interviewed<\/a><\/u> by the Times \u2014 the young marketing student who regrets having to care for her siblings while her mom hustled to make ends meet; the recent grad who wants to build her career first; and the gym employee who \u201cenjoys the [childless] peace\u201d with her husband \u2014 are all under the impression that being ready for kids is primarily a logistical and financial proposition.<\/p>\nBut if this standard were real, we should expect there to come a moment in most women\u2019s lives when they\u2019ve reached some or all of these benchmarks, prompting them to wake up and suddenly find they\u2019re ready to become mothers.<\/p>\n
But that\u2019s not what\u2019s happening. Because that\u2019s not how any of this works.<\/p>\n
The women featured in the Times seem to believe that becoming a mother is something they can accurately imagine ahead of time. They believe it\u2019s an endeavor that will someday fit into pictures of their lives they\u2019ve already painted. The problem is that motherhood doesn\u2019t lend itself to that kind of logic. There is no analog to having children by which women (or men, for that matter) can ever really make an informed decision not to do it. That would be like saying, \u201cI\u2019ve looked at this from every possible angle, and I\u2019ve decided not to live on Mars.\u201d To say such a thing would be to have no actual idea what we\u2019re choosing or not choosing.<\/p>\n
What many of the women interviewed by the Times don\u2019t seem to understand is that\u00a0<\/em>to become a mom is to fundamentally change. A woman in her early twenties can look at the prospect of motherhood as if it were simply another life choice. She might think \u201cmaybe I\u2019ll move to another city,\u201d or \u201cmaybe I\u2019ll break up with my boyfriend,\u201d and she can pretty fairly imagine what those experiences would be like, because she\u2019d still be herself when or if they happened. But to contemplate motherhood as the same sort of question is a category error. Because when she becomes a mom, she will change so fundamentally that she, frankly, has no business making decisions today on behalf of that stranger.<\/p>\nThat probably explains why childless women who try to defend their decision tend to overestimate the hard parts of motherhood and wildly underestimate the wonderful parts. Rose Paz, a young college student who spoke to the Times, said she doesn\u2019t want to have kids right now because it would be a financial struggle, and she remembers the painful experience of watching her own parents stress out over money.<\/p>\n
I can empathize with that fear, and it\u2019s true that below poverty, motherhood can be a daily crisis. But if Ms. Paz is imagining some future point in her life in which she won\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0feel stressed about money \u2014 that is, I\u2019m sorry to say, a fundamental misunderstanding of both stress and money. Life just doesn\u2019t work that way, and motherhood has nothing to do with it.<\/p>\nAnother woman, a social demographer, told the Times that the falling birthrate is a \u201csuccess story\u201d because women are finally making sure they have their \u201clives in order\u201d before having kids. \u201cWe spent decades shaming women for having kids under the wrong circumstances, for not having their ducks in a row\u2026 now they are holding up their end of the bargain,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Certainly, no woman should ever be shamed for having a child; much less a woman whose deadbeat partner has chosen to abandon her to single motherhood. But the social stigma on teen and single motherhood was never really about women having kids when they were poor; it was about women having kids when they weren\u2019t married. These supposedly empowered women claiming to have taken back control of their own lives aren\u2019t talking about making sure a man commits to them before having babies; they\u2019re talking about making enough money.<\/p>\n
Again, that\u2019s not the right perspective. The happiest women in America are married moms. Past a certain level of basic material security, the hardships of parenthood aren\u2019t really mitigated by more money, because they\u2019re much deeper and much more existential than the merely financial. They are mitigated by marriage, though. And that\u2019s because, just as it takes a man and a woman to make a baby, it also takes a man and a woman to raise a baby.<\/p>\n
It turns out, the\u00a0best<\/em> parts of marriage and motherhood have nothing to do with money, either. In my experience, they are surprising and unscripted. The best parts are finding your babies in bed, reading under the covers with a flashlight. It\u2019s when they say \u201cex-shepally\u201d when they mean \u201cespecially.\u201d It\u2019s watching their hair grow wild and curly. It\u2019s catching them being kind to a young stranger. It\u2019s seeing yourself care more about them than your own comfort, when you hadn\u2019t really known that was possible.<\/p>\nI\u2019m almost 40 now, with two young daughters and a marriage going on 17 years. I can\u2019t imagine a deeper source of both vulnerability and joy than this family of mine. I can reasonably imagine what life would have been like if I hadn\u2019t gotten married young. I remember what it was like to travel alone, to answer to no one but myself, to sleep in on Saturdays, and to pee in solitude.<\/p>\n
Women who haven\u2019t married or had children, however, don\u2019t have the same insight into their own what-ifs. They may really believe that not having children during their healthiest childbearing years is the path toward their deepest happiness. But they don\u2019t know it, and they\u2019re almost certainly wrong. From a Christian perspective, I believe this is why God made childbearing something totally outside our control.<\/p>\n
The hard things in life are usually the very best things, but most of us don\u2019t have the strength, on our own, to choose the hard things. Young women should get married and have babies anyway. They\u2019ll see \u2014 I mean this literally \u2014 exactly what I mean.<\/p>\n
Maria Baer is a contributing writer at the Institute for Family Studies and co-host of the Breakpoint podcast with The Colson Center for Christian Worldview.<\/em><\/p>\n\n
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The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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