Having a child: You go through all the things you do when you fall in love. You find yourself infatuated. You want to tell everyone about your new love. You can’t wait to be with that person. And you feel like, no matter how many things are going wrong, someone loves you.

The kid option. Alice Dreger. 2009. https://alicedreger.com/child

I often say, honestly, if the woman I was before I had a child could see the woman I am now, there is no way she would have a kid. That woman was so intense about her work, so used to having her schedule at her control, so used to napping, eating, watching a movie, and having sex whenever she felt like it, she would be horrified to see herself as me.

Me, I get the start and the end of each work day lopped off by the school bus. I get sick all the time from the latest germ to hit our elementary school. (And living in an international academic community, we get a lot of well-traveled germs.) I spend my weekends waiting for my son to finish eating his bagel so we can move on with our day. And then we move on to trainspotting out in the cold for several hours. I even (gasp) go to soccer practice—though I do bring something interesting to read, and I drive a little Honda Fit, or the Saturn SL from grad school (a ’95, with a glove compartment held closed by string), not a minivan. (I am way too sexy for a minivan.)

For intellectuals, having a child can be especially challenging. This is particularly true of the time when your children are babies. Babies don’t hold very good conversations. They don’t make good arguments or cite their sources. And children make you dumber, at least in the short term, because not only is it hard to keep up in your discipline when you lose so much time to family needs, it’s also hard to think straight when you are perpetually sleep-deprived.

When I was breast-feeding, I was sure that the ancients were right about the humours, especially about brains and breast-milk both being made of the same stuff (phlegm). Because the more I fed my son, the dumber I got, and the smarter he got. It really seemed like my brain was draining out my nipples into him.

One colleague of mine was considering having a child, and she asked me what it is like. I decided simply to explain the time loss, for starters. I asked her to pull up her calendar so I could show her. She did. “Now,” I said, “cross off one-third of what you currently have scheduled.” Then I suggested she imagine three days a week doing her remaining work while being very low on sleep. After that, I randomly chose three weeks from her calendar, and told her those would be weeks in which her imaginary child was too sick for her to really get any work done.

And then I explained that, from the moment she had a wanted child, she would be worrying about its mortality, no matter how rational she was, no matter how healthy and sensible her child was.