YO MAMA: Am I even ready to have a kid?

OPINION

My husband and I didn’t even know if we wanted a baby. We spent years agonizing over the decision, micro-analyzing how it would change our comfortable, predictable lives. I Googled things like “how do you know if you should have children?” because obviously if the Internet thought I was ready, then I was totally ready.

In classic fashion, we delayed. We wanted to wait until our careers were well established, some travel destinations had been crossed off the list, and our finances were in order — things that simultaneously have nothing to do with actually having a child, and absolutely everything.

Our stock answer to the obnoxiously loaded so-when-are-you-having-kids question became “I don’t know, maybe in a few years.”

A few years passed, and then a few more. We were now fortunate enough to have our own home, supported by reliable careers we loved. The old excuses no longer applied.

We turned now to the looming threats of environmental collapse, transcontinental diseases, and other daily catastrophes. Was it responsible to bring a baby into the world? Was the planet just going to implode in a few years in a cataclysmic blast of greenhouse gas emissions, fake news and capitalist greed? For a long while, I believed that outcome was far likelier than a future in which I actually had offspring.

Whether or not to have children seems to be one of, if not the biggest dilemmas facing Gen Xers and millennials today. Like me, more and more women are delaying pregnancy into their 30s, and many are choosing not to have kids at all.

A woman’s choice — and a couple’s choice for that matter — not to have children has never been as widely accepted, validated or embraced as it is today. The question is no longer ‘when’ you are having kids, but ‘if’.  More choice in the world of women’s reproductive health is always a victory in my books. I just didn’t know how to choose.

In the end, my husband and I decided to leave it up to fate. We would try for a few months and see what happened. I thought of how ironic it would be if, after spending my entire life trying NOT to get pregnant, I wouldn’t be able to have kids at all.

Twenty-eight days later, I peed on a stick and a pink plus sign appeared. How clever, I remember thinking, that they used a plus sign. It’s the addition symbol, after all.

Ready or not, I was having a baby. And I still didn’t know if I was going to like being a mother.

I ordered baby books from the library, got a midwife, sewed some teeny-tiny baby clothes, and waited for my “maternal instincts” to arrive and transform me into a baby fanatic. Days, weeks, months passed and I didn’t feel any different. I really liked being pregnant, which seemed like a good sign. I just didn’t feel particularly “motherly”. I just felt like me.

The day before my due date, we went out for a drive (the hospital go bag tucked into the back seat just in case.) We followed the spring sun out onto Westside Road and cruised alongside a diamond-studded Okanagan Lake. As we came around a bend I yelled at my husband to stop the car. The poor man thought I was going into labour; in actuality, I had just noticed a giant herd of bighorn sheep on the cliffside. We got out of the car and walked a little closer for a better view. I admired the impressive horns of the bighorn sheep, so regal and ornate. It was late March and the herd was filled with exuberant little lambs prancing about and playfighting. The sight filled me with warmth — a sensation halfway between the distant memory of a good wine buzz and that tickly feeling you get right before someone opens a present you can’t wait to give them. The maternal instincts! They had arrived, just in time! (Okay, maybe it was just hormones, or the intoxicatingly adorable little lambs.)

I felt happy, excited, and grateful that one day soon, I would be a mother. I wondered if maybe I’d overthought things, just a little. Maybe this really could be as simple as just wanting a baby and figuring it out — no pros and cons lists, no Google searches, no moral or ethical dilemmas to face. Maybe having a kid would help shut out all those things, soften my cynical side and make me live more in the moment. As I looked out at the herd of bighorn sheep, I realized it already had. 

— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.