Wait, do I want kids?

on parent memoirs I've loved lately, the dark side of MomTok, and trying to suppress my baby fever

“If at any point in my life I had been able to find out what the future held,” Rachel Cusk writes in the introduction of her controversial 2001 memoir, A Life’s Work, “I would have always wanted to know whether or not I would have children. More than love, more than work, more than the length of life or quantity of happiness, this was the question whose mystery I found most compelling.” She didn’t want to know, Cusk clarifies, so that motherhood might be rendered more imaginable to her, but because it seemed as though “the issue could not remain shrouded in uncertainty without becoming a distraction.”

Cusk gets her answer: She has two daughters. I’m still waiting on mine.