When The Ties Don't Bind

The prospect of becoming a mother challenges CARMEN MARIA MACHADO to examine her own.

A few months before my wife, Val, and I got married, we decided to see a couples counselor to prep us for a life together. We wanted to start things off right—look for what we were missing, gather tools to help us succeed. Our therapist, an astute, hysterically funny woman named Michelle, was, I thought, precisely

what we needed. She was thoughtful and found a way to artfully cut through each of our defenses—Val’s emotion, my retreat from it. (Recognizing what two oldest children needed from her, she gave us endless praise for our hard work, and a certificate when we graduated.) When we came to the discussion about children—there was an entire session dedicated to it, the premarital counseling version of Shark Week—I was taken aback when I found myself expressing ambivalence about parenthood.

Val and I had talked about children. As soon as it became clear that we were serious, we agreed that while we didn’t have to decide on the timeline and method just then, we both wanted to be parents. As aunts to our two nephews, we got a preview of the experience of having kids in our lives: exhausting, messy, but funny and magical and something we definitely wanted.

So in that room, I surprised myself when I said to my soon-to-be wife, “I don’t know if I want to have children.” An instinctive pre-cry tingle hit my sinuses. Then I said it again. “I don’t know if I want children.” I was on the verge of tears, but they didn’t come. Instead I just sat there with the knowledge that somehow felt brand new even though it wasn’t new at all.