The unique rewards of motherhood
Can we grasp the enormity of maternal love if we don't experience it?
A reader commented recently on my newsletter, questioning whether motherhood really is the most rewarding job (as I’d claimed), and pointing out that if I believe that, it would undermine my argument that motherhood is not for everyone.
The same week, the New York Times podcast Matter of Opinion discussed parenthood and the role it has played so far in the Presidential contest. In the course of that discussion, Carlos Lozada asked “How do you persuade someone to engage in a choice where the proof of the choice is only evident once you’ve made it?”
These questions are very similar; both suggest that people who choose not to have children are merely uninformed about the unique rewards of motherhood. This surprises me, because I really do think being a mother must be one of the most rewarding things a person can do. For instance, I like seeing the evidence of my work, whether that is a completed essay or a clean kitchen. I can imagine that the work of making a person is enormously satisfying. However, while I am aware of the potential for enormous satisfaction, I don’t want it.
I don’t believe parenting can always be rewarding — one of the scariest things, to me, is the total lack of control I would have over the well-being and safety and actions of someone I love more than anything in the world. Would parenting be rewarding if my kid turned out to be a sociopath? Probably not. Do I have any control over whether that happens? I don’t really know. But I expect that, regardless, the love would be unwavering and probably utterly overwhelming.
The closest thing I can relate this love to is having a dog. (Let me explain.) When I adopted my first dog, Eunice, I became a vegetarian. To be fair, I’d never been a big fan of meat. But within weeks, I loved her so much that all animals in the world moved to the same plane as her. I couldn’t hurt a spider any more than I could hurt her. I could intuit if she was unwell in any way, I could anticipate what she might do next, and I thought about her all the time.
When she got so ill she was constantly in and out of the emergency vet, I did the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do — literally the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do (and I know that makes it sound like I’ve had an easy life even though I’m not sure that’s true). I said goodbye to Eunice almost ten years ago and I still feel a weight in my chest when I think about her.
I waited years to get another dog, and when my husband and I adopted a stray, that love — and anxiety — returned almost immediately. It didn’t help that Dojo was prone to illness, partly blind, deaf, and traumatized from whatever happened to him early in life. I hardly slept in the two years we had him, I was so occupied with making sure he was OK. And again, after too little time together, we had to do the worst thing for us and the best thing for him.
I think that having a child would be like having a dog, but with the love and anxiety stretched well beyond any limits I know now. I would do absolutely anything to protect it. I would sacrifice myself — my sleep, my health, my work. I would spend all my money on things to make it happy and safe and well. I would think about it all the time, even when we weren’t together.
And before you say it, I fully understand that dogs are not people. If my youngest niece and Dojo were trapped a burning house, of course I would save my niece first, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t go back into a fireball of rubble to save Dojo, too.
If I had my own kid, I understand that the love would be almost unbearable. I get it. But it was only recently — thanks to the reader comment and the podcast — that I understood that parents might think child-free people don’t know this. I realize I haven’t experienced it directly, but I know what love is like. And I can see that parental love is on a different level. I can see it in my friends who are parents, in my sisters who have kids, in my own dad and step-mother. One of my sisters is a step-mother and another has two kids, and I can see the pride they have in those children. I can see that the children are the most important things in their lives, and that, far from resenting it, they love the fact the children are the most important things in their lives.
I am aware that the love is unfathomable and wonderful. But I am still OK with missing out on it.
On her podcast The Dilemma, Gina Rushton interviews LA Paul, a professor of philosophy and cognitive science. Rushton explains that Paul has argued that motherhood is a “transformative experience,” and that “the way we normally make decisions…can’t be applied to the decision of whether to have a child…[because] you don’t know how becoming a parent will change you.”
On the podcast, Paul further clarifies: “there’s a vulnerability that comes with being a parent…if something happens to your child, it’s gonna destroy your life. And by having that child and allowing that bond to form, you have made yourself permanently vulnerable. And it’s also beautiful and meaningful, but it’s a cost…There is a…way of being that doesn’t open up to you until you find yourself vulnerable in this particular way and it involves a kind of suffering and a kind of sacrifice and a kind of love and it changes who you are.”
It’s not that child-free people don’t know that we are missing out on something truly awesome. How could we not know, living in a world where most people want to have kids and do have kids and talk constantly about their kids? I have witnessed the change in my friends and family. When I hear that it’s like nothing else, that it’s a love that can’t be described, I don’t scoff. I believe it. But it doesn’t change my mind.