Kerry Eustice kept asking herself ” Should I have a baby or not?” – She didn’t know whether she wanted to be a mother, so she consulted people from all walks of life to find her answer.
In September last year, a few months before I turned 37, I started a list. It’s called..
“Reasons I Don’t Want to Have a Baby”:
- Goodbye to weekend lie-ins
- Might ruin my relationship with my husband. What if it makes us fall out of love with each other?
- Bringing a child into a world that is getting too hot, too angry and too divided
- Goodbye money: raising children is expensive
- Our families live in a different country
- No more impromptu cocktails, yoga, solo trips to the movies or lazy Sundays
- When I hear a toddler screeching on the street, I flinch
- Fear of parent and baby groups.
A solid list, in my view, and one that I could add to. But I’m not ready to accept that kids aren’t for me. In fact, I have another list..
“Reasons I Do Want to Have a Baby”:
- Kids are fun, weird and interesting
- To snuggle a baby of my own and sniff their soft, little head
- To experience the excitement of waking up your kids on Christmas morning
- Bedtime stories
- When I’m old, my children will visit me and I can make them roast dinners
- I’m obsessed with baby name lists
- To experience what it feels like to be pregnant, give birth and love something you and your partner have made
Are these good reasons? Bad ones? I don’t know. And not knowing is beginning to stress me out. I’ve always hoped that intuition would kick in when the time was right. But as I get older – and increasingly aware that I don’t have much time to dither – I feel more confused than ever.
As my pros and cons list has so far failed to edge me towards a decision, I realise I need some help. I decided to make a plan and seek advice from people who make a living through helping others make choices: a psychic, a philosopher, and reproductive rights activists … and my mom.
The Philosopher
Ruth Chang’s advice boils down to a simple principle: when it comes to big life decisions, choices are often hard because neither option is better than the other. But we have the power to make an option better and more appealing for ourselves.
“The key is to plump for a choice and commit to it,” she says. “By doing so it becomes the better choice because we work hard to instill it with value. By committing, we can make something the right choice for us.
“When you commit to a certain type of life, hard choices become fewer because you are on that path.”
Chang is a chair of jurisprudence at Oxford University and has been a professor of philosophy for 20 years. I find her via a TED talk on how to make hard decisions that has been viewed more than seven million times. (I may have Googled “how to make hard decisions”).
After getting hundreds of emails asking her for advice – commonly from men asking if they should break up with their girlfriends – Chang observed that most of the people she talks to actually just want permission.
Read the full article here…
Author: Kerry Eustice
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