I compulsively read whatever perspectives I could find online by people who regretted having children. No one who didn’t want a child would have read so much about the experience of having children. I was looking for an armature to make conscious a decision that I had already unconsciously made. Regret is a popular topic in contemporary writing on motherhood, sparkling with the static of a broken taboo. The only comparable regret discourse I can think of is the liberal media’s desire to flush out people who regret voting for Trump. I recall very little of what I read, but I remember a comment by a woman who said she did not relate to regret discourse because before her child was born she would spend hours looking mindlessly at her phone, and now her days were full of the meaningful labor of childcare. This comforted me because I too had empty time to fill. Time, like a uterus, expands to fit what’s inside it. Children, little human clocks, youth coming around again like lunchtime, illuminate the stretchy, incomprehensible texture of time. The single most common thing parents of older children say to me is, “Enjoy it, it goes by so fast!” Everyone says it in the same tone, nostalgic and conspiratorial, stunned by the fact of finitude. Becoming a parent is like joining a subculture of the majority. Like queer culture, it is structured around the illegibility of love, but it’s not remotely queer, it’s the least queer love of all: the heavy paste of parenting’s social form completely conceals its destabilizing, romantic heart.
Regret hallucinates a bridge between what does and does not happen, an anchor securing the unlived life to the lived one. The regret I experienced after my earlier abortion stemmed not only from having made what I thought was a wrong decision, but from my refusal to acknowledge the decision’s total reality. The regret allowed me to live two lives, the life of reality, in which I was not a mother, and the life of regret, in which the baby was still at stake, still an open question and, in a way, I was its mother. The non-baby of my regret would now be old enough to vote, and they have left home, but they still visit sometimes, especially now I start to realize that I will most likely only ever have one child. And I regret that. “One is better than none,” a stranger I confided in at a playgroup once told me, as we watched a room full of babies play. I repeat the phrase to myself often, as a talisman of my narrow escape from the annihilating power of my indecisiveness.