Commentary
I was a career-driven young woman shaped by feminist ideology. I worked hard, struggled hard, and eventually succeeded in the male-dominated world of restaurants and professional kitchens. I easily could have become what I now think of as accidentally childless.
I did not have my first child until 37, and somehow still managed to have four children. But looking around my circle of friends and extended family, I realize how differently my life could have gone.
What I see everywhere is not women consciously rejecting motherhood as much as postponing it. Career first. Stability first. Travel first. Financial freedom first. Self-development first. Then suddenly the fertility window begins quietly closing.
Some of my close friends found loving partners after 40, but children never came. Others married in their late thirties assuming children would naturally follow, only to spend years and enormous amounts of money on fertility treatments that ultimately failed.
Some say they never wanted children at all. Maybe for some that is completely true. But I suspect many women have simply learned to suppress a longing they were taught to view as less important than individual achievement.
I also know there are extraordinary women without children living deeply meaningful lives, and I know motherhood is not possible for everyone. I can only speak honestly about what I have observed in myself, my friendships, and my generation.
I say this without judgment because I understand it intimately. I lived that life too.
I had the large house in a planned community, the expensive car, the beautiful pool, financial comfort, endless social opportunities, and a career that gave me praise and identity. I thought I was content. And in many ways, I was.
But none of it compares to children.
Nothing compares to hearing “Mom.” Nothing compares to creating life, carrying it, feeding it, protecting it, and watching pieces of yourself move through the world in another human being.
For me, motherhood was the thing that finally made me feel fully adult. I know some people without children will dislike hearing that, but it is the truth of my own experience.
One thing I rarely hear discussed honestly is how difficult it can be to adjust to motherhood later in life.
By the time many women have children now, they have spent nearly two decades building lives entirely around themselves. Their schedules, careers, travel, sleep, routines, ambitions, finances, and homes revolve around personal autonomy and self-direction.
Then suddenly a tiny human arrives who is completely dependent, wildly inefficient, deeply needy, and utterly unconcerned with your schedule, your sleep, your career goals, or your emotional bandwidth.
Children interrupt everything.
And perhaps that is part of their purpose.
The modern world increasingly asks, “How do I preserve my freedom?” Children ask the opposite question: “Who are you willing to become for someone else?”
Motherhood transformed me in beautiful ways, but also uncomfortable ones. It forced me to become less self-centered. Less obsessed with my own comfort, ambitions, image, and control. Children demand endless giving. Not performative giving. Actual giving. At 3 a.m. giving. Giving when you are sick. Giving when nobody applauds you. Giving when there is nothing immediate in return.
And I sometimes wonder whether modern society has trained us away from that kind of sacrifice.
Quiet conversations happen in the strangest places.
Maybe I’m on the phone with a lawyer handling some business issue and she quietly says, “Can I ask you something? I just froze my eggs. How old were you when you had your last child?”
Maybe it is a flight attendant noticing me visibly pregnant at 44 who leans in softly and asks, “I hope this isn’t rude, but how old are you?” Then when I tell her, she clasps her hands together and says, “You’re giving women hope everywhere.”
Or maybe it is a woman behind the counter at a veterinary office quietly admitting, “I’m over 40 and still hope to have children someday.”
I have had versions of these conversations over and over again.
Women searching for evidence that it could still happen.
And it can happen.
But there is a difference between possible and probable.
Modern medicine has extended fertility in remarkable ways, but it cannot fully override biology. At the same time we are constantly bombarded by endocrine disruptors, processed foods, chronic stress, microplastics, pesticides, and environmental chemicals that many researchers believe are contributing to declining fertility in both men and women.
In many ways, we are technologically extending fertility while simultaneously degrading it.
The truth is that biology does not entirely bend to ideology, career timing, financial readiness, or modern lifestyles. Our best odds are still generally found in youth, even if our culture increasingly treats youth as a time exclusively for self-exploration and independence.
Men are not innocent in this shift either. Modern adulthood increasingly revolves around personal freedom, endless adolescence, consumption, experiences, and self-construction for both sexes.
Spending so much time around animals has only deepened these observations for me. Watching cows year after year, their entire biological rhythm revolves around reproduction, birth, nurturing, and beginning again. Nature itself constantly orients toward continuation.
Human beings may be the only mammals capable of fully overriding that instinct.
Sometimes I wonder where all that energy goes instead.
Often, especially among my more progressive friends, I see that instinct redirected toward activism, social causes, and protecting the vulnerable. I do not question that many of those efforts come from genuine compassion and good intentions. But I also think some of it can become misplaced maternal energy detached from family and redirected outward toward society itself.
When the instinct to nurture, protect, defend, and sacrifice no longer has children or family at the center of it, that energy does not simply disappear. It often reemerges politically, socially, and ideologically. Sometimes constructively. Sometimes destructively. Sometimes in ways that seem less about helping actual vulnerable people and more about searching for purpose, identity, and moral meaning in a world increasingly disconnected from family and community.
Last night we hosted a rehearsal dinner for a couple who were 22 and 25 years old, both Texas A&M graduates, deeply Catholic, openly family-oriented, and intentionally building a life around shared values rather than endless self-optimization. Their centerpieces were repurposed cans filled with living plants and images of saints.
When I was 22, my priorities were very different.
But honestly, I think those kids may have the right idea.
Our culture tells young people to delay marriage, avoid commitment, maximize freedom, travel, build careers, and enjoy youth while they can. Children are often framed as limitations rather than fulfillment.
I increasingly wonder whether our culture has confused freedom with fulfillment, only for many people to discover too late that the two are not always the same thing.
