Deciding About Children After You Leave

Estrangement from your mother changes how you think about having a baby, and it raises two questions that keep getting answered as one. Whether you want to be a mother is the first. What your mother gets if you become one is the second, and you can answer them separately.

A grandchild gives an estranged mother a way back in, and the grandmother role comes with claims nobody in your family will question. She gets the announcement, the hospital, the photographs, Christmas morning, a week in August. You're expected to supply all of it, the same way you supplied everything else, and the expectation gets harder to refuse the further along you are, because by then people are telling you it's for the baby rather than for her.

The pressure comes at the point when you're in no condition to argue. Women end up deciding this at 38 weeks, on four hours of sleep, with a relative already in the hallway. Decide months early instead, and tell the people who'll be asked.

Decide whether she hears about the pregnancy at all, decide who's allowed to tell her. Your sister, your father, the cousin who posts everything, they all need to hear it from you before somebody asks them directly. Ask your hospital about visitor and privacy policies before you're in labor, because policies differ and the time to learn yours isn't during contractions, and some hospitals will keep your name off the board and hold calls at the desk if you ask in advance. Your partner needs the answers too, since he's the one who'll be giving them at the desk while you're in labor.

A grandchild doesn't change what made you leave. Pregnancy doesn't erase the history, and a new title doesn't produce trust that wasn't there a year ago. You can judge contact by how she behaves now rather than by what a grandmother is supposed to be given.

The fear of turning into her is usually aimed at the wrong behavior. If you grew up as the daughter who gave way, what you learned wasn't how to run a house through fear, it was how to put up with whatever your mother did and apologize for it afterward. The risk you actually run is doing too much of it. You'll be the mother who never asks the father for anything, who gets up every night because asking him to feels worse than the tiredness, who cancels her own appointments before anyone else's, who explains to a four-year-old why she's the one being reasonable.

Estrangement does give you a few years to work out whether you're selfish, difficult, and too sensitive, or whether those were the words your family used on you. You'll notice you're patient with other people's children, that people hand you responsibility without thinking twice, that you already handle an argument differently than your mother handled one.

Some women get a mother who cooks for a month, gets up at night so they can sleep, and watches the baby while they shower. You're replacing a person who would have done all of that for free, and nobody else is going to offer six weeks of it. Work out before the third trimester who's with you in week two, who's with you in week five when your partner is back at work, and who you can call at four in the morning when you've been up since one and the baby won't go down. If the answer to any of those is nobody, find that out in month seven, while you can still make arrangements.

Ask for specific things, because general offers go nowhere. Your sister takes Saturday morning so you can sleep from seven to eleven. A friend brings enough dinner for three nights and doesn't stay. A neighbor runs a load of laundry while the baby is down. People say yes to a day and a task. They say no to an open-ended arrangement without ever telling you they said no.

Nobody is entitled to a grandchild from you, and your own childhood has no claim on you either. Wanting children is its own reason, not wanting them is its own reason. If you decide against it and part of the reason is what your family was like, your mother took something from you, and you can call it that.

If you do have the baby, parts of your childhood will make more sense than you want them to. You'll be looking at a three-year-old and remembering being three, and some of it will be worse than you remembered because now you know the size of the child it happened to. You don't have to do it perfectly to do it differently. You have to notice what you're doing to your child, say so when you get it wrong, and apologize to a four-year-old like you mean it.