Clock Watcher: my article in February ELLE

(UPDATE! The link to Clock Watcher is up.)

In 2008, I wrote a piece for ELLE magazine about the financial costs of having a child. I admitted that the USDA’s 17-year estimate of $204,060 (it’s even higher now!) seemed so daunting that it was forcing my husband and I to put off parenthood — possibly indefinitely. We just didn’t see how we’d ever make enough money to raise a child without sacrificing our career ambitions, our hard-won happiness and our relationship harmony. I became obsessed with this quote from economist Elizabeth Warren, “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse.”

The response to my article was mostly sympathetic, and many young couples admitted to sharing my terror over child-raising costs. However, I also heard from women–and it was always women–who dismissed my financial panic as unnecessary. When I was ready to have a baby, they assured me, maternal desire would trump most practical concerns. The cost of diapers and day care would become irrelevant as I focused on bringing life into the world. My money worries certainly wouldn’t disappear, but they would become more of a consideration than an obstacle to motherhood. And if they didn’t? Well, if I could let something as mundane as money prevent me from having a baby, that must mean that I didn’t want to become a mother badly enough.

Most of this feedback was honest and well-meaning, and it got me thinking: many of my girlfriends had openly worried about the effect that a baby would have on their careers, their finances, their relationships and their sense of self, but that hadn’t stopped them from (eventually) taking the plunge into parenthood. Some had given in to a chronic desire to have kids, but others described an impossible-to-ignore urge to have a baby, despite the sacrifices.

My article opened up a new set of questions for me. Everyone now knows how expensive it is to have children, and we’re all more aware of how difficult it is to have kids in the United States, which is now globally infamous for its lack of parental support. However, those facts haven’t had a significant impact on America’s women: they’re having children later, but the nation’s fertility rates have barely budged (especially compared to Japan, Korea and most of Europe).

I started to wonder what it would take to get me over my financial fears — aside from a new career and a new husband, that is (those are non-negotiable). I thought about the way some women talked about their urge to get pregnant as if it were their destiny, as if Cupid had misfired and sent his arrow into their womb instead of their heart. Would this happen to me, if only I waited long enough? If I were receptive enough? Was there a biological explanation behind sudden-onset baby lust? I’d heard so much about the biological clock, but not much about the alarm mechanism that is supposed to let us know that this thing is working. I’m older and most likely less fertile than I’d been when I wrote my cost-of-kids piece, but I’m still undecided about babies, and still fixated on the financial aspect of parenthood.

I decided to explore this further, and I wrote about my findings in a follow-up article for ELLE called “Clock Watcher.” It’s in the February 2011 issue, out now.

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