I knew that becoming a parent would change me—but I had no idea how.
In the spring of 2022, I was 36 years old and jumping up and down in my bathroom, trying to figure out my future. I had ordered a fertility test online that said it would provide fast results with just a few drops of blood. The videos on the company’s website featured a smiling blond woman jumping—to stimulate blood flow, naturally—and then effortlessly dribbling blood from her fingertips all over a little strip of test paper. All I had to do was be like her. Joyful. Sanguineous. Fertile.
For years, my husband, Rich, and I had gingerly walked the prime meridian between wanting and not wanting kids, usually leaning toward the “no” side. Having a baby had seemed unaffordable and impossible. On days when I finished work at 8 p.m., the thought of procreating made me laugh, then shudder.
Recently, though, I’d begun to reconsider. I was in the midst of an admittedly strange-sounding project: I was spending a year trying to change my personality. According to a scientific personality test I’d taken, I scored sky-high on neuroticism, a trait associated with anxiety and depression, and low on agreeableness and extroversion. I lived in a constant, clenched state of dread, and it was poisoning my life. My therapist had stopped laughing at my jokes.
But I had read some scientific research suggesting that you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. Several studies show that people who want to be, say, less isolated or less anxious can make a habit of socializing, meditating, or journaling. Eventually these habits will come naturally, knitting together to form new traits.
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There are many reasons to postpone or avoid having children—the cost, the responsibility, the existence of and use case for the NoseFrida. But in addition to the practical challenges, a narrative has taken hold: Everything changes when you become a mother.
Once they reach their 30s, many people have carefully cultivated friend groups and sourdough starters and five-year plans. They “really have a good sense of who they are, and then having a baby totally disrupts everything that they thought they knew about themselves,” says Lauren Ratliff, a perinatal therapist in Illinois.
Recall the research showing there’s no one way that parenthood tends to change people’s personalities. Anecdotally, researchers told me that they do notice certain patterns among new parents. Most moms worry about their kid, more or less constantly, from the minute they find out they’re pregnant. “Signing up to be a parent is signing up to have a lifetime of some degree of depression and anxiety,” Ratliff, the therapist, told me.
During my interview with Ratliff, I told her that Evan had lately been losing interest in breastfeeding. I had awaited this day through months of bleeding nipples and frustration, but now that it was here, it was making me a bit sad. “Your baby’s moving to the next stage,” she affirmed, “and this one is not going to come back again.” I started tearing up—both at the memory of those bleary, milk-soaked months together and at the realization that he wouldn’t even be a baby for much longer.
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