Making Decisions at a Crossroads
There was a piece in Vox recently that was about the decision whether or not to have children, but I thought the advice in the piece was applicable to anyone at a crossroads during infertility as well. Just as it is hard to know whether or not to begin with family building, it’s also hard to know whether to continue with family building.
I guess the article got me with these lines:
Most people who contact me say they feel like they’re the only one who can’t decide. I let them know immediately: They’re not the only one. Our society allows little room for ambivalence around this topic.
That’s because we, unfortunately, live in a pronatalist world where the unspoken message is that everyone should want children and should have them, the end.
It is hard to detach from that pronatalist society to make it a personal decision (instead of a societal one) because we are always surrounded by that message. And the people around us are also influenced by it. Therefore, it’s like trying to have a conversation while surrounded by noise. It takes a lot of effort to separate what a person wants as an individual from that larger societal message. And I think this is equally true no matter where you fall on the want spectrum. Society just has a way of getting very loud in delivering its message of what it thinks you should do and how it thinks you should do it.
The other piece of this article that grabbed me: “It’s important to know that a person’s desire and decision are not always the same, nor is the goal for them to be the same. The goal is to know your truth about each of them.” In other words, these are two separate things that we sometimes try to solve at the same time. And we can’t always deal with both simultaneously. Sometimes it’s about figuring out one, accepting it, and then figuring out the other.
She gives six steps to help people decide, and many are helpful in also deciding whether or not to continue with family building when you’re in the middle of it. Placing this here in case it helps anyone.
2 comments
I saw that article a while back. Lots of wisdom there, and I’m glad she gives some practical advice/a process to follow to help make a decision.
On a somewhat related note, a fellow childless-not-by-choice blogger/advocate recently spoke to a group of women who are trying to decide whether to continue with infertility treatment, and she asked some of us if we had any advice to offer. I took what I wrote to her and turned it into a blog post that’s been sitting in my drafts folder. Time to dust it off!
“Making a conscious decision only after knowing what you want and why you want it is what real freedom is all about.“
I love this quote. Being conscious about stepping into anything is awesome. For a lot of us whether it’s work or parenting or even who we marry, unconsciousness can rule then we have to deal with that later in life.