Kids, Early and Often
The case for forming family when you're young
It was my privilege to write Fairer Disputations’s Mother’s Day reflection this year. (You’re getting it a little late, since it was also my privilege to spend Mother’s Day getting three kids on and off a plane… reasonable successfully!).
I’m going to share a lengthy excerpt below and you can read the whole thing here.
Think of your life as a ribbon unspooling along a timeline. You know when you began, but not when you will end. If you marry, at some point your two ribbons begin rolling down the timeline in tandem. The timing of your meeting and marriage doesn’t just set the pattern for your major anniversaries, it determines how much of your life is shared.
I began dating my husband just in time to mail him cookies when his uncle passed away, but not in time to meet that uncle. He was my boyfriend in time to give me a Mary Undoer of Knots prayer card during a labor dispute at work, which I’ve carried in my purse ever since. Whenever I pull it out to pray with a friend, I feel a grateful echo of that early mark of love.
If you have children, new skeins begin to unspool alongside your paired strands. The present prudence suggests you should be very, very careful to pin the start of the ribbon in just the right spot—after grad school, after some time to travel, after choosing where to live long-term. None of these factors are inappropriate to consider, but there’s something to set against them.
How long will the ribbon of your life and those of your children overlap? You will share more of your life with your children if their lives begin before yours are more than a third unfurled.
You don’t have total control over when those small ribbons come into being, any more than you can guarantee finding a partner to create them with. You have to zoom very far in on the timeline of my husband’s and my marriage to see our six miscarriages. Each child we lost would be a snippet of ribbon that accompanied us for six weeks, eight weeks, two weeks, and on and on, dappling our months with joy and grief.
Part of what marks our shared life is this doctor’s office, that hospital room, this moment I slipped off my wedding ring for the first time since I put it on to get emergency surgery. And then that heartbeat, that flickered and flickered and has not gone silent yet. Two little siblings that followed, tangled up together in their different colors and characters.
Only one of those little rolling ribbons lies tangent to my father’s. He went through the agony of bypass surgery and a hard recovery in the hope of seeing those days. For one and a half years, my daughter let me see his joy even as his body grew frailer and more uncomfortable. Then his ribbon ended, and hers kept running.
None of this is intended to scare single people. I have never found that working from an anxious, scarcity-based way of thinking helps me to make better decisions. You can think of your unspooling life as a matter of spending down your resources and exhausting the years given to you, but I prefer to think about it constructively. What am I building up, and when is my first opportunity to lay a cornerstone? I want to take on projects too large for just one life, children being the most obviously likely to outlast me.
Read the rest at Fairer Disputations…
Because my day job is in family policy, I get asked a lot of questions about the fertility rate and whether policies I favor like a baby bonus will persuade people to have babies.
I favor expansions of family benefits to cushion the cost of a child, and to help people shift desired births forward when they want to, but the case for babies is, well, BABIES.
Not just when they are round-cheeked and milk-drunk, but as persons whose lives and loves will reshape yours, who you want as much time with as you can get. I think that people should get their lives entangled with something risky earlier and more often than they expect is reasonable. (Also a big theme of my BOOM review on bubbles).
I think we’re missing the main reason women decide to do things like egg freezing. It’s very rare, at least in the women who have been studied, that women are delaying their fertility to focus on career. Much more commonly they are unable to find a man to marry. This was my story—I met my husband when I was 36. I am highly educated and found dating extremely challenging. We have 4 kids now and it grieves me to think how little time they will have with my parents and that I may never see my own grandchildren, but it was not because I was following my girl boss fantasies.
This debate reminds me of the “childless cat lady” comment that JD Vance made. We can be overly focused on the small intentionally child free portion of the population, but much more commonly the childless women he referred to dreamed of having marriage and babies and have had to grieve it as they aged out of their natiral fertility. I don’t fault them for pursuing education and career along the way.
My parents had me at the young age of 20. There were more hardships they encountered and stigma as just-past-teenage parents. There were also some small advantages (being mistaken for someone older). My husband’s parents chose (to some extent) the opposite and had him at 40.
We are fortunate in this respect - that we will most likely have elder care responsibilities at different stages of our lives. As basically only children, the burden of care will fall on us primarily to manage care for all four of them.
One of the things we’ve been keeping in mind is that the more ribbons we create, the longer they will get to share life together. It’s likely that we will have a child at 40, but they will be on the tail end of other siblings. They will have others to turn to for help when they need help with a babysitting or have to take a trip to the hospital (or when they have to care for us). My parents get to spend a lot more quality time with their grandkids because of their age than my MIL who is older and now disabled. Frankly, when their time comes, my parents will likely get excellent help from their grandchildren.
I am reminded of the adage “a cord of three strands is not easily broken.” The more ribbons we create, the more we generate an anti-fragile family structure that can ensure all members are cared for during times of need.