I want to want what I want

I’m almost seven months pregnant, and it’s fine. Earlier in my pregnancy, I got spooked by the reports of how pregnancy changes the brain. To be fair, those reports were relatively neutral: some changes were positive, some negative. But I still held onto some concerns, one of which was that if scientists had discovered pregnancy changes women’s brains for the worse, they wouldn’t report it out. It’s a bit too Charles Murray for the mainstream.

I don’t think pregnancy makes women dumber, obviously. But I don’t have trouble believing it changes the brain. I spent years deciding whether or not to have kids, and in that time, I asked oh-so-many mothers about their experiences. Arguably, too many. Some of them, I probably should have left alone. So many mothers that I started a podcast documenting it. And one of the most conclusive assessments I heard was that after pregnancy, you just care about different things. Your priorities shift. Your brain makes space to care about the new child.

This should have come as a relief to me. I’ve been suffering pregnancy brain-fog, and I was worried that would last forever. Not the case, the mothers told me. The only permanent change is a shift in priorities. And yet…I didn’t like that idea. I don’t want to care about different things. I like the things I care about. I care about them.

The more I think about it, the more I get tied in a logical knot. It doesn’t make sense to fear a change in what I care about, because if I were to care about other things, I wouldn’t care about the things I no longer cared about. A person can’t believe their own priorities are wrong; if they did, they’d re-prioritize (a person can, however, think their revealed prioritizes are wrong. For example, someone might know they’re spending time in ways that doesn’t align with their priorities. In fact, this is true of everyone with a smartphone).

And still, it bothered me. I can imagine a future in which I have a different job, live in a different place, eat different foods, spend my time in different ways. But I can’t imagine a future in which I care about different things. I am what I care about. The interiority of my priorities feels like such a fundamental part of me.

Here’s an example: I’m an introvert. I’ve spent a lot of my pregnancy anxious that I won’t have enough alone time once the baby comes. Mothers tell me not to worry about this – they say I may want time away from other people but I won’t want separation from my baby. That I’ll miss my baby the moment I leave it; that time with the baby will become my new priority. But I don’t want this. I want to want alone time. On the other hand, if I didn’t want alone time, I guess I wouldn’t miss that longing. Is a longing, in and of itself, a pleasant feeling? I wouldn’t have thought so, but I fear its absence.

I decided to become a mother for a number of reasons I could list for you, all of which feel logical. It wasn’t a particularly emotional choice; I’m not someone who always knew I wanted to be a mother. I read and reread Cheryl Strayed’s “The Ghost Ship That Didn’t Carry Us” so many times before I got pregnant. In the essay, she gives this piece of advance to a person unsure about whether or not to have kids:

What don’t you know? Make a list. Write down everything you don’t know about your future life—which is everything, of course—but use your imagination. What are the thoughts and images that come to mind when you picture yourself at twice the age you are now? What springs forth if you imagine the 82 year-old self who opted to “keep enjoying the same life” and what when you picture the 82 year-old self with a thirty-nine year old son or daughter? Write down “same life” and “son or daughter” and underneath each make another list of the things you think those experiences would give to and take from you and then ponder which entries on your list might cancel each other out. Would the temporary loss of a considerable portion your personal freedom in middle age be significantly neutralized by the experience of loving someone more powerfully than you ever have? Would the achy uncertainty of never having been anyone’s father be defused by the glorious reality that you got to live your life relatively unconstrained by the needs of another? What is a good life? Write “good life” and list everything that you associate with a good life then rank them in order of importance. Have the most meaningful things in your life come to you as a result of ease or struggle? What scares you about sacrifice? What scares you about not sacrificing?

I did that, more or less. I was persuaded by the line “Have the most meaningful things in your life come to you as a result of ease or struggle?” But here is where my fear of shifting priorities emerges: what if my priorities were to change, and I became someone else with a new set of “most meaningful things?” What if I made a decision that was correct for who I used to be, but it was the wrong one for who I became?

I don’t think parents have "better” priorities than anyone else. I don’t want to decide that after having a kid, I’ve “grown up” and learned to care about “real” things. The things I care about now are real. But then again, I can’t really stop myself from changing my priorities. And maybe I’ll turn into someone who isn’t so attached to wanting what I want. But for now, I want to stay the same.