Should I have a kid? The mother of all decisions with Gina Rushton and Penny Greenhalgh
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To me, there's the biological imperative part of me, which is irrational and emotional and whimsical. And then there's the other part of me I feel like I'm split into. The whole thing with the question is that throws you into this time beyond yourself and you have to think about the future in a way that I don't think most life decisions do.

I'm in the Sydney studio with journalist and author Gina Rushton, who's in her early 30s. And in Melbourne, waving at me through a Zoom link, is Penny Greenhold, who's 37. Penny is a comedian and writer. So why am I talking to these smart, funny women? Well, because even though they're in different cities and they don't know each other, Gina and Penny have something in common. They're both weighing up whether or not to become a mum.

Gina has even written a book about it. It's called The Most Important Job in the World. And I love the title because it sums up so perfectly the virtue society attaches to motherhood. There's so much push and pull for women in the middle space where Gina and Penny find themselves. Two possible futures sketched in pencil, one with children and one without, waiting to be filled in.

And when you're making that decision in your 30s and beyond, the tick, tick, tick of your fertility clock can be deafening and distracting. You better act before the choice is out of your hands and your ovaries. But how do you weigh up such a monumental decision? Flip a coin? Make a pros and cons list? An existential deep dive? I'm Yumi Steins. Ladies...

We need to talk about the mother of all choices. Gina Rushton spent most of her life convinced she did not want to be a mother until something happened a few years ago. She had some hectic abdominal pain and thought it might have been last night's takeaway, but then found herself lying on her bathroom floor unable to get up.

When she got to the hospital, the doctors told her she needed surgery right away. They said she was bleeding internally, her left ovary was dead and needed to be cut out. The doctor said it would affect her fertility, but they'd talk about that later. They needed to act fast. And there, in the emergency ward, Gina started to cry.

And I was really surprised that I was upset because I really didn't think I wanted kids and I didn't think that it should phase me. And in the end, what had actually happened was a really, really big cyst had burst on my ovary and the ovary lived. But they did find endometriosis, which obviously affects your fertility. So that's sort of when the question began. Right. And what was the question?

do I want to be a parent one day, really? And it sort of hastened that question for me because of the fertility concerns, but also just because I hadn't really thought about it deeply because it had just been a no for so long. And I guess there's reassurance in being convinced of your no. Yeah, it's great. Yeah. It's way easier than a yes in some ways. Yeah.

A no is a no. Yeah. Penny, what about you? I don't think I ever seriously considered motherhood until I sort of felt like that option was maybe...

coming to an end, getting towards the end of your 30s and also having conversations, so many conversations with friends of mine who might want to be parents but aren't in relationships or there's so many ducks that feel like they need to be lined up before you can make a decision like that. What Penny's talking about here is something that is the reality for so many women. Yes, they want the option of having a baby, but the person to make that baby with is nowhere to be found. And

And yeah, we all know that it is harder to conceive as you get older. But here are the stats anyway, real quick. If you're 30, you've got a 75% chance of conceiving within a year of trying. That moves down to 66% when you're 35 and drops to 44% when you're 40. And then it falls off a cliff after that.

Penny has a partner now, but the relationship is still new. It's so, like, weird to be in a space where you've not really thought about something and then it sort of hits you in waves, like the grief of it potentially not happening. Three months into Penny's relationship, the baby issue raised its little head. On some level, I was hoping that he would just be a hard yes,

And then, you know, like I could just... You could coattail ride that energy into my... Yeah, coattail ride. That's 100%. Like if I was... If one person could be sure, a hard yes, then that would be enough, maybe. But because we're both a maybe still, it's like, oh, man. I remember hearing somebody say that...

Dating as a Gen Xer used to be you'd get drunk at the pub and bump into someone and if you kind of hit it off, you'd go home and have sex. And then if it worked out, then you'd keep going and keep dating and that was sort of how it went. And I feel like the decision to have a baby is often similarly flippant and kind of like a roll of the dice or a sliding down a slide where gravity takes over and you just don't actually engage critically. And I think that perhaps the difference is...

with Penny and Gina sitting before me is that you are more critically engaged with the decision and you don't feel sort of swept into this script. Yes. Gina? My writing around this, the main point that it gets dismissed on is that kind of millennials are just, you know, navel-gazing, self-absorbed, neurotic overthinkers.

And actually, I think that when I have these conversations and hear things like that, and so many people have said similar things, I should say, is that there's a deep compassion in there for people

yourself for your potential as a parent, for the potential children you'll have, for the world you're bringing them into. I think that millennials get a bad rap for a lot of reasons, you know, that we're kind of like over-therapized or whatever. But I actually think that we have a pretty good awareness of how harm moves through generations and understanding how family dynamics play out through generations.

And while we might learn from our parents' mistakes, a lot of people don't want to risk repeating them. I have quite a dysfunctional family, so for me it was like the path to not having that was just to not have kids. I never imagined having kids. Like, there just was not something that I ever, ever thought about. Gina looks at these generational ties and messiness in her book. I did not plan a chapter about how people felt about their own families, and I had to create that chapter because that was...

For many people, they're like the number one thing that they wanted to talk or think about. The number one reason not to have kids? Both, actually. So in some cases it was like, you know, I had this incredible relationship with my father and I want to recreate that for my kids. Or it's like, I'm worried that I don't know how to be a good parent because I don't know what a good parent looks like kind of thing.

In writing and speaking to women weighing up whether to become a mum, Gina found that we place a ridiculous amount of pressure on ourselves to pass some kind of invisible motherhood test. Mothers in particular are already held to this insane set of standards. And then we're like, I can only be a parent if...

I've sorted out my finances and who can do that in this economy? I've reached a certain stage in my career. Like I've somehow undone like the ways that the patriarchy influences my relationship somehow before my fertility runs out. Yeah. Ticking off criteria that are quite difficult to achieve. When our mothers used to smoke during pregnancy. My mum smoked through

all four pregnancies. Like, you know. I think there's a kind of rigidness in my thinking too that I'm trying to like be aware of, which is that the emotion is really tied to a biological child.

And my definition of like motherhood, the anguish of the indecision, it's very black and white thinking on my part. It's like the definition of motherhood is extremely narrow and it's this very specific target that I either hit and everything's perfect or I miss and I'm some sort of failure.

Gina, there's a chapter in your book called Mothering Millennial Men. It's just so unsexy. I get the opposite of a horn when I read. But you talk to women in that about their fear that having a baby means they've got a mother, a child and their partner. What sort of things did they tell you? I know there's been a bazillion books written about the literal split of domestic hands-on relationships

physical labour between people and obviously that exacerbates once you have kids. And this was a few years ago, but in my mid to late 20s, I had a lot of friends who were kind of saying a version of, why would I want to have a kid? I'm already dating one. I'm already mothering someone in some way. Like it was kind of funny in your early 20s when you're like, oh, this guy, like he doesn't have a bed frame, you know, or whatever. But, and then you kind of get a bit further into it and you're like, oh God, what if we had a kid? The people that really still relate to that

are people that have actually gone ahead and had kids anyway and are still trying to have those discussions with their partners. But it is, yeah, it's a pretty grim thing to talk about. Yeah. There's a resentment and it's hard to avoid that. There is a real resentment. From women? Yeah, from women. I talk about this concept called heteropessimism, which is this idea that kind of like we're just giving up, that we're just kind of destined for these things

and the best we can do is make memes about them and like... And drink a lot. And drink a lot and bitch with our friends about how annoying it is and like, you know, I'm the mum and my boyfriend's this oaf child. Really? When it gets less funny, what do we do? My friends' theories keep steering towards a commune. Yes. Yes. Totally. Yeah, right? Oh, I'm into this. I love this. I love the sound of this. I think about this so much and even just single friends with no kids. Yep.

If you were to definitely choose this path, I won't have a child, do we need a ceremony? Do we need some sort of way to mark it so that we believe it, it's bedded in, it's ceremonialised or something? Gina? I love that idea because I think that those years until your fertility, you know,

They're really fraught for a lot of people who don't have kids and there still are these horrible stereotypes about the types of women who don't have kids, whether it's like the careerist or they're too selfish or they're uncaring or all of these stereotypes we have around. So I would love that. I think that's a great idea. Yeah, it's interesting about the acknowledgement of others and that sort of sense that you have choice. Women have choice sometimes.

So long as you eventually choose baby. Yeah, yeah. That's implied all the time, isn't it? Yeah. And if you seem to, like, quote unquote, miss out, then you become the object of sympathy and that's kind of the best you can hope for, you know? Wild. So, Penny, we're all sold this story about how it's supposed to go. Variations of you meet someone, you fall in love. It can be a same-sex person, but you often want to have a baby together. Yeah.

So when you were younger and thinking ahead to having kids of your own one day, did you imagine that sort of scenario? Yep. Do you think also that we're all born into families and so we just think it's obviously that's what's going to happen? You join the dots, you turn into a grown-up, you get married, you have your happily ever after. You start a family and that's how life goes.

More to love. Gina, you decided to write a book called The Most Important Job in the World. The book looks at what it means to be a mother and you spoke with lots of other women about their indecision. In writing the book, you gave yourself nine months to decide. Very fitting. How did that go? Terribly. Terribly. So dumb.

I wouldn't recommend writing a book in nine months. I wouldn't recommend trying to make a big life decision in nine months. I answered a lot of questions, but I didn't quite answer the big one I set out to answer. But I think that...

It was an incredibly useful exercise in asking better questions. When people spoke to Gina for her book, they would say things like, the world is on fire and who can afford to have a baby anyway as reasons not to bring a baby into the world. All these big existential things came up in almost every interview I did and

But for many people, those things actually weren't the deciding factors. The two people that were, quote-unquote, ambivalent in the climate change chapter brought their babies to the book launch. So... Were they? Yeah. That's so funny to hold them up like Lion King babies. Maybe, Penny, you can speak to this. Does existential fear around things like the climate crisis inform your feelings about becoming a parent? Yeah.

Yes, but then also I wonder, Gina, like what you were saying about the shorthand of it. The reason why it feels kind of so torturous maybe to be in this state of indecision is not because necessarily of the state of the world, but it's like the state of you. Oh, that's so true.

So I want to ask you, how does your career come into all this? Do you think that you can have kids and have it all? Gina? So we were raised on that lean in feminism, like you're going to be a girl boss, you're going to have it all, and a really icky type of feminism. I think that the idea of kind of being a girl boss or in whatever chosen field, I just think has just died. And people, they realise the pack of lies we've been sold about how achievable certain things are anyway. How about you, Penny? Yeah.

I don't know. I don't think I've ever observed anybody having it all. It sounded to me always like a pack of bullshit. I think I always thought that becoming a mother there would be, you can't have it all at once at least. There's only so much room on the canvas, you only have so much capacity and eventually all the negative space gets filled, you know.

No, you've got to leave negative space. You want to put artwork. You're cramming too much stuff on there. Well, I mean, the truth is we've got to sleep. That is the truth. Yeah. We need space in our lives to not be hustling and doing everything all the time always. Yeah, and I want that version of life for myself. Gina, you made the decision to freeze your eggs. I did. Tell us about whether that gave you peace of mind.

So it's really hard when you have endometriosis. The medical system absolutely treats you as a womb and not a person. Like everything is just seen through the prism of like fertility. Like, you know, you'll go and be like, I'm in excruciating pain. What can we do for pain management? And they'll be like, but what about your eggs? So for me, it was just something that felt kind of inevitable in the end. Like this was a thing that's affecting my fertility. And so I have just got to stump up the treatment

exorbitant cost and do this. I thought it would give me more peace of mind than it did, to be honest. It's not a full insurance policy, even though I think that a lot of people are coerced into thinking it is. But

It did feel in the moment like I was doing the only thing I could do until I was sure either way. Penny, is egg freezing something you would consider? It's not for me, I don't think. And I think there's a couple of reasons why. One is I watched my sister go through IVF and I'm scarred by that and I don't have any sort of feeling that it would necessarily help, you know.

In terms of like an insurance policy and turning up in a few years' time and just being like, oh, well, those are frozen, that's great. Or just defrost those and cook up a little baby. Doesn't sound very palatable, that cooked baby. Is there a, for both of you, is there a timeline in your mind?

I mean, yes, in that I'd like to be free of the agony of the decision. I think that there's probably an exhaustion point or a point that I hope that I get to where I just know either way so I can begin that life in a way. I do feel like I'm in a holding pattern. So you want the handcuffs off your ovaries? I do. One way or another. Penny, is there a timeline for you? Is there like a threshold or an age line that you'll cross?

I haven't been looking directly at it, if that makes sense. I've sort of like been floating around it and sort of, I don't know, being in my emotions about it. I have no idea about my egg health. I don't know what

where the line would be potentially for a decision to be made. What about this saying, and we've all heard it, and we've heard it from people we don't expect it from, that you don't know real love. Gina's already... I knew you were going to say that. I'm so sorry. But it's true. It's said constantly, and from people that you don't expect it from, you don't know real love until you've had a child of your own. Gina? Yeah.

You know, can I be honest? I used to find it really offensive. I think it's true you don't know a certain type of love until you've had a child, in the same way that you don't know what it's like to love and take care of someone when they're dying or to... Like, there are all types of love you don't know until you've experienced it. Having seen people in my life become parents, I fully believe that I don't know the kind of daily, sacrificial, unconditional, sometimes...

punishing love of loving kids, you know, and the vulnerability it opens you up to that, you know, you've created this life and now you'll forever be anxious about its survival. I believe that but I also know people who have become parents and think it's bullshit. Yeah, right. You know, and just think, no, like I love my partner this deeply, I love my friends this deeply, I love my kids but I don't believe that there's something...

unknowable about that love. So I think the people that can actually answer that question are parents who are unfortunately often the people that say that, Frank. Do you say that, Yumi? No, not at all, no. Yeah, what do you think about it? I think you're right in it's the daily practice, the bullshit of it. Have a bath, take a shit, put your shoes on. Are you wearing sunscreen? That is so unrelenting that you probably wouldn't know it unless you're

like a kindergarten teacher or you work in an asylum or you're a nurse, but you will know it, like you will know what it is. But no, I would never say that because I don't think it's true. I think there's great ocean depths of love that you can experience extra to this. ♪

Do you have a vision of what it looks like to have a life that is rich, that is full of friends and beautiful family, but where you've made the active choice to not populate the earth with another child that you've given birth to? Definitely. I feel like I can see that a lot more clearly than my life with children. Absolutely. And I think that for women, obviously we've been socialised enough

to believe that that kind of care we give as mothers is like the kind of ultimate kind of sacrifice and thing that you can do for your family and for society. But I think I have a richer understanding now of the ways that you can still sacrifice for people or for causes or for things that you believe in outside of the family as well. And I think that that's really clear to me. Can I tell you a story? Yeah. I went away...

to an Airbnb with a bunch of really old friends, beautiful old friends. And we have this little tradition of like doing tarot readings for each other. And it's always better when you ask a real question. And I'd been sort of like sitting on this, you know, thought about parenthood and the decision and whether it was ever going to happen for me. So I asked the question if I would ever be a parent

immediately was just like wracked with sobs. I didn't have any idea that I had this emotion tied to the question. And I was like this emotional wreck. And where we got to was that there's maybe a way to be a mother in a more cosmic sense, like to turn up

in the world and have that energy of a mother and of having that, you know, unconditional love for the people in your life. And I woke up the next day with this absolute lightness that I hadn't felt in months. Like I'd had this weight lifted off me. This moment was a turning point of sorts for Penny.

Even though Penny has agonised over the question, she can also see that there's more than one way to be a mother.

This is my dream for myself. If I found myself single and feeling like I'd missed out on the opportunity to be a biological parent of somebody, if there was some sort of commune situation where I could be a spare adult and I could help my mates and chip in and fulfil some sort of parental role on a really chill, casual basis that was totally on my terms, I feel like...

That could be really dreamy. Does that resonate for you, Gina? Yeah, definitely. I think I'm someone who is invested in care, whether it's for my friends, for my family, for my community. I'm interested. I like doing stuff for other people. I like cooking things for them. I like sending them a care package, that kind of stuff. I think that whether or not I have children, I've realised that that's something that I...

deeply hold dear and think that is really important and is really important to me. But especially if it's rich, if it's a rich life with love and showing up for people. I mean, I think that sounds like a life well lived. Ultimately, you're trying to make a decision on something that is unknowable until you do it. Do I like bungee jumping? You won't know unless you jump off the cliff. So how do you do that? How do you make the decision on something that is unknowable?

Actually, the comforting thing about this is that you don't know how your life's going to turn out either way. No one can see over that wall. And especially with something as transformative as parenthood, I think that you have to give up a bit of the ego and a bit of the sense of control and kind of just take comfort in knowing that you don't know.

The thing that doesn't change is your capacity to maybe mould and shape your perspective on things and to evolve and grow with the situation as it changes. And maybe to have faith that you have that capacity and that you can roll with it once you've made that decision. For some of us, the decision to become mothers comes unbidden. For others, it doesn't happen despite a deep-felt, desperate desire.

Some women know that motherhood is not for them, while for people like Penny and Gina, the choice weighs heavily. When it comes to big life choices, you can never make the perfect decision. And I'm reminded of the advice that Cheryl Strayed once gave a reader of her Dear Sugar column. The reader was asking this same question, should I have a child? Strayed suggested to imagine a life in which there was a child and one in which there wasn't.

and to picture looking back on life as an 80-year-old in both scenarios. No matter what the choice, there would run alongside them a sister life, the one that took the different path. Strayed writes, "'I'll never know, and neither will you, of the life you don't choose. "'We'll only know that whatever that sister life was, "'it was important and beautiful and not ours.'"

It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us. There's nothing to do but salute it from the shore.

This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra and Gadigal peoples. Ladies We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt. It's produced by Elsa Silberstein. Supervising producer is Tamar Kranswick and our executive producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan. If you'd like to respond to today's episode or any episode, Ladies We Need To Talk welcomes your emails. Our address is ladies at abc.net.au.

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