I would rather regret not having children than regret having them

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Hadiya Roderique is a writer based in Toronto.

“What about our baby?” my partner asked me as we sat on the grey couch in our living room. We had just gotten back from a walk with our friends, a newly married couple who announced their pregnancy to us as we strolled amongst the budding trees in High Park. They held hands and looked at each other with starry eyes, as if they were Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe on a romantic stroll. I remember looking at them and feeling like my partner and I were perhaps more like Anne and Roy Gardner, the man who was perfect on paper but not right for her.

This happened exactly five years ago, in April, 2021 – six months after we moved our things – mostly mine, into a cozy three-bedroom house in a nice, central neighbourhood. After he asked the question, he looked at me expectantly. His eyes were hazel, his brow furrowed. I knit my fingers together and unknit them, over and over, twisting my hands into different configurations. I didn’t know what to say.

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In that moment, I realized that we never had a truly serious conversation about children before cohabitating. At least, not one about having kids together. Not about how many, how to raise them, who might stay home on leave, what languages we would speak to them, nanny versus daycare. No discussion of timing, despite me being 40 when we moved in together. No mention of IUI or IVF. We both operated on the assumption – erroneous – that we were on the same page.

But with his question, the implication now hung heavy that he did want them and I was to be the decider as to whether or not we would have them. Something already seemed to be shouting, no! But I didn’t know what it was, or where it was coming from. He was, is, exactly the kind of guy one would want to have kids with – kind, caring, responsible. I’d once publicly described him as a merman in a sea of mediocrity, a phrase that earned him some gentle ribbing from his colleagues.

Decision time

Before meeting him, it had been years since I’d given any thought to having kids. I wasn’t opposed to the idea. But having children wasn’t something that really shaped my choices. I was looking for love, not sperm. And I hadn’t met any serious contenders for love, let alone parenthood, in a while.

When I was 23, my boyfriend, who was 30, had brought up the subject of having children in the first two months of our relationship. I remember us sitting in a bar, staring adoringly at each other, as we discussed trying for kids. “25, 26?” he suggested first, using my age as the proxy for timing. “27, 28?” I countered. His desire for children was loud and clear from the start.

But in my current relationship, his desire wasn’t clear to me until he uttered those four words – “What about our baby?”

I knew that this relationship was my only realistic shot at having a biological child with a partner. I was about to turn 41, and despite the history of late and prolific fertility in my family, I knew that if I wanted to do this, this was the time and this was the guy.

I felt … ambivalent. Tasked with the responsibility of deciding, I tackled the problem with logical gusto. I read several subreddits – r/childfree, r/mommit, r/daddit, r/regretfulparents, r/fencesitters. I read books, including the book most recommended by Reddit, The Baby Decision by Merle Bombardieri. I talked to my friends. I read research. The evidence was conflicting. Some people would warn you not to have a child unless you wanted it with 100 per cent of your being. Others would say you could never be sure. For some, it was the best decision they ever made. For others, it was the worst. I still have the notes I compiled with quotes from different people, ones of love and joy, ones of regret.

I wanted to want children. I didn’t want to disappoint my partner. But I felt like he thought there was something unnatural about my decision to apply logic to a decision that in his view should be emotional. “I think if anyone actually thought logically about having children, they wouldn’t have any,” he said during one conversation. A philosopher eschewing logic, I thought wryly. I, on the other hand, thought it strange to make a monumental decision based primarily on emotion and naked desire without a consideration of logic.

I felt alone in the process. There was a niggling feeling that he just wanted me to be someone different, someone who instinctively wanted what he wanted. Like I was a square peg that he was trying to fit into a round hole.

I felt unable to explore my ambivalence, as he seemed to always dismiss my thoughts and worries with a simple phrase: “You just don’t want one.” As if any hesitation or doubt just simply meant that deep down, I didn’t want a baby. That if I truly wanted one, I would just accept that there are risks and not talk or worry about any of them. He echoed this too, in our recent postmortem discussions. “Sometimes, I even thought that the points we were discussing only masked the fact that you did not want any. There was always another complication, any worry allayed created another one, and thus I was left feeling that you had a desire not to have children, and this was a way of evading telling me this.”

Hadiya Roderique: Can I be a Black mother in a world so dangerous to Black children?

Recently, he clarified his thoughts to me, referencing his favourite philosopher, Aristotle – “the desire to have children sets the goal, one wants children, and the deliberation is to figure out whether this goal can be realized.” But to me, this is still saying that you either just innately want a baby or don’t, a decision about wanting or not wanting made in a vacuum wherein the world and all the conditions are perfect. For me, the desire and the act cannot be divorced in this way.

It was not his body and mind that would bear the risks of the act. It was not his hormones, his postpartum depression and psychosis, his career, his status in society that would change. The calcium would not leach from his bones; his brain chemistry would not change. He was not the one whose body would cease feeling like their own. He did not know the realities of inhabiting the world in a Black body. The realities of the act are intricately and inextricably linked to the desire. His perspective felt very male. Historically, men’s lives rarely changed when they had a baby. Many men’s lives still barely change now.

The baby decision got put on hold when he received an offer for a job back in his home country in Europe – now, the decision was about whether he would move there, and whether I’d go with him. I placed no pressure on him. I wanted him to make his own choice. But I knew I could not move with him. To a place where I did not speak the language, would have no career. Where “parent” might be the only identity I could claim, the only way to integrate into a social circle. To be a parent without any village or support. I think he knew it too.

In the intervening time, my twin nieces were born, and a few months after their birth, I concluded that no more perfect humans existed on the planet. I have a love for them that surprises me and definitely surprises my sister. Their photos and videos take over my phone. I call them every day. I am Auntie Supreme. My nickname was their third word. “DeeDee!” they squeal when I come up the stairs or they see me down the street. They are now four and we have a whole routine when I leave, with kisses and hugs and high fives, and declarations that “I love you this much and I love you this much,” spreading our arms as wide as they can go. I love them more, obviously, as my arms are longer, but they try their hardest to reach high, standing on their tiptoes. I did daycare pickups, do kindergarten pickups. My sister changed one niece’s middle name to match mine. “DeeDee’s other name is Joleene and my other name is Joleene,” she exclaims proudly. I would die a thousand deaths for these children. Throw myself in front of a car to push their tiny bodies away from harm.

My love for my nieces frustrated my partner. “Why can’t we have what they have?” he asked me one day. I didn’t have an answer. At least not one I could articulate. And what they had, other than the two adorable children, wasn’t all that great. They are separated now.

My partner decided to stay in Canada. And with that, the baby decision was renewed. “No sex and no baby. What’s the point?” he snarled at me one day. I should have known it was over, then.

I kept pushing, though. I tried to convince myself that I could do it. But no matter what, I could not say yes with excitement and hope and optimism and promise. He was right, in a sense: I just didn’t want one, not in this relationship configuration.

And so, we eventually ended. We are still friends. We work at the same place and take the train together when we go in on the same days – I wait on the platform until he pokes his head out from the last car, third door, having gotten on the stop before. He is always late. We go on walks in the snow, and I tell him about the inappropriate crushes I have. I have dinner with him and his parents when they visit. He is in a relationship with a very lovely woman who seems to be a much better match. He is happy, and I am happy for him.

Last summer, we were all out for dinner and I told them I was writing a piece about why I didn’t end up having kids. “Because you didn’t want them,” he quipped immediately, with a smile. I chuckled. “No, it was more than that …” But I bit my tongue, not wanting to say that part of the truth out loud.

Because I now know that it wasn’t simply that I didn’t want them. What I have realized in the space between us and now is that I had three preconditions for having children. Necessary, but sufficient conditions, to borrow the parlance of logic, that were lacking in the relationships I had had thus far. These requirements swirled unconsciously in my mind while we were together, but until we separated, they weren’t clear as a cohesive whole.

First, I needed big love. Second, I needed the timing to be right. And third, I needed a relationship that was ready to fight the patriarchy together. Of the parents around me, couples that had these three components seemed happy, and the couples who seemed less happy appeared to be missing at least one.

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Big love

On the big love front, I needed someone that I loved and cared for as much as I love and care for myself. Someone I would happily make sacrifices for, give up a kidney for. Whom I respected deeply. Someone I loved so much that I wanted something that would tie us together in a lifelong project, forever. Someone I wanted to fuse my DNA with, creating a child who could perhaps be the best of each of us. I needed someone who equally loved me back in this way. Someone who loved me enough to push through when things got tough.

I have observed the people who had children with someone they did not love in this way or who did not love them this way. The people who got together with someone who seemed good enough to have the child they either wanted or thought they should have or didn’t want to regret not having. I have seen the cracks that the lack of that love creates, until they split the union apart or leave two people tolerating a permanent state of unhappiness.

My ex is a lovely man, and I think he will be a caring and dedicated father and partner to his new partner. But I always recall the line from Wedding Crashers, of all movies, when I think about true love – “the soul’s recognition of its counterpart in another.” We loved each other, cared for and supported each other, but he was not my counterpart, and I was not his. I knew in my heart that we just didn’t have the kind of love that would survive the pressure of a baby. I could see each of our annoyances with each other just becoming exacerbated over time. I needed my Gilbert, not Roy. He needed his Anne. I can see that he and his new partner love each other and look at each other in a way that we did not. She looks at him like someone who feels so lucky to have found him. She looks at him the way he deserves to be looked at.

Timing

I had big love when I was 23. To this day, I have never felt love so big. Our first date lasted 24 hours. He told me he loved me a month and a week later, saying that he had felt it for a month. I felt seen, with him, before I was even somebody to look at. I remember his best friend saying to me, “You two are going to get married. I’ve never seen him look at anyone like this.” I could imagine our child – a curly haired biracial little girl or boy I named Sasha or Michaela in my head. But I was 23, and he was 30. I had just graduated from university, and he had a grown-up job and career. I became friends later in life with one of his good friends. She told me that he had called her, back then, about his dilemma. “He said he met you, and he really loved you, but he didn’t think you were ready to have kids, and he was.”

He was right, of course. I loved him so much that I probably would have done it, but there was a good chance I would have been regretful and resentful. My friends would have been having adventures, going off to grad school and travelling the world, and I would have been so jealous, being alone at home with a baby. I needed to live more life first to be ready to sacrifice part of it to raise a child. He had his first child a year or two after we broke up.

Fighting the patriarchy

In my professional life, I am an expert on gender, parenthood and work. I am an employment and human-rights lawyer by training. My PhD research focused on maternal inequality in the workplace. I have researched, observed and listened to innumerable stories of parents.

Parenthood is a bit of a blind crapshoot. You prepare the best you can, but some things are at the whim of nature or chance. A child with profound disabilities. An injury during birth to you or your child. Misfortune befalling you or your spouse or your child. You also cannot predict what kind of parent your partner will be. Who will they be under pressure? Who will they be when you are both sleep deprived and exhausted? It is so easy to slip into gendered patterns that are hard to get out of.

Having a child with a man seems to be one of the riskiest things that a woman can do. There are too many stories of men who flip a switch when their progeny arrives. Who wanted a child like a child wants a puppy, and did not expect the sheer volume of work that being a good parent requires. You cannot really know ahead of time if you have one of these men, but deep love and true partnership seem to go hand in hand to increase the chances of a relationship more likely to withstand the pressures of the patriarchy. bell hooks notes in her foundational book, All About Love, love is an action, a choice, a combination of “care, affection, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as communication.” It is the men who do not truly love you who see inequity in your partnership and feel no need to do anything about it. Who happily buy their leisure with your time. A man who truly loves you does not want to contribute to your suffering.

How I learned to make peace with parental regret

Years ago, I half-joked about sharing a sperm donor with my best friend, and raising our children in the same house as siblings – I could see, in the way she cared for others, the kind of loving and devoted parent she would be (and now is). That hypothetical situation, full of care, respect and trust, seemed a better recipe for parental success than a relationship with a man.

Parenting is hard work, and the patriarchy let men escape that work for so long. When you’re used to privilege, equality feels like oppression. Men know how to be loved. They have a harder time doing the loving.

There are many straight women who choose motherhood with men, knowing they don’t have that reciprocal love. Who risk a very common unequal burden, and who are willing to risk it or tolerate it for the children they have always wanted. That is their choice to make, and it is a valid one. It just wasn’t a choice I was willing to make, in a world that is already more difficult for me as a Black woman.

I think perhaps, too, it is part of my nature that makes it easier to resist the pressures placed on women to have kids. I am generally not someone who easily fits in. When I was young, I was too smart, too weird, too different, too poor. So, I became accustomed to not doing what everyone else was doing. To marching to the beat of my own drum. To dreaming bigger than others expected for me. I don’t look to others to make decisions. I look to science, to logic, to facts, to ambition, to my imagination. And I am simply not willing to be a parent without the things I know I would need for success, both for the sake of my child, my partner, and myself. Being a parent is already hard enough with the best of conditions. I don’t need my life to be harder. It has already been hard enough.

Grief

There is of course, some grief that comes with this position. Grief that I did not meet my big love at the right time. I can see the joys of parenthood around me – the beam on my best friend’s face when her son brings her a flower, the way my nieces’ eyes light up when they see me pulling their wagon to kindergarten pickup, the way they run over to the fence and try to squeeze their hands through to touch me or when they snuggle up to me on each side of my body for a story. The way they call out for Mama when they are hurt. I think I could have been a good mother. I am a highly capable and deeply thoughtful human being. I have a large capacity for love. I am patient and gentle with children. I am the kind of person who reads parenting books to be a better aunt.

But I would far rather regret not having children than regret having them. When we regret or grieve something, or think “what if”; we are always grieving the best-case scenario. The two adorable, well-behaved children who learn to read early and excel in school and sports. The handsome husband who is the perfect, equal partner. I do not grieve the partner I want to strangle as he pretends to sleep soundly through the cries of our child at 3 a.m., or who uses weaponized incompetence to shoulder me with a heavier burden. I do not grieve having a child that I lose to cancer. I do not grieve the life of someone whose son is a 30-year-old unemployed university dropout video-game addict living in their basement. I do not grieve the failure to accomplish some of my hopes and dreams because of the time needed to be a truly good parent and raise a kid who isn’t addicted to an iPad. When I grieve, I am imagining the experience that I would have wanted, not necessarily the experience I would have gotten.

And so, after the grief comes relief. Relief that I didn’t do something because it was expected. Relief that I know myself and my own mind and what was best for me.