I think I might want children someday, and that is terrifying

I’ve always appreciated healthy, robust debates around parenthood versus being child-free. I appreciate the thought that goes into these conversations, because I believe that having children - whether you want them or not - should be a process; a meditation.

There’s a quote from this movie I like, where a man is telling his girlfriend about his wife that left him shortly after their daughter was born.

“She thought it would be like a Huggies commercial,” he said. “And when it turned out to be harder than that, she left.”

And those words have stayed with me. Because I’ve always assumed that I would be a bad mother, that I would be negligent and unstable and impatient and quick to anger. But as time has passed, I have realised more and more that one day, I am going to want to be a mother.

And that scares the shit out of me, and it breaks my heart just a little.

It breaks my heart because I know that the journey of motherhood is going to be difficult. That it’s going to be filled with loss and disappointment and grief; that it is going to test my relationship with my partner or husband in ways that I cannot foresee, and that I am going to lose parts of myself that I once called home.

And it breaks my heart because I think being a mother would make me really, really happy. I think it would fill me with the kind of joy that I imagine the universe must have for all the humans it governs, the kind of joy that changes you.

And I think I am afraid of those changes. I am afraid of saying goodbye to the Ayanda that is wild and colourful and independent; the Ayanda of late nights and vices and irresponsibility. I am afraid of being in a domestic home that demands of me, day after day, to be the best version of myself for the human I have created.

I went through a phase of being lowkey obsessed with Angelina Jolie, and something she said about her life experiences really made me think. In essence, she adopted her first child because she knew that motherhood would ground her. That she would have some sense of tethering, and that it would keep her out of trouble.

Angelina Jolie is a role model of mine, at once for her wildish, Artemis-like nature, as well as her deep mothering essence. And perhaps she is a woman I should look to, a woman who was able to preserve a sacred part of herself while creating another facet of her complexity as a mother.

I suppose I have this idea that I am going to change fully and completely if I became a mother. That the lioness in me would be quelled, that my voice would somehow be silenced. But perhaps that need not be the case. Perhaps motherhood is like the sun, shedding ever more light on the things that already exist inside of us, good and bad.

I don’t think I would be a bad mother, but the fear lies in what I would be, then. Self-sacrificial? Lonely? Bored? Unfulfilled? What if my desires for motherhood are rooted in the romantic, the unrealistic, the ungrounded? What if I become a mother and I find that it’s not worth shit? What if I regret the thing that I made, the thing that began in my belly like a sunflower and grew into a handful of weeds?

I have asserted my belief in being childfree for a long time. And I don’t think that the time in which I believed I would always be childfree was disingenuous. I think it served its purpose. It allowed me to explore my femininity outside of the conventions of what a woman should look like, and what she should do with her life, and it allows me to do so still, as a woman who is not yet a mother.

But here I am, revealing to myself and to you, dear reader, my truest truth. I may want children someday, and it fills me with so many complex emotions. The excitement and nerves of telling my partner one day that I’m pregnant; the wonder of a growing belly and changing preferences and perspectives; the breath-taking awe of holding our son or daughter in our arms and naming them after virtues or nature or poetry. Watching it fall asleep at night, marvelling at its perfections.

And I think of its father, and hold my truth with trepidation as I wonder what a child will do to our romantic and domestic relationship. Will he love our offspring as much as I intuitively feel I will? Will he be a good father? Will he remain the good man, the honourable man, the faithful man that I pledged to forever with? I wonder about the man I will end up loving and vowing myself to, and whether he would make a good father. Would he find renewed love in his heart for humans and for life through the birth of his child?

Or would we fall apart, the way some things are meant to? Will this new thing - this new entity of the universe - break us as the pressure and weight of children break so many relationships, their innocence revealing cracks in what was once perceived to be an impenetrable foundation?

So there are all these fears, all these questions. And at the same time, there is all this…breathless anticipation. What will they be like, this creature? What human will they grow into? How will they test me, change me, love me? What will my life unfold into; what novel and perplexing things will I find beautiful? What will move me?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. And I know that I might wake up tomorrow, decrying everything I’ve just written out of fears rooted in the centre of me, out of unresolved trauma and grief. Or maybe, I’ll wake up one day and simply decide that I don’t, in fact, want to be a mother; that this was just another phase I had to go through to continue finding the truth of me, the truth of my womanhood.

But for the meantime, I will honour what is true inside of me, no matter how scary it is to face. Because one way or another, something will change me. Something always changes us, bringing us closer to the women who we are meant to be, and breaks our heart to break it open. I am fucking terrified of what’s to come - of what epiphanies will find me next - but maybe that’s the point. To decide on the femininity that feels most honest to me at any given moment, and to just go with it.

Art credits: Stormm Bradshaw

@Inner Swirl