On whether to have children – or why

As a child, I had everything handed to me on a silver platter. I traveled through Europe and the United States. I was exposed to languages, arts, culture. I received a top-notch education. I took lessons in piano and ballet. I ran track in high school. I took home awards and scholarships. I was always encouraged and supported by my family and teachers, adults who were confident that I could do or be whatever I wanted.

I feel like I let everyone down. For all intents and purposes, I should be excelling at something right now. I should be a diplomat, or working at the United Nations, or be a published writer, or, at the very least, be accomplished in my field of choice.

I wanted to be an actor ever since Mrs. Campbell’s fourth grade play about the Romans invading Britain in something like 55 BC. It began with a troop of soldiers marching on stage, chanting “Sinister, Dexter, Sinister, Dexter…” (Latin for “Left, Right, Left, Right.”) I played Delirius, a bad poet. I made the audience laugh.

From that point on, I was in love with the stage. I loved the rehearsal process of bringing a script to life, of being back stage, of listening to an audience respond to the play. Most of all, I was in love with what I still feel is the noble art of bringing to an audience the chance to live vicariously through the actor.

An audience member can experience an event through an actor that they may never live through first hand. If a role I played resonated with even a single audience member, then that one person might walk away from the theater thinking a little differently about the world around them. And maybe, just maybe, one day they might behave a little differently as a result. Perhaps they would be a little more empathetic, or sympathetic, or open-minded in a way they weren’t before. The power of that potential ripple effect was how I felt I could make a difference in this world.

When I was in the throes of pursuing my career, my priorities revolved – theoretically –around acting. What if I missed a crucial audition because I was on vacation? How could I take a summer job waiting tables when it added nothing to my acting resume? Most importantly, how could I possibly get married and have children? What if I had to be away for a job for three months? Or six? I couldn’t risk that kind of commitment and sacrifice. In truth, I never succeeded to the level where that last issue was real, but I did aspire to be in that league, and so I felt I had to adopt those concerns.

Years of failing to earn a living as a professional actor took its toll on me. I found myself bitter, cynical and unhappy. Out of self-preservation, I finally quit.

Now that I’m no longer acting, I don’t have a career that calls for commitment or sacrifice. Now I’m afraid that I want children not only because I met the man whose children I want to have, but also because I don’t have something else to pour my heart into.

I mother my loved ones inasmuch as I hound them to wear sunscreen and be careful driving, but being a mother was never much of a draw for me. Babies have lots of body fluids oozing from every orifice; it kind of grosses me out. They cost a lot of money, they take up so much time. And it’s forever.

And yet. The desire to be a mother surfaced when my own mother died. I suddenly felt a strong yearning to bring a child into the world so that they, too, would know the feeling of being loved unconditionally.

That urge has tempered a fair amount since then, but there remains this fear that I will not have left this planet a better place for my having been on it. I don’t know if having children will rectify this, but I find myself with a mindset not unlike immigrants from a struggling nation, thinking, I can teach my child all I have learned, and they can have a better life than I did.

But this is a false statement. I have a good life. I have a rich, varied, interesting, entertaining life. Would I be so badly off if I didn’t have a child? Would my life be lonelier without children? Would my life as I know it today seem empty without having someone to pass it on to?

I have a little time left to answer these questions before I must make a decision. No, that’s not quite accurate; I have a few years remaining before I can no longer have a child - I have a lifetime to answer these questions. I just might not reach a conclusion before I lose the chance to be a mother.

Lost and Found

For Christmas last year, H. sent me a car key tracker and, as my students would say, “ It was the best present EVER!” It came with a home base, plus a little beeper that attached to the key. Whenever I misplaced my key, I’d press on the home base button and follow the beeping sound until – AHA! I have since broken the device (overuse?), but the point is I am prone to misplacing things. Keys, glasses, earrings. Currently, I have misplaced my sense of humor.

I began this new year by bidding farewell to my relationship with D. We had danced our dance to its very end. Around the same time, I tossed my name into a hat for an administrative job back in New York, at the school that had always felt like home and where I had worked successfully as a teacher for quite a few years. I did not even make the first round of interviews. Me. Pride.Wounded. And then, I lost my sense of humor.

This doesn’t happen often mind you. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to laugh through most situations. While H. and I did not grow up feeling particularly elegant or graceful (partly due to our frizzy, brown hair and freckles amidst a sea of silky, long, blond-haired Swedish cousins), we did grow up with an intact sense of humor. And the more self-deprecating, the better. We have laughed ourselves through travel fiascos, absurd realities (H. rolling a suitcase through an Arlington National Cemetery service comes to mind), relationship woes, and medicinal mishaps. (May I recommend not taking an entire Ambien with a glass of wine if you plan on walking anywhere, even down the hall to bed.)

Death and disease are so horrible that ridiculous laughter at inappropriate times is especially necessary. When tossing our mother’s ashes into the Mediterranean one chilly April, along with the dog’s - he’d been my father’s and we figured all family related ashes should co-mingle in the sea - the wind whipped those ashes right back at us. (On a side note that I make somewhat apologetically, the term ashes is very misleading; think large pieces of sea salt and you’re getting closer.) There we stood with a tiny gathering of relatives we knew in the once-in-a-while-holiday-hello kind of way, including cousins we hadn’t seen in a decade who barely spoke a word of English, with our mother and dog caught in our eyelashes, in the folds of winter coats, in the corners of our mouths. We two laughed all the way to our bistro lunch.

I’m just saying, I can laugh. But now and then, I just can’t really muster up the energy. And without H. close by, it’s that much harder. She’s the funniest person I know. Plan B? I’ve got one. A few years ago, after an unpleasant break-up, I discovered Grey’s Anatomy. Starting at Season 1, I watched as many episodes in a row as my eyes could muster. This was before I’d discovered Netflix; I became a crazy woman driving feverishly along Maui’s country roads at night from video store to video store tracking down the next disk in the series.

Now here I stand again at a crossroads, uncertain of my next step in love, work, home. But before I make my move, I need a really, really good laugh - - and likely a good cry, too. Not because life is so terrible; no, so I can move all that old energy out and make room for the new. Also, if I'm not laughing, it's a lot harder to be Out There in the big, wide world. So, in addition to lots of yoga and walks and, yes, perhaps some wine as well, I’ve started Grey’s Anatomy all over again. What can I say? Nothing like a hospital drama to tug at the heartstrings and unleash the floodgates. But mostly, George makes me laugh. Thank goodness.