maybe you sped passed this paragraph.
Looking back, the fact that my faith needed shoring up was a sign that something was changing. As I got older, the constant travel that once thrilled me became wearying. My work still meant a lot to me, but while I once thought that publishing a book would make me feel that I’d arrived, publishing two taught me that arrival is elusive. Where I’d once seen family and intellectual life in opposition, over time I started worrying that it was an intellectual loss to go through life without experiencing something so fundamental to so many people’s existence. Meanwhile, 35 was creeping up on me. I’d been led to believe, falsely, that this is when most women’s fertility collapses. I still wasn’t sure that I’d be a good mother, but I had no doubt that my immensely kind husband would be a good father, probably good enough to make up for me
That's retrospective though. It doesn't sound like that's how she was feeling at the time, it sounds like that's how she THOUGHT she felt at the time, and we all know how bad humans are with the whole 'accurate recollection' thing. This is really the crux of the argument for me. What things were they discussing that made them ambivalent, and what factor(s) specifically at the time made them choose to have kids? It just all strikes me haphazard, as most conceptions seem to be. Have a baby, and the choice is made for you and then it's up to the writer in this case to justify it after the fact. I'm not writing this as a critique of parents as a whole, but of a person in specific. Imagine that instead of being able to continue to jet-set around to various exotic locations with a 6 month old, she had suffered intense postpartum depression, or else suffered the things her earlier negative examples had gone through. This article would have been a very different one.Matt and I went back and forth, and back and forth some more. We both felt like we were atop a fulcrum and could be pushed either way if only the other knew what to do. At some point, we decided that I’d go off the pill and see what happened.
“through no act of his own, but because of a careless, inconceivably frivolous and selfish act of mine, making life untenable.”
A 40-year-old mother of twins wrote, “I was an attractive, fulfilled career woman before I had these kids. Now I’m an exhausted, nervous wreck who misses her job and sees very little of her husband. He’s got a ‘friend,’ I’m sure, and I don’t blame him.”