My mother was recently diagnosed with a terminal disease, with a prognosis of two to four years. I am 34, close to my mum and she’s a great mother, but for the last few years she has been pressuring me to have a baby. And since being diagnosed, she has upped the pressure.
My partner of 12 years has never wanted children. Although I imagined I would have children when we met in our early 20s, it didn’t seem important at the time and I hoped he might change his mind. I assumed I would get broody at some point, and that would force the issue – but I never have.
Even before my mother’s diagnosis, it was something I worried about constantly. Due to my age, I knew I had to make a choice between my life with my partner (which I am worried will be consumed by a child) and having a baby. I decided I was going to use the next year to travel and would resolve whether to leave my boyfriend and find a partner who wanted children. However, this timeline has been torn to shreds. It isn’t just for my mother that I want to have a child while she’s alive, it’s also for me, because I would value her help.
I don’t want to break up with my partner. Although we have our problems, I can’t imagine being with anyone else. My mother loves him, too, and would be devastated if we broke up. I don’t know if I would have time to break up, heal, meet someone I could fall in love with, get pregnant and have a baby in the time my mother has left. I feel that I’m in an impossible situation. It also doesn’t help that I live a 10-hour plane ride from my parents.
I’m really sorry to hear about your mum. That alone would be enough to unbalance anyone. Facing loss is bound to make you look at life and want to accelerate everything to fit it into your mum’s last few years. But you clearly cannot have a baby just for your mother’s sake. Nor can you stay with your boyfriend if this relationship isn’t going in the direction you want, simply because your mum would be devastated if you split up. There are so many different scenarios that may unfold with your mother’s illness, that you cannot hinge any big life decisions around it. That’s before we factor in the huge distance between you.
What I see is that this concerns three things: coming to terms with your mother’s illness and prognosis; whether you want to stay with your partner; if you want to have a baby. I don’t see the last two as connected to the first.
Have you ever focused on what you want? Your choices seem to have been dictated by other people. You seem to have been planning to have a baby at some point, but buried that desire because your partner didn’t want one, but now your mother’s illness has made you a little braver and enabled you to think about what you might want. However, the specialist I consulted this week (psychotherapist Carol Leader, bpc.org.uk) and I disagreed on this – she didn’t detect that you really wanted a baby, but I did. And perhaps this reflects the contradictions within you. “It’s wishful thinking that there is one perfect choice,” Leader said. “Any decision comes with some loss, some pain as well as gain.”
We all need to balance what’s more gain than pain to make any decision. But how can you do that under the shadow of this awful news? What you need to do is step back when you feel so overwhelmed.
Leader had some good, practical suggestions which may help you: “Try to spend a month acting as if you’ve decided to have a child, and a month acting as if you’ve decided definitely not to have one. This can give you some space to allow you to move from this stuck place you’re currently in.”
She also asked: “How would you feel if your partner said he’d changed his mind and wanted to have a baby?”
And I’d like to add: how would you feel if your mother suddenly stopped putting pressure on you? These exercises may help you focus on what you really want and from that, hopefully, you can think about what to do next.
You need to talk to your partner. Your relationship should be able to sustain an honest conversation. Your partner’s response may clarify things for you. Your mother is ill, but needs to stop telling you to have a baby “to give her life meaning” (which is what you said in your longer letter). This is a really difficult situation. “There is no magic solution,” says Leader, “only real ones.”
• Send your problem to annalisa.barbieri@mac.com. Annalisa regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence
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