My mother has schizophrenia and there’s a chance I could too. Am I right to want biological children?
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I’m not ambivalent about having kids because I’m afraid for their mental health. It’s because I’m afraid for my own. One recent afternoon, I went with a friend to pick up her five-year-old from art class. Our progress walking home was slow. Her daughter wanted to examine every leaf. She wanted to say hello to every stranger. She wanted to be in the shade but not walk in the sun to get there. It took 20 minutes to travel a block, even longer to make the next.
My friend did not get frustrated and neither did I. It felt like a privilege to watch them together. A privilege to see this woman, whom I’d known since we were 23 and making bad life decisions, be a really good mom in her late 30s. On the walk back to the train, I thought, I could do that. And it’s true, I could be a mom. I’m in my 30s. I own a home. My husband is the competent and selfless son of two developmental psychology professors – a man whose baby photos appear in actual textbooks about how to raise kids well.
Others have done more with less. My mom got pregnant with me when she was 19 and dropped out of college to raise me. She got a nursing degree, made sure I did well in school, taught me to be confident, disciplined and unafraid. But she’d also been mercurial throughout my childhood and subsequently developed late-in-life schizophrenia, the emotional and physical consequences of which I would not wish on anyone.
On my ninth birthday, she locked me in my bedroom and didn’t speak to me all day – punishment, she said, for leaving broccoli out on the kitchen counter the night before. She read my journal, then called my grandmother to read my complaints about my social life and daily defeats at school aloud, humiliating me. She beat me with a leather belt for transgressions she made up. She would grow enraged in the middle of an otherwise ordinary conversation. “Some day, you’ll look up and everybody you love will just be gone,” she said to me once. “No one’s gonna call or come by. They’ll all just disappear.” I remember feeling stunned by the implication that, not only would I be abandoned, but that my abandonment was inevitable. I figured whatever made her hate me would make others hate me as well, and so I spent a lot of time alone.
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