Why I Finally Said Yes to Motherhood

A few thoughts on purpose, autonomy, and "tired, happy bones."

I started to realize the other day that I never really wrote down my reasoning for having a child. I had presented this question in audio essay form about a year ago, kind of promising an answer at some point, and vaguely delivering in another lyric audio essay that was mostly a jumble of anxieties. I’m still a jumble of anxieties, but I had the chance to articulate my choice the other night, and I thought it might be nice to get it into writing.

I’m currently at a writing retreat in West Virginia for my work with the literary nonprofit, The Inner Loop. Retreaters spend all day writing, while staff like me might take a stab at writing and then distract ourselves with other tasks: grocery runs, making dinner, cleaning. Yesterday, my feet hurt at the end of the night from making a soup for thirty people and my hands still smell like onions.

I sat down with some writers to talk about our days, and inevitably the conversation turned towards my pregnancy as the belly has popped and there’s no denying it. (We’ve finally moved past Maybe she’s born with it, or maybe she’s pregnant rumination!) All the other writers in the conversation were parents, and they started talking about how exhausted they were, how hard parenting is, how they’ve warped themselves and their lives to bring someone new into the world.

“Don’t listen to them,” another mother said from the corner of the room. She was smiling, half joking.

I reassured them none of this information was new to me—remember, I have 17 nieces and nephews (!!) and have talked extensively with my siblings and in-laws about parenting ups and downs. But I also felt this need to explain myself, to tell them why I chose to do it even knowing all the negatives.

Deciding to become a mother took many years and many conversations with myself and my partner that usually revolved around regret. Would I regret not having a child? And then if I had a child, would I regret having it? I lived in an “arid maybe,” as Hannah Black said in her essay “Mother, Maybe.” Even after getting pregnant, the indecision stuck around in nebulous ways. To quote Black again—as if I could have written this myself, “I remained in the fog of my indecision for so long, even weeks into the pregnancy, that I had to arrive at the decision multiple times after it was made.”

I’ve been constantly reassuring myself that I made the right decision with a thought I keep returning to: to put it frankly, life was feeling a bit bland, existentially. And I have a really good life, so that’s saying something. I started to picture a world in which I didn’t have kids. I knew I would have remained happy, but not totally fulfilled. I think this stems from the dichotomous conversation about motherhood, in which a woman must for some reason choose between a career and being a mother, as if those are the only two life options.

But that dichotomy did provide a framework that helped me evaluate my life. I find my work meaningful—as a freelancer, I work for the aforementioned literary nonprofit, and then also produce two podcasts. I get to flex my creative skills and my editing skills, and ultimately I would even say I enjoy what I do, which feels like a crazy privilege. And yet…these jobs ask me to spend the majority of my time at my computer, staring at scripts, editing audio, and answering emails. Forty-ish hours of each of my weeks are spent sitting and staring, often alone. This, to me, at its bare bones, is not exactly a meaningful life.

So, I started to keep track of the times I felt most happy, most fulfilled. And those moments occurred when I was chasing kids and staying up late on trips home to visit family, or sitting around a table playing games and eating good food with friends, or wandering in nature, or working with my hands at the urban farm. Honestly, these activities reminded me of my Mormon mission, when I spent all day every day talking to people, walking from one end of my area to the other, and providing service for strangers and friends alike.

Just a blurry pic of me and dat baby before heading to the writing retreat.

A man I met on my mission once told me that his missionary service gave him the constant feeling of “tired, happy bones.” It’s a phrase I’ve never forgotten over the past twelve years since I met him. I crave that feeling—and though I wouldn’t find it now in missionary work for all of its dubious reasons, I find it now in the activities I listed above. Watching kids, creating with people I love, doing work that helps the world and its people. I want to go to bed with that blissful pain, knowing there was more to my day than helping fulfill other people’s dreams.

And maybe that’s a selfish reason to bring a human life into the world. I go back and forth on this line of thought all the time—what am I getting from this vs. what my baby will be getting from this. But I think what also feels central to deciding to have a child is my constant battle with understanding purpose in the first place.

I initially found it a bit terrifying to raise a baby now that I don’t live by a set moral framework hand-delivered to me by the Mormon church. How could I frame the values that I pass on? I still live largely like a Mormon, honestly, but the reasoning is different: I’m not serving others, for instance, to show God how much I care for his children. I’m serving others because I believe service and love for friends and strangers alike is necessary to building and maintaining a strong community.

But there’s also an expansive liberating feeling when it comes to choosing my own framework. I think of the child version of myself, lying in bed at night, wondering if accidentally saying a swear word in my thoughts would mean I could not go to heaven. This child version of myself was always in conversation with God, apologizing for every “wrong” thing she had done, every impure thought, every question that led her down the spiral of does-God-even-exist. How dare she question life, religion, anything when she was handed such a beautiful life?

I want to look into my baby girl’s room and see her sleeping soundly. (I know, parents are laughing because sleep can be so elusive, but bear with me—it’s kind of a metaphor.) I want to see her exploring the world with a curiosity not dictated by one story. I want to see her expand her worldview, learn real histories, not question her worthiness, and love herself for who she is and not what some old man prophet has told her to be.

Maybe someday she’ll join Mormonism and tell me that my dream of her autonomy follows the famous Disney quote: That’s your dream, Mom, not mine. And I’ll have to be okay with that. The point is, I want to raise her with the option to choose who she becomes, regardless of what I think would equal a meaningful life for her. But I like the possibility of her showing me new ways to live, too. I don’t want to go through life thinking I know it all. There’s so much I don’t know, so much more to discover. And I’ll be glad to let her take the lead when she’s ready.

To be honest, I haven’t felt that instant connection so many mothers talk about. Right now, my daughter is a creature inside of me that sometimes moves in ways that causes me to lose my breath. I don’t know what she’s up to. I don’t know who she is. I don’t know what I’m in for. I’m scared and excited to find out, and holding onto the idea that life—for all of us—is on the precipice of one of many new beginnings. Ask me later, I guess, but as of now: I stand by my decision.

Sleeplessly,

Abi

P.S. This is not becoming a strictly motherhood-based Substack, though the last few publications might say otherwise! There will be more of our usual programming coming up next.