have also faced this kind of choice? For some reason, Johnny Cash’s wife comes to mind: “I could’ve made more records,” June said, later in her life, “but I wanted to have a marriage.” There are endless stories like this. I call it the “New England Cemetery Syndrome.” Visit any New England graveyard filled with two or three centuries of history and you will find clusters of family gravestones—often lined up in a neat row—of one infant after another, one winter after another, sometimes for years on end. Babies died. They died in droves. And the mothers did what they had to do: They buried what they had lost, grieved, and somehow moved on to survive another winter.

  Modern women, of course, don’t have to deal with such bitter losses—at least not routinely, at least not literally, or at least not yearly, as so many of our ancestors had to. This is a blessing. But don’t necessarily be fooled into thinking that modern life is therefore easy, or that modern life carries no grieving and loss for women anymore. I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried—in neat little rows—the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash’s never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career.

  And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways—often invisibly—and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.

  My father had none of that elasticity. He was a man, an engineer, fixed and steady. He was always the same. He was Dad. He was the rock in the stream. We all moved around him, but my mother most of all. She was mercury, the tide. Due to this supreme adaptability, she created the best possible world for us within her home. She made the decision to quit her job and stay home because she believed this choice would most benefit her family, and, I must say, it did benefit us. When Mom quit her job, all of our lives (except hers, I mean) became much nicer. My dad had a full-time wife again, and Catherine and I had a full-time mom. My sister and I, to be honest, hadn’t loved the days when Mom worked at Planned Parenthood. There were no quality day-care options in our hometown back then, so we’d often find ourselves having to go to the houses of various neighbors after school. Aside from happy access to our neighborhood televisions (we didn’t have the stupendous luxury of TV in our own house), Catherine and I always hated these patched-together babysitting arrangements. Frankly, we were delighted when our mother gave up her dreams and came home to take care of us.

  Most of all, though, I believe that my sister and I benefited incalculably from Mom’s decision to stay married to our father. Divorce sucks for kids, and it can leave lingering psychological scars. We were spared all that. We had an attentive mom at home who met us at the door every day after school, who supervised our daily lives, and who had dinner on the table when our dad got home from work. Unlike so many of my friends from broken homes, I never had to meet my father’s icky new girlfriend; Christmases were always in the same place; a sense of constancy in the household allowed me to focus on my homework rather than on my family’s heartache . . . and therefore I prospered.

  But I just want to say here—to lock it forever in print, if only to honor my mother—that an awful lot of my advantages as a child were built on the a
shes of her personal sacrifice. The fact remains that while our family as a whole profited immensely from my mother’s quitting her career, her life as an individual did not necessarily benefit so immensely. In the end, she did just what her female predecessors had always done: She sewed winter coats for her children from the leftover material of her heart’s more quiet desires.

  And this is my beef, by the way, with social conservatives who are always harping about how the most nourishing home for a child is a two-parent household with a mother in the kitchen. If I—as a beneficiary of that exact formula—will concede that my own life was indeed enriched by that precise familial structure, will the social conservatives please (for once!) concede that this arrangement has always put a disproportionately cumbersome burden on women? Such a system demands that mothers become selfless to the point of near invisibility in order to construct these exemplary environments for their families. And might those same social conservatives—instead of just praising mothers as “sacred” and “noble”—be willing to someday join a larger conversation about how we might work together as a society to construct a world where healthy children can be raised and healthy families can prosper without women having to scrape bare the walls of their own souls to do it?

  Excuse me for the rant.

  This is just a really, really big issue of mine.

  Maybe it is precisely because I have seen the cost of motherhood in the lives of women I love and admire that I stand here, nearly forty years old, feeling no desire whatsoever for a baby of my own.

  Of course this is a rather important question to discuss on the brink of marriage, and so I must address it here—if only because child rearing and marriage are so inherently linked in our culture and in our minds. We all know the refrain, right? First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage? Even the very word “matrimony” comes to us from the Latin word for mother. We don’t call marriage “patrimony.” Matrimony carries an intrinsic assumption of motherhood, as though it is the babies themselves who make the marriage. Actually, often it is the babies themselves who make the marriage: Not only have many couples throughout history been forced into marriage thanks to an unplanned pregnancy, but sometimes couples waited until a successful pregnancy occurred before sealing the deal with matrimony in order to ensure that fertility would not later be a problem. How else could you find out whether your prospective bride or groom was a productive breeder except by giving the engine a test run? This was often the case in early American colonial society, in which—as the historian Nancy Cott has discovered—many small communities considered pregnancy to be a stigma-free, socially accepted signal that it was now time for a young couple to tie the knot.

  But with modernity and the easy availability of birth control, the whole issue of procreation has become more nuanced and tricky. Now the equation is no longer “babies beget matrimony,” or even necessarily “matrimony begets babies”; instead, these days it all comes down to three critical questions: when, how, and whether. Should you and your spouse happen to disagree on any of these questions, married life can become extremely complicated, because often our feelings about these three questions can be nonnegotiable.

  I know this from painful personal experience because my first marriage fell apart—to a large extent—over the question of children. My then-husband had always assumed that we would have babies together one day. He had every right to make that assumption, since I had always assumed it myself, though I wasn’t entirely sure when I would want babies. The prospect of eventual pregnancy and parenthood had seemed comfortably distant on my wedding day; it was an event that would happen sometime “in the future,” “at the right moment,” and “when we were both ready.” But the future sometimes approaches us more quickly than we expect, and the right moment doesn’t always announce itself with clarity. The problems that existed within my marriage soon made me doubt whether this man and I would ever be ready, truly, to endure such a challenge as raising children.

  Moreover, while the vague idea of motherhood had always seemed natural to me, the reality—as it approached—only filled me with dread and sorrow. As I got older, I discovered that nothing within me cried out for a baby. My womb did not seem to have come equipped with that famously ticking clock. Unlike so many of my friends, I did not ache with longing whenever I saw an infant. (Though I did ache with longing, it is true, whenever I saw a good used-book shop.) Every morning, I would perform something like a CAT scan on myself, searching for a desire to be pregnant, but I never found it. There was no imperative there, and I believe that child rearing must come with an imperative, must be driven by a sense of longing and even destiny, because it is such a massively important undertaking. I’ve witnessed this longing in other people; I know what it looks like. But I never felt it in myself.

  Moreover, as I aged, I discovered that I loved my work as a writer more and more, and I didn’t want to give up even an hour of that communion. Like Jinny in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves, I felt at times “a thousand capacities” spring up in me, and I wanted to chase them all down and make every last one of them manifest. Decades ago, the novelist Katherine Mansfield wrote in one of her youthful diaries, “I want to work!”—and her emphasis, the hard-underlined passion of that yearning, still reaches across the decades and puts a crease in my heart.

  I, too, wanted to work. Uninterruptedly. Joyfully.

  How would I manage that, though, with a baby? Increasingly panicked by this question, and well aware of my then-husband’s growing impatience, I spent two frantic years interviewing every woman I could—married, single, childless, artistic, archetypally maternal—and I asked them about their choices, and the consequences of their choices. I was hoping their answers might resolve all my questions, but their answers covered such a wide range of experience that I found myself only more confused in the end.

  For instance, I met one woman (an artist who worked at home) who said, “I had my doubts, too, but the minute my baby was born, everything else in my life fell away. Nothing is more important to me now than my son.”

  But another woman (whom I would define as one of the best mothers I’ve ever met, and whose grown kids are wonderful and successful) admitted to me privately and even shockingly, “Looking back on it all now, I’m not at all convinced that my life was really bettered in any way by the choice to have children. I gave up altogether too much, and I regret it. It’s not that I don’t adore my kids, but honestly, I sometimes wish I could have all those lost years back.”

  A fashionable, charismatic West Coast businesswoman, on the other hand, said to me, “The one thing nobody ever warned me about when I started having babies was this: Brace yourself for the happiest years of your life. I never saw that coming. The joy of it has been like an avalanche.”

  But I also talked to an exhausted single mom (a gifted novelist) who said, “Raising a child is the very definition of ambivalence. I am overwhelmed at times by how something can simultaneously be so awful and so rewarding.”

  Another creative friend of mine said, “Yes, you lose a lot of your freedoms. But as a mother, you gain a new kind of freedom as well—the freedom to love another human being unconditionally, with all your heart. That’s a freedom worth experiencing, too.”

  Still another friend, who had left her career as an editor to stay home with her three children, warned me, “Think very carefully about this decision, Liz. It’s difficult enough to be a mom when it’s what you really want to do. Don’t even go near child rearing until you’re absolutely sure.”

  Another woman, though, who has managed to keep her vibrant career thriving even with three kids, and who sometimes takes her children with her on overseas business trips, said, “Just go for it. It’s not that hard. You just have to push against all the forces that tell you what you can’t do anymore now that you’re a mom.”

  But I was also deeply touched when I met a renowned photographer, now in her sixties, who made this simple comment to me on the topic of
children: “I never had ’em, honey. And I never missed ’em.”

  Do you see a pattern here?

  I didn’t.

  Because there wasn’t a pattern. There was just a whole bunch of smart women trying to work things out on their own terms, trying to navigate somehow by their own instincts. Whether I myself should ever be a mother was clearly not a question that any of these women were going to be able to answer for me. I would need to make that choice myself. And the stakes of my choice were personally titanic. Declaring that I did not want to have children effectively meant the end of my marriage. There were other reasons I left that marriage (there were aspects of our relationship that were frankly preposterous), but the question of children was the final blow. There is no compromise position on this question after all.

  So, he fumed; I cried; we divorced.

  But that’s another book.

  Given all that history, it should not be surprising to anyone that, after a few years alone, I met and fell in love with Felipe—an older man with a pair of beautiful, adult children, who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in repeating the experience of fatherhood. It is also no accident that Felipe fell in love with me—a childless woman in the waning years of her fertility who adored his kids but who had not one smidgen of interest whatsoever in becoming a mother herself.

  That relief—the great thrumming relief that we both felt when we discovered that neither one of us was going to coerce the other into parenthood—still sends a pleasant vibrating hum across our life together. I still can’t entirely get over it. For some reason, I had never once considered the possibility that I might be allowed to have a lifelong male companion without also being expected to have children. This is how deeply the incantation of “first-comes-love-then-comes-marriage-then-comes-baby-in-the-baby-carriage” had penetrated my consciousness; I had honestly neglected to notice that you could opt out of the baby carriage business and nobody—not in our country anyhow—would arrest you for it. And the fact that, upon meeting Felipe, I also inherited two wonderful adult stepchildren was a bonus gift. Felipe’s kids need my love and they need my support, but they do not need my mothering; they had already been beautifully mothered long before I ever arrived on the scene. Best of all, though, by introducing Felipe’s children into my own extended family, I pulled off the ultimate generational magic trick: I provided my parents with an extra set of grandchildren, without ever having to raise babies of my own. Even now, the freedom and abundance of it all feels something close to miraculous.