#147: Who’s allowed to want kids?
My perilous journey into the TTC forums
Good morning!
In January, I wrote about my and Avi’s decision to try for a baby last year, after which I took a much-needed break from all of it. In the months since, I’ve been thinking about that first attempt at attempting, when I felt simultaneously so unlike myself and also undeniably tapped into something big. I now think of that time as one of self-misunderstanding, and with some distance, I have a bit more clarity.
Who’s allowed to want kids?
The forums were full of crazy people. That’s what I kept telling my friends. We gossiped about their acronyms—“DH” for dear husband, “AF” for aunt flo, “BD” for baby dance, which apparently meant sex—and wondered what kind of lives they led. Maybe they were young and oppressed, trapped in Christian marriages of convenience. Maybe they believed their only value was their potential to mother. These were the primary circumstances I understood to cause a laser-focus on getting pregnant. Who else would be so eager to sacrifice their bodies, their autonomy, their time, their freedom? I wasn’t the same, I assured myself, as I exhaustively scrolled their posts, my browser set to incognito.
I first discovered the TTC (trying to conceive) forums after I googled how to get pregnant last summer. I was alone in bed at 7am, and the search felt illicit. Not because it involved sex, but because Avi and I had agreed to tread softly, try casually, see what happened. Googling whiffed of determination. And wasn’t “how to get pregnant” obvious, anyway? I’d learned in 4th grade, sitting in the passenger seat of my mom’s car, already parked at home, after I’d asked her what people did if they got pregnant and didn’t want to be. The question was less advanced than it sounds—I thought pregnancy was like a virus, that you caught it like a cold. She told me how it worked, and for the next 24 years, I avoided making a baby as if it actually were a sickness.
Now I was more interested in the particulars. Those the forums had in spades. I could read about what specific times of day people had sex and in what position. I could read about what specifically they’d eaten, which brand of tests they’d taken, and with what kind of pee (morning or afternoon? hydrated or dehydrated?). I could learn about their earliest signs of pregnancy—say, a tickle in their left boob—and on which day post-ovulation (DPO) they’d felt it. Most people got a positive test (BFP: big fat positive) a day or two before their missed period, but that was too long to wait. Posters wanted to know about their pregnancies as soon as possible, and they held onto hope as long as they could, even if they were cramping and bleeding, the tests reading negative. “AF-like cramps and spotting before BFP?” their posts pleaded. Yes yes yes, the chorus replied, it’s possible!
Hope shot through the TTC forums like a missile, contagious and kinetic until it disappeared over the horizon, again and again. The posts were about trying, after all. The people who succeeded eventually moved over to BabyBumps. Maybe that was part of the problem for me: all that trying in the trying forums. The desperation radiated off their questions (“My joints hurt, could that be a sign?”). So far, in my life, effortlessness held far greater appeal—in dressing, in poise, in making a baby. To appear effortless meant to never outwardly cop to a condition of lack. And yet that’s exactly what I felt last fall: weird, isolated, lacking. A little bit like a loser. The forums forced me to acknowledge something I'd been avoiding—desire itself. I wanted to want in a remote sort of way, and here these women were, vulnerable and unashamed of their desire, seeking refuge and support for their sake and for mine. Secretly I loved them for that.
For a while I was unaware of my hypocrisy, pegging them as so different from me. When my therapist asked me how the forums made me feel and I said, “embarrassed,” it took me a long time to realize I wasn’t referring to the silly acronyms or eager young brides. I was embarrassed first and foremost by myself—by my simple desire to have a baby, which I’d deemed hokey and prosaic compared to my other ambitions. This new pursuit seemed to have split my identity in two. Half of me was laughing with my friends about the acronym “DTD” (do the deed), the other was googling when, exactly, to do it.
There’s a reason I associated the forums with conservative types. It’s not particularly popular (or easy) to frame parenthood as aspirational when you hold the concerns of the left. At least not in my world. Sure, you can have kids as a leftist, but the primary conversations surrounding parenthood that I participated in concerned its problems: the right to abortion, the problem of climate change, the dubious ethics of adoption, the terrifying scourge of school shootings, the destructive influence of the nuclear family, the damage motherhood does to women’s careers and mental health, the alarming lack of support for parents in the West, the movement to destigmatize childlessness and celebrate non-traditional life paths, etc. All important and valid conversations. None exactly ushering leftists enthusiasticly towards parenthood.
Then, as I began to pay closer attention, there were the more general cultural attitudes that seemed to surround me in the city. A full cosmopolitan life, as far as I could gather, was not one of changing diapers and school pickups, but of arts, culture, travel, reinvention. Of rejecting the dusty hetero milestones of marriage and children. I sensed people’s equal disinterest in those who’d had kids and decamped to the suburbs as in those who’d had kids and stayed, crowding the urban sidewalks with their clunky strollers. Neither quite fit the narrative of New York’s liberatory promise of being alive in this city, interesting and interested. Even my TikTok algorithm clocked my paranoia, serving me videos of city-types rolling their eyes at “breeders.” I found one particularly bruising, of a guy explaining how he would always pretend to be happy for pregnant friends while making fun of them behind their backs. The forums seemed worlds away.
Part of me knew the anti-kid sentiment was smoke and mirrors for lots of people in their twenties—a young liberal city-dweller’s image-project that didn’t quite scan up close. Likewise, I knew plenty of people with kids in the city who were thriving, creative, and present (and I knew wherever that wasn’t the case was a collective failure, not a personal one). But I couldn’t help absorbing some of the antipathy, at least superficially. However easy it was for me to privately disregard the idea that parenthood was gauche or life-ending, I still wanted to belong here, to not be disregarded or left behind as a friend, woman, writer, critic, New Yorker. Avi’s lack of anxiety surrounding this was notable, by the way. He was confused that I felt judged for wanting a kid, which might have made me angry if it hadn’t made me feel ashamed first. And so the forums became my little secret. Outwardly, a joke; inwardly, a comfort. Trying to conceive made me feel so nuts and unlike myself that it wasn’t too difficult to split my consciousness this way. Sadly this was not particularly sustainable.
It’s too bad that I pulled the elementary move of taking my inner conflict and projecting it as judgment onto other women. I suppose it made (half of) me feel safe to distance myself from the forums, twisting my internalized misogyny into a critique of patriarchy. A pretty clever trick! In reality, I may find the forum language a little cringe and prudish (I’m not alone), and the neuroticism a tad unhealthy (I did eventually have to ban myself for a while, if only to stop word-searching my every curiosity and take a breath), but I’ve now experienced the strange process of trying for a kid without immediate success. And I know, firsthand, that all kinds of women are pulled to motherhood, and that it’s nothing if not sane to wonder, desperately, after making one of the biggest decisions of your life, if it worked, and be frustrated if it didn’t.
As much as I was embarrassed, last year, by my desire to get pregnant, I’m more embarrassed, now, that it was so difficult for me to stop viewing my choices as a branding exercise. After all, I’d come to an uncompromised decision, with Avi, that parenthood was something I valued and desired in my life, and that I didn’t believe it would make me any less useful, driven, or principled, in the same way choosing differently wouldn’t either. But in my consequent attempts to extricate myself from the sexist notion that motherhood belittles women, I’d managed to reinforce it. I was so afraid of the trying, the wanting, the sacrificing. Of the brutal femininity of all of it. But those things are only shameful through a superficial and limiting lens, and I’m finally, thankfully, losing interest in looking through it.
My favorite article I read last week was “The Incredible Disappearing Doomsday,” by Kyle Paoletta for Harpers, the most useful piece I’ve read on climate change in a while. Friday’s 15 things also included my favorite New York radio station, an extremely memorable pasta, a beautiful cemetery, and more. The rec of the week was the best frozen treats, about which many were rightly passionate.
Follow-up podcast on the forums
This Tuesday, my friend Harling will be joining me to discuss everything related to TTC and the forums. Harling was my ride-or-die through the process last year, as she was going through it herself, and she has just as many thoughts about the forums as I do. The comments will be open on that in case you want to join the discussion! And ICYMI, last week on the podcast, I finally gave an update about Bug and discussed what I’ve learned through taking care of a terminal pet. Your comments made me cry!
Finally finally, my advice hotline is back up and running! You can once again call and leave a voicemail at 802-404-BABY. Danny and I would be so happy to hear from you.
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley