Lost in the current conversations about reproductive rights and the value of motherhood are the voices of those who didn’t choose to be childless. Eugenia Cheng joins host Krys Boyd to discuss her yearning to be a mother while not being able to, why she feels pinned in by stereotypes and labels, and what she wants a broader public to understand. Her recent essay in The Wall Street Journal is headlined “I Am Childless, but Not by Choice.”
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Transcript
Krys Boyd [00:00:00] Lately, there’s a lot of consternation about declining birth rates around the world in the U.S., anxieties around what a future with far fewer babies could look like seems to be fueling anger at women who don’t have children. J.D. Vance laments childless cat ladies in leadership positions. Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders says that without biological children to care for, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble. The underlying assumption seems to be that women who have passed beyond childbearing age without producing a baby must be disconnected from the realities of working families are simply too selfish to make the sacrifices required for parenthood. But what about all the people who desperately wanted to be mothers but never got the chance? From Kera in Dallas, this is Think. I’m Krys Boyd. Mathematician and writer Eugenia Cheng is the former everyday math columnist for The Wall Street Journal, which published her essay “I Am Childless, but Not By Choice.” It’s a candid reflection on her long held dreams of motherhood and the fact that regardless of how it might look to outsiders, her very successful career has very little to do with why, at the age of 48, she is not a parent today. Eugenia, welcome back to Think.
Eugenia Cheng [00:01:12] Thank you so much for having me.
Krys Boyd [00:01:14] You offer no criticism of women who don’t want children of their own, but you very much did want to be a mother. What sort of life did you imagine for yourself?
Eugenia Cheng [00:01:26] I always imagined that I would have children and also have a job that enabled me to support my children. I was brought up to believe that I should not be dependent on a man for support and that I should contribute to the support of my family. And it was really for that reason that I wanted to have a job and as good a job as I could get for the safety and security of my family, just like my mother did. My mother sets an example of getting a good job to work alongside my father to support her family, and that’s what I always worked for and imagined I would do.
Krys Boyd [00:02:06] Early in your life, when motherhood was something, well, in the future, did it even occur to you that this was something that might not happen for whatever reason?
Eugenia Cheng [00:02:15] I don’t think it did occur to me. It’s now so much a part of my consciousness that it’s actually quite difficult to think back to that. But you know what it’s like for girls. We spend so much time having it drilled into us how terrible teenage pregnancy would be. Like getting pregnant is the biggest disaster, the most horrifying thing that could possibly happen. That was drummed into me all the way through my my teenage years. And so it was never really mentioned that it might be hard to do. We have the impression that, you know, you have unprotected intercourse one time you will get pregnant. It’s going to be terrible, right?
Krys Boyd [00:02:51] Yeah. Beyond wanting to, like, finish your degree and get a job, which you had achieved by the time you were 25, you weren’t pushing off the possibility of motherhood in service to your career. But at 25, the men in your dating pool were, let’s say, not ready for kids yet.
Eugenia Cheng [00:03:09] One could say that they simply didn’t want to have kids with me because my first serious boyfriend, as I mentioned in the article, we we split up before I was 30 and he was adamant that he would never, ever, ever going to want children, that he was wanting them less and less all the time. Well, guess what? Yes. Last year he did have a child.
Krys Boyd [00:03:29] Well, I mean, it’s interesting because men can often afford to put off or swear off parenthood and then change their minds at any time. That’s not necessarily an option for women.
Eugenia Cheng [00:03:39] When men suffer the fertility problems of aging. It’s at a time when they’re aging in every way, really. Much later on, when their career is probably winding down, their whole body is aging in every way. But but for women, it happens in our late 30s and 40s when everything else can be absolutely at a peak. I am completely physically healthy in every other way. I’ve never been fitter. And my career is at the peak. Everything about my life is at the peak. Apart from this one thing that crushes in this terrible, violent juxtaposition with the other things that are peaking.
Krys Boyd [00:04:18] It also doesn’t seem fair because in the 21st century, we as women are told that if we sort of follow all the rules and do everything right, there’s nothing we can’t have that we want.
Eugenia Cheng [00:04:29] That is a story that we can be told that although it’s almost become a pressure on us, that we’re supposed to be able to have everything. But some people do put off having some women put off having children because they too want to be able to provide for their children in a responsible manner. But it takes them perhaps longer to get to a point in their career where they think that they will be able to sustain their career after the children are born and also be able to provide for them financially. Of course, on the flip side of that, if they don’t wait until they’re at a point where they can provide for their children, then they get criticized for perhaps relying too much on men or for just wanting men for their money. And so there are so many ways in which we women simply can’t win.
Krys Boyd [00:05:18] That early boyfriend who swore he would never want kids and one of them less all the time and ultimately had a child later with someone else, was his decision that he never wanted kids. Was that a factor in the end of that relationship?
Eugenia Cheng [00:05:33] Yes, it definitely was, because I you know, we were young. I think we got together when I was about 23, and I thought, well, you can’t split up with someone on the assumption that they will never change. But then I thought, I’m not going to sit around forever while my biological clock is ticking, because contrary to what some people say, I was extremely aware by that time that my time was running out. I was horrified by the possibility that I might not have children by the age of 30, because that just seemed, first of all, very old. And secondly, I knew that fertility declines perilously after that. And so some people claim that women don’t realize that their fertility is declining, which I personally think is ridiculous, but maybe some people aren’t. I was certainly aware of it, and so I definitely wasn’t going to wait around for very much longer.
Krys Boyd [00:06:27] I mean, it’s so interesting that this sort of thing is happening in the 21st Century. And I have no doubt that this was your experience. Why do you think some men are intimidated by the idea of partnering with a woman who might be more educated, more successful, more brilliant than they are?
Eugenia Cheng [00:06:44] I think what it is, is that with the rise of feminism and women’s empowerment, women have been taking roles that men previously thought of as theirs. Whether it is contributing to breadwinning, going to work, being in jobs that men previously thought were very male jobs such as being scientists or being engineers or doctors or bankers or mathematicians. And women are taking leadership roles and they’re becoming more dominant in families and relationships. But I think that we haven’t given men a clear role to fill instead. And so they sometimes, at least the ones that I attempted to date when I was younger, they wanted a role. And if the role wasn’t to be dominance and superior, they they just didn’t know what it was going to be.
Krys Boyd [00:07:36] We’ll give a little spoiler alert here. You did end up finding a partner who is fantastic and respects you in exactly that way. But I think the irony early on for you is that, you know, while you were waiting to find the right person, you were building this stellar career reputation. And if you were a man, you would be such a catch.
Eugenia Cheng [00:07:55] Well, thank you. And unfortunately, one man who was a TV presenter, actually, who I was about to go on air with when my first book came out, he said to me, Well, no one will ever want to be with you because you’re too good at everything. And like you say, if that was a man, then I like to think that that would be an amazing thing. But for me, it wasn’t. And as you say, I know that when women have children, it it impacts their career. It slows down their career. It means that they earn less. It makes it harder for them to to have a career as a converse because I wasn’t having children. I had loads of time to to keep going in my career and all the years I wasn’t having children. My career progressed further and further and further, making the problem of intimidating men worse and worse as I went along.
Krys Boyd [00:08:50] I can’t even imagine someone saying that to you, you know, seconds before you’re going to go on the air for an interview. I mean, did it feel like the oxygen had been knocked out of your lungs?
Eugenia Cheng [00:09:00] Yes. And I didn’t know I really didn’t know what to say because I was about to go on and it was live TV. I was about to go on. And if it had been someone in a social situation or in a bar or something, I would have addressed that comment and I would have argued with it or told that person that that he was being rude or belittling or possibly asked if that was if he was just saying something more about himself than about anyone else, or asking him to try to get into a conversation about whether he felt intimidated. But there was no time to do that. And it also seemed completely inappropriate. And I feel like many women have been socialized to be amenable and to not cause a fuss, especially when I’m about to do an interview. And so I didn’t feel I could say anything at all. I was just absolutely gobsmacked. And unfortunately, it wasn’t the only gobsmacking thing that happened to me when I was doing myfirst book. So I I’ve now published eight books, but it was all new to me then, and unfortunately now I’m quite used to it. But at the time it was all mind blowing. The things that usually men, probably always men might say to me.
Krys Boyd [00:10:14] It is kind of the classic thing, right? That after it’s over, you think, I should have just gotten in this comment. I mean, at the time that someone says something that is so offensive, it can be hard to know precisely what to do, even though later you can script out a whole beautiful movie scene of how you could see that person down.
Eugenia Cheng [00:10:32] Yes. And another problem is that I, I was talking about my first book, How to Bake Pi, which is all math is fun and it’s like cooking and it’s delicious. I didn’t want to cry right before going on, which I might have done because these things, it really hurts. And it’s it hurts every day. And even just listening to your introduction to this interview, I almost thought I was going to cry listening to my own story being said to me because the amount of effort I expend every day on not breaking down is extraordinary.
Krys Boyd [00:11:10] Did you ever think about doing it on your own? Having a baby on your own?
Eugenia Cheng [00:11:14] No, I didn’t. Well, yes, I did. But I didn’t want to do that. I did. I’ve thought of all the possible things. You know, people often say, have you thought of this? Have you thought of that? And I know that’s not how you meant it. But but yes, I have thought of all the things and I did not want to do it on my own because for me, it wasn’t just about having a child. It was really about procreating with someone I loved in a stable, loving family relationship. That’s what I really it’s quite a biological urge for me, and I know everyone’s different and there are many different ways to have children and they were wonderful. But for me, it was definitely something about the miracle of of coming together with the person I love and and creating new life with them.
Krys Boyd [00:12:02] I totally get it. And to your point, I mean, there is no right way. We don’t want to prescribe the way other people do it. But there’s nothing wrong with you having wanted to do it with a partner.
Eugenia Cheng [00:12:11] It’s why I wanted to write about it and talk about it, because at the beginning I was hiding it all the time because it was too awful and because there is such a taboo about it. And because, like many other women who’ve been through this, I felt. Such. I’m going to break down now. But I felt such a shame that I had failed in this in this way, but my body had failed that something that felt so fundamental to me about my experience of being a woman for my whole life had completely failed. It just felt like such an awful failure that I couldn’t possibly let anyone know about it. But then the pain was so great that I couldn’t not let anyone know about it any more because there were so many situations in which I would simply break down or be unable to answer people’s questions because people ask such innocuous questions. Do you have children? Just as a part of conversation. And then I would either have to break down or run away and lock myself in a bathroom. And so then I thought, well, it’s better to talk about it so that people know. And because there are so many people who are going through it, who all each individually feel isolated and alone, like nobody, nobody can help them or talk to them. And so I wanted to because I do have something of a voice with the public work I do. I wanted to give a voice to this story to try and help other people who are going through it. If that’s the only thing I can do with this pain. Then I wanted to try and share what I’m going through with the world so that people can understand it better and so that other people going through it feel a little bit less alone.
Krys Boyd [00:14:01] Eugenia, you spoke a moment ago about feeling as if you had failed, your body had failed because you weren’t able to become pregnant and carry a pregnancy to term. I mean, intellectually, you and I both know that’s not true. But sometimes our emotions are stronger than our intellect. Even for someone like you, who is an extraordinary intellect.
Eugenia Cheng [00:14:25] That’s right. And the thing is that I can take it a little further intellectually and say that my body literally did fail. It failed to do that thing I wanted it to do. It failed to do the thing that so many other people seem to be able to do. And it’s particularly another heartbreaking aspect of it is that there are so many women who don’t want that to happen to whom it happens and who are currently having to fight for the right to end those pregnancies that they don’t want. Maybe it was because of rape or incest or harassment or something going wrong. There are so many reasons, but that the questions about abortion get so much more airtime and publicity than the pain of the other way around where you want to do it and you are unable to.
Krys Boyd [00:15:18] Do you remember the age of the era in which it seemed like every one of your friends started having babies?
Eugenia Cheng [00:15:25] Yes. Yes, it was quite soon after graduation. And the thing is that I’ve always had friends who are many different ages, and it’s because I have a wide range of interests. And I, I, I’m not really ageist in the way that I make friends. And so it started probably in my mid-twenties and then it just kept going. And, you know, it’s still going because I have friends who are younger than me who are still popping out children all over the place. And now it’s becoming the fact that friends are starting to have grandchildren. So I know it’s never going to stop.
Krys Boyd [00:16:05] How do you handle those announcements? Are they like, are you happy for the person and yet blanketed in grief? What do they feel like to you?
Eugenia Cheng [00:16:16] I’m going to stick my neck out even further and be really honest about this. And although it will, it may make me sound terrible and I don’t want to sound like a terrible person. What I want to do is be honest about the depth of my pain and my trauma. To say that when I hear a pregnancy announcement, I’m currently unable to be happy for that person. And I know that makes me sound like a terrible person. But it’s because the pain I feel is still so raw. All I feel is is bitterness about. About the fact that I couldn’t do it and that everyone else seems to do it so easily. Now, I also know that’s not true because it turns out once I started talking about these issues, many people told me about the difficulties that they had or the number of rounds of fertility treatment they had to have. And it turns out that that many people, many, many people have fertility treatment and never talk about it because we don’t talk about it. And many people have miscarriages. It’s statistically true that anyone with at least two children is extremely likely to have had a miscarriage somewhere along the way. And the pain of those miscarriages can often still be very raw, except that it’s not compounded by the pain of them not eventually being able to have a child. And so I admit that when I hear women bravely talking about their miscarriages, it’s very brave. But then I always scroll down the article for the inevitable fact that they did manage to have a child afterwards or they already had a child, or it was in between their pregnancies, the miscarriages, the multiple miscarriages I had. Ah, the pain of them is. There is nothing to offset them. There is no eventual joy. There is no. There’s just nothing. All there is is the pain and the emptiness that came after it.
Krys Boyd [00:18:16] And there’s so little acknowledgment of people in your situation reading your essay. I was struck by the fact that when someone, God forbid, loses a child who has been born, we say, I can’t even imagine the depths of your grief. It would be hard to ever get over this thing. But somehow we treat miscarriages like a different situation in our culture.
Eugenia Cheng [00:18:39] Yes. And it’s tricky, right? Because because I know that there are some people who believe that that an embryo is a full, full human right from the moment of conception. I don’t believe that. But there is a it’s a they grow gradually. Right. And it’s difficult to say exactly. There isn’t one point where it’s not a human and then it is a human. But for me, those miscarried pregnancies, that was the most I ever got to be a mother. That was those were my oldest children. And so to me, that does feel like those were my children who died inside me. And I think that it is sometimes called disenfranchized grief, because if somebody dies and you knew them, then it’s a bit more obvious what the grief consists of because you miss them and they have left a hole in your life where they used to be. And when it’s a child, you wasn’t even born yet. The hole in your life is the imagined future. It’s not something that already was. And I think that your right people. It does get less minimized. And I don’t want to make it into some kind of competition. I don’t like competitions anyway, and we don’t need to have a hierarchy of trauma to try and say, well, this room is as bad as that trauma. No, this trauma is worse than this trauma. We don’t need to do that. But I do I do wish we could acknowledge that the sorts of things that people say to me about being unable to have children, I know it’s not as terrible as an actual child dying, but sometimes I want to say to people, Would you say that to somebody whose child died? I don’t think so. Would you say, well, you could just have another one? It’s not too late to have another one. Any of those things? No, I don’t think people would say that.
Krys Boyd [00:20:42] I mean, you’re grieving for, you know, this moment of unlimited possibility suddenly being foreclosed upon so that nothing is possible, like you’re grieving for a future you never even got to have.
Eugenia Cheng [00:20:58] Yes. And there are so many people who say, you shouldn’t you don’t give up hope. And I think they’re just being unscientific. The scientific fact is that for having biological children. There is an age beyond which it’s completely unrealistic to keep hoping. Some people, I think, want me to keep hoping because they can’t bear the thought of the pain themselves. And I often do understand that people are well-meaning, some people aren’t well-meaning, and we can get to that later. But many people are well-meaning. It’s just that the things that comes out come out of their mouths. Unhelpful at all. And even when I tell them it’s not helpful, they still persist. I’ve had. I’ve got into arguments with friends where they’re keeping on telling me that I must carry on hoping. I must just find some doctor who will keep trying. Meanwhile, I’m in floods of tears asking them to please stop because it really isn’t helping and they still carry on saying it. And I just don’t know why. I don’t know why that I don’t know why they do that.
Krys Boyd [00:22:08] So it feels to you like people are trying to make themselves feel better. Like if you can say, I’m still hopeful, I’m still optimistic, then they don’t have to worry about or countenance your pain.
Eugenia Cheng [00:22:20] Yes, I think so. And what I what I hope is that what’s hiding in there is the fact that people do understand how terrible it is, and that’s why they they can’t talk about it.
Krys Boyd [00:22:34] Assisted reproductive technologies like IVF are in such common use Now we know so many people who conceive with some extra help that I think it’s easy if we haven’t gone through it to overlook how physically and emotionally arduous this can be. Will you tell us a little bit about what IVF required of you?
Eugenia Cheng [00:22:54] Yes, it’s it is extremely physically and emotionally arduous and for many people, financially arduous. I was very lucky to have excellent employer health insurance. And so it didn’t have to be financially arduous. But the the regime of testing and and injections, I hardly even know where to start. But you have to inject yourself with a cocktail of drugs that simultaneously stimulate your ovaries to produce more eggs while also preventing them from ovulating too soon. Because what the drugs are trying to do is make several follicles grow simultaneously so that all the eggs can be harvested at the same time because usually they’re growing at different rates so that only one or possibly two will will ovulate during each menstrual cycle. And so you’re you’re stimulating them to try and make more. And then you have to go and have a invasive ultrasound. I’ll just put it like that, invasive ultrasound to see how big they are so that they can all be measured to decide what dose of drugs to keep injecting. You have to inject yourself. And honestly, the first time I gave myself an injection, I know there are many people who give themselves injections for various reasons every day, but it was the first time I had given myself an injection. It was very surreal to be holding this syringe and the needle in my hand and staring at my flesh and going, okay, well, I’m going to stab this thing into my flesh now. And first, by the way, you have to mix the drugs because they come in little vials that you have to mix to activate them. Then you have to learn how to draw them into the syringe, get the air bubbles out, sanitize everything, and you have to do it on a very strict schedule. I was doing several in the morning and several in the afternoon in a very small time frame to time it right. So you can’t really live a normal life at that time because it’s all surrounded by where you’ll be able to be when you do these injections. And after I had done my first few cycles, I got more used to it and I got more fed up with not being able to go anywhere. And so I did have some ludicrous experiences in public restrooms of laying out my drug paraphernalia and giving myself these injections. That was then punctuated by some occasions where I needed a single user bathroom because you have to have running water. You can’t you need a sink. And so you can’t do it. We shouldn’t do it just in a normal restroom where the sinks altogether. And there was one occasion where I was trying to get to use the single use a restroom which was locked, and the security people wouldn’t let me use it. And I had actually phoned in advance at that concert. I phoned in advance to make sure it would be possible. And they said, yes. And the security person wouldn’t let me use it, looked at me and said, Why do you need to use it? You’re not disabled. And then another security guard came along and another security guard, and then they all kind of ganged up on me. And there was about ten of them all standing around, stared at me, going, Why do you need to use a single use a restroom? It was it was pretty it was pretty awful. And so then once they’ve decided that the follicles are all of the appropriate size to harvest the eggs, they have to time it very carefully because they want enough of them to be big enough to get a viable egg. But they want the biggest one not to be in danger of ovulating because if one of them ovulate, it’s all over. So then they’ve carefully time a day where. They will harvest the eggs and then you have to go in. And that’s a that’s a procedure. So you have to go under some form of anesthetic. It was actually the Twilight, I think, isn’t a full general anesthetic, but you’re completely you’re completely unconscious. And then they they harvest, they harvest the eggs. And then you wake up and they tell you. Then there’s this horrible wait to see how many there are. And then while that’s going on, the the sperm sample has to be collected. And then they test that and then they select the one of the ones I did were involved, Icsi, which I can’t remember what it stands for now, but it’s a selective sperm where they take one per egg and it’s it’s amazing really. They, they put it straight into the egg to, to to try to fertilize it. And then there’s this numbers game where you have to wait day by day for first of all, you recovering from the surgery and then you have to wait day by day where they tell you how many eggs you had, how many managed to get fertilized. And then each day, how many, how many managed to grow because they have to grow them to a certain point before they can implant them. And then if you are going to do genetic testing in order to see whether they are genetically sound, because the main cause of miscarriage in women of a certain age is that the the eggs just aren’t genetically sound anymore. So if you want to test them, then they have to go for genetic testing. And so each round there’s this attrition where you might start with six, but then only four of them fertilize and only two of them make it, and then there’s only one. And then after you’ve got some that can be implanted, then you have to go through the process of actually implanting them. And then there’s no way to make them implant in the uterus. They just have to sort of put them in there and hope for the best, which is extraordinary. There are so many parts of this that are just left to to luck and hope. And so they put the fertilized embryo into the uterus down to and then they just leave it there and hope that it will implant. And so the tragedy of my last cycle is that. It did implant, but it floated up the fallopian tube and implanted ectopically and though it had to be removed and contrary to some ridiculous people who claim that ectopic pregnancies can simply be moved back into the uterus, which is completely untrue, they an ectopic pregnancy cannot be viable and if it grows, it may rupture and then you can bleed to death. And so that’s one of the cases where having a complete ban on abortions is life threatening to women because if it’s ectopic and it keeps growing, it will it it will rupture and possibly kill you. And so when mine was diagnosed as ectopic, the the way that they try to treat it is using methotrexate, which is a chemotherapy drug, because chemotherapy drugs, as I learned what they do is they target the fastest growing cells in the body, which is calf muscle. If you have cancer and it’s a growing embryo, if you have a growing embryo. And so we had to kill this thing before it killed me. And that was I said that with a slightly flippant tone of voice, because the alternative is to break down again. But that was the last part of the trauma where it was a kind of race that my last possible child is trying to kill me. Not deliberately, but that’s what it felt like. And now I have to kill it. And in the end, the methotrexate didn’t work. The embryo kept growing despite two doses of methotrexate, and then it ruptured. And so then I had to go into the emergency room for emergency surgery.
Krys Boyd [00:30:23] I’m so sorry that happened to you.
Eugenia Cheng [00:30:27] Thank you. And it was also during Covid, so I had to go in by myself. It was terrible.
Krys Boyd [00:30:34] Eugenia, you had multiple miscarriages. Was there a point at which you had to learn to kind of harden yourself emotionally when you learned you were pregnant at all to not get your hopes up?
Eugenia Cheng [00:30:49] I have a very dark relationship with hope now because, yes, hope didn’t seem to serve me well because having my hopes dashed was so painful. But then again, not having any hope is so dark. And so it was it was very difficult to know how to go on at all. And I was very grateful that the clinic I was at had clinical psychologist assigned to every patient to give support, because I think otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to cope at all. And it’s it was definitely not a cause for great joy when I got a positive pregnancy test after a while because I was just too aware of what might happen next, and that is indeed what did happen next every time.
Krys Boyd [00:31:47] I hope you’ll forgive the question, because, you know, there are people listening who are thinking, if this woman can’t have a biological child, she can adopt a child. Will you share why for you, this has not felt like the right solution.
Eugenia Cheng [00:32:02] Yes, there are so many reasons. And thank you for your attempt in asking the question. It’s true that many people say it and many people say it as if adoption is basically the same as having a biological child. And one of the things I want to stress is that adoption is an amazing and noble way to have children, but it is not the same as having a biological child. We acknowledge for adopted children that it is not the same as being raised by their biological parents and that it is much more traumatic typically than being raised by their biological parents. And I think we should acknowledge that the other way around for parents as well. For someone like me, there are so many reasons that this did not feel like something I could go through. First of all, I was still so traumatized and I am still so traumatized by what happened. The process of adoption is not like going to an animal shelter and picking out a puppy and going home with it. It is rightly a very long, laborious and testing process where you have to be vetted for whether you are suitable as a parent and then some a biological mother or parents need to choose you. And I was simply too traumatized to go through that level of judgment, having already felt completely like a failure for not being unable to have biological children. But it wasn’t I wasn’t ready to do that in the state of trauma that I’m in. Adoption is a traumatic thing, and I don’t believe it was the right thing to do to go into it. In already a state of trauma, there are many children who need to be looked after in many ways. And I believe that the best thing I can do in the world is to carry on nurturing children and young people in the form of education, which is what has been my vocation for my whole life. And I think that that is the best contribution I can make to the future generations and the future of humanity and the future of the planet. I think that people who adopt are wonderful. And it wasn’t for me.
Krys Boyd [00:34:15] Perimenopause and menopause are finally coming into the light of like public conversations in a way they never have before. But you note that they are so often framed around new or uncomfortable physical symptoms. For you, menopause feels like something else entirely. A symbol.
Eugenia Cheng [00:34:32] Yes, it really frustrates me. Thank you for mentioning this. Every time I read an article about hot flashes or brain fog or waking up in the night or or else menopause is great because finally I feel like I just don’t care about things anymore. It’s so powerful. And I always read those articles and scroll down to see if there will be any mention of the fact that menopause means that you can’t biologically have children anymore, which is the whole point about menopause, in my opinion. And to me, that’s all it is. I don’t care about hot flashes. I don’t care about brain fog. All of that may well be uncomfortable, but it pales into utter insignificance compared with the tragedy of being unable to have the children that I always wanted. And why this doesn’t get mentioned in articles about menopause is. Well, it’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it and one of the reasons I’m so grateful that you wanted to talk about it with me, because I think it needs to be talked about that if you already have all the children that you wanted, then that’s one thing. But there are so many of us who don’t. And although the numbers are changing, some people say, well, you’re just an insignificant minority. The current statistics are that about 20% of women in their mid-forties. Don’t have children and 90% of them previously wanted children. And that’s I don’t think that’s an insignificant number of people.
Krys Boyd [00:36:06] I keep thinking about Sarah Huckabee Sanders talking about Kamala Harris having nothing to keep her humble because she hasn’t borne children. I will asterisk here note that being a stepmother is not nothing, but I mean, I can’t speak to either woman’s humility, but hearing your story, it seems like longing for a child and not having one is an excruciatingly humbling experience.
Eugenia Cheng [00:36:31] I think that’s right. But also, there are so many humbling experiences in the world. I think if someone thinks that there’s nothing keeping you humble, if you don’t have children, what they’re really saying is that nothing kept them humble until they had children. And it’s the same about the people who think that that if you don’t have children, then you have no investment in the future. What they’re saying is that they don’t care about anything about the future except their own children. If they think that someone without children doesn’t care about the future, and if they think that it’s only when you have children that you learn to be unselfish. What they’re saying is that they themselves don’t care about anyone except their own children, whereas I am exceedingly invested in the future and always have been, which is why I’m an educator. The reason I’m in education is because I want to help the next generation be able to help themselves and to make the world a better place. I have always have this vocation. This is what I’ve always cared about. And being an educator has always kept me humble because I have. I have to try to help students do things that they couldn’t otherwise do. And it stretches all of my abilities to my limits to do that. And sometimes I’m unable to help people. And that is extremely humbling in another way. And I think that’s a bit like what you’re saying about being unable to have children. Being unable to do something is an awfully humbling experience. And I think that that. I am definitely invested in the future in the form of education, and that is my way of being unselfish because I’m trying all the time to help other people. All the work I do is to help other people who I think have been unfairly treated by society. And I absolutely I’m aggravated by people claiming that someone who doesn’t have children has no investment in the future, has nothing keeping them humble or or is is selfish. It makes me worry about the people who say that that they really don’t care about anyone except their own children.
Krys Boyd [00:38:45] I so appreciate, Eugenia, your candor in the essay and in this conversation. In talking through these things at this moment when it is as raw for you as perhaps it ever has been, even if you are at the end of the years, your body could potentially have conceived. I mean, it would be one thing for us to be talking 20 years from now. Why write this now when when even having the conversation is is so exceptionally hard.
Eugenia Cheng [00:39:16] I don’t know if it’s going to get easier, actually. I am on some support groups online. I’m actually one of the most liberating posts I saw was by someone in her 70s saying that that she’s now in her 70s and the pain is just as bad as it always was. And the reason I say that sounds awfully depressing, but I actually found it quite liberating because I thought, first of all, it was very validating about the pain and the fact that we can’t just try to get over it. And secondly, it freed me from sitting around waiting for the pain to go away because I know it’s not going to or I fear it might not. I think what happens is that I’m getting better at blocking it out. And so in any moment of the day where I forget about it, then I’m okay. And then as soon as I think about it, for example, because I’m talking about it, then I will break down and the pain will seem. Just as bad, if not as bad as when she just came out the emergency room and I had the physical pain as well. But sometimes I’m walking up the street and I remember it. And I will almost start screaming, No, this can’t be real. This can’t be real. This can’t be real. Because I don’t believe it. Because I spend so much of my day basically pretending it’s not real in order to be able to carry on. And the reason that I want to write it when it’s raw is, first of all, if I wait until it’s not raw, I may never write it. It was an extraordinarily difficult piece to write, and I’m so grateful to the editor who was so caring and supportive and nurturing about it because it was incredibly painful to write. But I think that maybe why most people don’t write about it. Maybe that’s why there is so little written about it, partly because that’s not the stories that people typically want to publish. But maybe it’s because it’s too painful for people to write about it. And I always think whenever anything happens to me, what can I do to help other people with this situation? Can I do it? Can I make something helpful out of this horrible thing? And so I thought, if I can write and express this to to help others with it, then it then it’s okay for me to try to do it while it’s raw. And maybe it will come out even more powerfully because it is so raw. And that’s why I don’t try to hide my feelings. And I haven’t been trying to hide my feelings during this interview because I want them to be visible. And I know that so many people are trying to hide them. And I can’t anymore.
Krys Boyd [00:42:00] Have you learned a good way to tell people to mind their own business when they comment on childless women in any capacity?
Eugenia Cheng [00:42:08] I. I don’t want to be combative with people. That’s not true. Occasionally, I want to be combative, sometimes someone says something so crass that I just want to be combative like that. But what I mostly want to do is raise awareness. And I understand that it’s so society’s norms. I’m not blaming anyone for it. And one of the reasons I’m not blaming anyone because some of my absolutely dearest, dearest, loveliest friends have occasionally had things pop out of their mouth that they immediately realized sound absolutely awful and came across completely wrong. Just like when I think things like they they are the parents. They’re the mothers of young children and they go out for the evening and they go, I’m childless this evening. And then they suddenly realize what they said. And because someone so nice and so close to me and so aware of my pain because someone like that can say something like that, I know it’s not out of maliciousness or. Or anything like that. It’s just because of the way that society’s norms are all under the assumption that the general experience of life is that people have children and that it’s difficult and it is difficult, and that if you can have an evening without them, then you’re then you’re going to have fun. And so when people when people. Say things. Even after I’ve expressed my pain, that’s when I feel like being a little bit combative. But mostly I just want to point out to them that this is a tragedy for me and that they are stepping on a tragedy. And then I give them the opportunity to to step back from whatever it was they were saying and change what they were saying. And unfortunately, sometimes I think that momentum is going so fast in one direction that they can’t turn around and they carry on saying whatever it was they were going to say. One person memorably, I said, asked me if I had children, and I said, the great tragedy of my life is that I was unable to. And he it was a he replied, Well, the great tragedy of my life is that I do have children hahahaha. That was quite extraordinary. But apart from that, I don’t want to just tell people, mind your own business because that is a bit aggressive. I want to open space for conversation, not close it down. And so I’m more likely to say something like. I wasn’t able to. And that’s a great tragedy for me. And very often they respond in lovely ways. And I think that I feel relieved that I opened a space for conversation rather than closing down.
Krys Boyd [00:44:52] Mathematician and writer Eugenia Chen is the former everyday math columnist for The Wall Street Journal, which published her essay “I Am Childless but Not By Choice.” Eugenia, thanks so much for the conversation.
Eugenia Cheng [00:45:04] Thank you so much.
Krys Boyd [00:45:06] Think is distributed by PRX at the Public Radio Exchange. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram and wherever you get your podcasts, just search for KERA Think. Our web site is think.kera.org. Again, I’m Krys Boyd. Thanks for listening. Have a great day.
