Phoebe Luckhurst and her husband, Samuel, both 34, meet Merle Bombardieri, the 75-year-old therapist who says she can help them make the biggest choice of their lives.
It’s a normal Wednesday afternoon except I’m talking to a stranger on the internet about my biological clock. I am not being particularly eloquent, though Merle Bombardieri seems to be keeping up. After I finally finish stammering about fertility and cliff faces, she summarises kindly: “It’s not as if you’re 29 and you’ve got years to think about it.”
Ouch. Yet it’s true (I’m 34) and this sort of real talk is precisely what I signed up for with my husband, Samuel, also 34 and sitting beside me. Via Zoom from an armchair in her sunlit living room in St Petersburg, Florida, the 75-year-old psychotherapist helps people from all over the world make the most definitive decision of their lives: whether or not to have a child. This afternoon it is our turn in the hot seat.
Bombardieri has been a “baby decision coach” for four decades (she is also a licensed clinical social worker). Her first book, The Baby Decision, was published in 1981 and she is writing another: Baby or Childfree? She works with couples and single clients all over the world – from Scotland to southeast Asia – most of whom want to decide one way or the other in the next six months to a year (a session costs US$200 – about NZ$329). In the first of what is usually between five and eight sessions, she asks people to place themselves on a scale of one to 10 according to how keen they are to become a parent. Some couples pose a challenge. “If people are polarised at zero and 10 it is going to be much harder to find a solution that would enable them to stay together,” she says. “If you have a zero and a 10, those are the people most likely to break up.”
Fortunately for our year-old marriage and eight-year relationship, Samuel and I are happily united in our indecision (solid fives), which is a feeling I sum up with further panache: “I feel like we’re on the same page, is how I would characterise it. Ummmm. Which is kind of an openness to both sides. And not decided on either.” She nods in understanding.
“My stance is there’s no one right answer,” she says. “The only question to ask is, what makes sense for me? And if it’s a couple, what makes sense for us?” Bombardieri does encounter a number of recurring themes – uncertainty, fear of parenthood, fear of pregnancy, a fear of sacrificing one’s identity to a squalling infant. Increasingly, couples are citing the environmental impact of having a child. “The environment is a big one,” she says.
Money is also a big one for many people. The economic realities of the past two decades have preserved those in their twenties and thirties in a state of suspended semi-adolescence, in which they reach the “traditional” milestones of adulthood – home ownership, marriage, parenthood – far later. Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that while earnings have doubled in England and Wales since 1997, house prices have increased four and a half times. The UK has the third-highest childcare costs in the developed world. No wonder birth rates are in freefall: in England and Wales, they are at their lowest rate for two decades. Politicians, demographers and economists predict an apocalypse. “No other generation has had to deal with this,” Bombardieri says.
In many ways, Samuel and I fit the profile of these 34-year-old perma-adolescents. We don’t own our one-bed flat in southeast London and I don’t know how we’d afford theoretical childcare. He runs a mobile gaming company and I’m a journalist, which means I probably have about four more years left before I am replaced by a robot.
That’s not the whole story, though. We both cherish our independence – which might sound glib but doesn’t feel it. We feel queasy about adding a new consumer to a burning planet. Honestly, I have never fantasised about being a mother. On the other hand I regularly fantasise about us moving to Paris or New York. In these fantasies we do not have a baby. At the same time we’re not certain we don’t want a baby. Samuel and I fear missing out on something profound. Although very few of my friends have children, most of us would say we are “currently child-free” rather than “definitely staying child-free”. The uncertainty is unsettling. Which is what has brought us to Bombardieri’s (virtual) sofa.
Conscious that every generation thinks it has invented its own brand of angst, I recently asked my mum how she knew she wanted to have me and she laughed. “We didn’t know we were ready – we just did it.” When we speak before the session, Bombardieri is more delicate. “We think of ourselves as psychologically sophisticated. But on this issue so many people don’t really know what they think and feel.”
She starts by acknowledging the “weirdness” of what we’re about to do. I ask if we’ll have an answer by the end of our hour-long session. She says we’ll probably have to settle for “a better sense of where you might be leaning, and some ideas about what to do next”.
The main problem we’ve found when we’ve tried to work out what we want to do is that it all feels so abstract. “I worry about future regret if we don’t become parents,” Samuel says. “But whenever I delve into it, there’s nothing very specific there. It’s almost a fear of not being a parent, rather than a desire to be a parent.”
“I always say, don’t ask if you’ll regret your decision because it’s human nature to regret decisions,” is Bombardieri’s response. “The question should be, which decision will I regret least?”
And who is influencing it? Sam and I are lucky that we do not have nosy parents explicitly demanding grandchildren. But we both sense an expectation that we’ll follow the conventional order of things. This assumption has always triggered my inner iconoclast, though it turns out Bombardieri is also a quiet radical. “I think that the child-free choice should be the default,” she says. “And people should only have children if they feel strong desire, if they feel that it’s a really important part of themselves and their relationship – rather than it being a big deal and that they’re becoming huge mavericks by saying no to parenthood.”
In her sessions she often prescribes thought exercises. In this one – designed to be done solo – you use two chairs. “You sit in one chair and say, ‘I want a child no matter what.’ And then you sit in the other chair and say, ‘But what about my identity? What about my career?’ The idea is for them to have an argument. Not be polite, intellectual, but have an argument, because in those arguments you can hear if one voice is stronger than the other.”
More openness is also important. There is judgment – in your thirties, parenthood can feel like an unyielding dividing line. Those with children feel judged by those who don’t have them – and vice versa – while those who are struggling to conceive find both camps unbearable. Many women are steeped in a culture, turbocharged by social media, that makes motherhood look like a war. “They’re terrified because all they’re reading online about are the difficulties: postpartum depression, feeling as if one has lost one’s identity. And even though those things are often true, they’re often temporary, and they’re often mixed – even in the beginning, even with postpartum depression – with a lot of joy. I think that’s really important for the conversation.”
In truth, Samuel and I have both drunk the Kool-Aid about early years parenting being a sort of hostage situation. Obviously, though, kids grow up. “What I say is very few people would have a kid if your child was going to be a baby for ever,” Bombardieri responds. Unfortunately, they do at some point become teenagers.
We briskly address the biological clock question. She recommends that many clients consider fertility testing. “If you decide you’d like to have a child but would like to start trying in three or four years, that would be a much easier decision if you had some information about your fertility.” For Samuel, this would involve sperm analysis; for me, ultrasound scans, blood tests and a hysterosalpingogram (an X-ray of the womb and fallopian tubes). But testing cannot be relied upon to predict how easy or hard it is for an individual or couple to conceive, and it would cost about £700 ($1500). “No one can promise you,” Bombardieri says. I do not mention my phobia of needles.
A practical step – something that cuts through the more existential stuff – is reassuring. Unfortunately this feeling is fleeting, as Bombardieri wants us to think about what great hopes and dreams we have for all of our (presently) child-free time. “What do you feel you’re on the verge of that you would love to happen before you have a child?” she asks. I recently spent an entire Saturday afternoon watching 10 episodes of Emily in Paris. At the time this felt pretty bad, but it now feels like a crime against humanity.
I mention my fantasy of living in New York. “We’d like to travel,” Sam adds. “Which will be tricky to do with a child.”
Bombardieri is prepared for this. “On Reddit, in the chat group about parenting, people will say, ‘We love to travel and we’re thinking about having a child, but we’re afraid we won’t travel again until the child is seven, or until we have the money.’ And 29 people will say, ‘When we sit down to dinner, the first thing our five-year-old asks us is which country we are going to next.’ "
While I hope we would not produce a child this obnoxious, we concede her point. We have evidently internalised a certain version of parenting: namely, that your life ends when you have a child. “A lot of this has to do with a spirit of adventure,” Bombardieri says. “We’re not talking about wealthy people. We’re talking about people who are creative in arrangements.”
It seems that we are both dreadfully conventional after all. Bombardieri makes another observation. “It would be useful for you to think about the idea of a one-child family.” There is a silence as we mull this over. “I think I’ve always assumed that if we had children it would be two or zero, just by default,” Samuel says slowly. “So that’s interesting.” I feel the same. I am the eldest of four and Samuel has a younger brother; we are both very close to our siblings and our models of family life involve multiple children. “It’s funny to think you haven’t had one child but you’re assuming that, if you have one, you have to have two,” Bombardieri says. “You have no idea whether you’re going to love or hate parenthood and you’ve committed yourself to having another child.”
When you put it like that, we sound ridiculous. “For people like you, one child can be the great solution. You get to experience the deep, wonderful joys of having a child without being overwhelmed.” This is our biggest breakthrough.
The end of the hour approaches. This last revelation aside, the issue still feels fairly abstract, which is probably the limitation of this type of coaching – even accounting for the fact that people usually have more than one session. At a certain point you just have to settle for one of two unknowns, and no amount of talking can change this fact. Still, there’s hope. “I love that you’re not disagreeing with each other,” she says. “So you don’t have to do all the difficult things that go with that. I’m really happy for you about that.”
And so we finish, not quite back where we started. We are prescribed a series of podcasts, further reading and thought exercises that include writing a list of what would excite us about the prospect of having a child. “A lot of people find that if they can name what appeals to them about parenthood before they do go ahead, they will remember why they’re parents when the going gets tough,” Bombardieri says. “If they decide to be child-free, the more specific they can be about what they think they’re going to miss, the easier it is to do what I call stealing from the other side – planning to get those satisfactions with nieces, nephews or other children. It’s good information to have.”
We vow to do this exercise. I also vow to Samuel that I’ll never make us talk about our family planning in a newspaper again.
“I think it’s going to be really interesting,” Bombardieri adds before we hang up. “These conversations are never just about baby or no baby. It’s ‘Who am I? Who are we? What hasn’t happened yet that we want to happen between now and when we die?’ A lot of couples tell me they learn things about each other that they didn’t know – about the way they look at life, the way they look at death. It’s difficult and frustrating and scary. It can also be quite wonderful.”
- The Baby Decision by Merle Bombardieri (Orchard View Press) is out now
Podcasts and books to help you decide
Listen
Kids or Childfree
Keltie Maguire spent a decade deciding whether to have children (she didn’t). In this show, she and her guests discuss the issues that shaped her decision.
The Longest Shortest Time
Hosted by author Hillary Frank, this is an award-winning parenting podcast about families, relationships and the many “absurdities” of raising children.
Read
To Have and to Hold: Motherhood, Marriage & the Modern Dilemma by Molly Millwood
A clinical psychologist’s take on what women lose – and gain – when they become mothers.
The Daily Dad: 366 Meditations on Parenting, Love and Raising Great Kids by Ryan Holiday
Meaningful short essays on fatherhood that draw from literature, history and philosophy.
The Power of Showing Up by Daniel J Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson
Two parenting experts explain how “present” parents positively influence their children’s development.
Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood by Lucy Jones
Jones’s influential book explores how motherhood radically alters women’s minds, brains and bodies.
Written by: Phoebe Luckhurst
© The Times of London