00:04:30.340So you want to be a mom then? And I was like, you're like that five percent. Is that five percent enough?
00:04:37.340Right. Shouldn't I be a hundred percent sure if I'm going to annihilate my dreams and my identity and all the other things we're told about what motherhood means?
00:04:49.100And she's like, no, fifty five percent. Just go with it.0.89
00:04:53.100I did not just jump and decide to be a mother because of that one therapy session, just in case you were worried about me.
00:04:58.760Uh-huh. But that was the sort of beginning of the journey there.
00:05:05.340And where was your ambivalence coming from? What were the pros and what were the cons for you?
00:05:12.320There weren't many pros, actually. It was coming from, well, the first line of my book is this.
00:05:19.540I come from a long line of women who abandon their children.
00:05:23.760So talk to me a little bit about those women.1.00
00:05:25.760Yeah. I had always been told the sort of family mythology was that my great-grandmother, my grandmother, and my mother had all abandoned their kids in one way or another.
00:05:39.120And I actually thought there must be a flaw in my genetic code, which is actually where the title of my book, The Mother Code, comes from.
00:05:47.580There must be something wrong with my DNA that's almost like a curse that would make me abandon my children, too.
00:05:55.760And so that was one big thing. And then the second is that I have a half brother who I call Adam in the book. And he has a triple whammy or had a triple whammy of rare disorders that all struck him when he was when my mom was pregnant with him.
00:06:13.720And so those two things were hung over me and I decided I need to figure out if there really is this sort of abandon your children gene and also if I could be a carrier for my half brother's disorders.
00:06:30.920And so I found, went to talk to geneticists, doctors, researchers, anyone really, to try to figure out if someone could say to me once and for all, whether or not I should be a mother.
00:06:45.020If my, if a geneticist said, it's not looking good, you might've been in your children or, or I don't know, you might, you know, be a carrier for one of those diseases.
00:06:55.380I had decided I would not have children.
00:06:57.620it. And yeah, I mean, I was wanting to leave it up to everyone else. I just could not make
00:07:07.740the decision for myself. I think that systematically, you know, going through and
00:07:13.880like really thinking through what does motherhood mean is motherhood for me is something that a lot0.92
00:07:23.000of women don't do. I think a lot of women just automatically go into it. And I think the1.00
00:07:29.240exploration of it is really interesting. Absolutely. And I talk about that, too,
00:07:35.400because I felt like in college I had friends who had these big dreams and then they told me they
00:07:46.960were sort of curbing some of those dreams. So I'll give you an example. One friend of mine
00:07:51.460was a drummer in a band. And she's like, oh, well, you know, when I meet the person who I'm
00:07:58.180going to have a child with, I'm going to have to give that up. So even in our early 20s, I was
00:08:03.040already seeing young women my age kind of giving things up for this promise of being a mother
00:08:11.560someday. And so I was already irked by that. And so there is a lot of that in the book, too.
00:08:19.940and I will also say this like I we don't know I want to say like we don't know anything about
00:08:26.960our fertility and like how I didn't know let me just speak for myself I didn't hardly do anything
00:08:33.100about how to get pregnant I spent so long trying not to get pregnant I didn't know what am I a
00:08:38.580fertile person am I not a fertile person and one of the things I was wondering about when I talked
00:08:44.000to that geneticist and I then went to a fertility doctor I'm like can I even get pregnant I was kind
00:08:49.860of hoping maybe the fertility doctor would be like too late even though I was only in my like
00:08:55.680early 30s I thought he would just be like you know you that that ship had sailed and one of
00:09:01.840the other reasons for that is because I was dating and eventually married a man who didn't want
00:09:07.920children and so there was this sort of like emotional contortions I was doing to try to
00:09:14.460save my marriage and hoping that if something outside of me said, nope, you can't have a baby,
00:09:20.680then we could, you know, live happily ever after. But if I had to decide myself, then it would be
00:09:28.100like I was leaving him if I decided that I wanted a child. And I just couldn't bring myself to do
00:09:34.160that. Yeah. So you you thought that by marrying a man who didn't want children without kind of
00:09:42.660make the decision for you and that you could be happy without any, but you weren't, right?
00:09:50.460Mm-hmm. Yeah. And I thought that meant something was wrong with me too. I thought that that was
00:09:57.360another flaw. It meant that I could never be happy. What was going to be enough for me?
00:10:03.760Why couldn't I be happy with this man who was loyal, didn't beat me?
00:10:10.640I looked around me at some of my friends, boyfriends and husbands, and I'm like, my guy is way better than them.
00:10:18.260Also, going back to my maternal line, the women in my family didn't have great husbands either.
00:10:24.880And so here I was willing to or wondering if I should leave my husband.
00:10:32.060and also beating myself up because I thought, wow, this is a really good guy.
00:11:19.080And so I it feels like it's a little bit worse almost because I had to decide, am I going to stay in my marriage for something that I don't even know that I want more than 55 percent?
00:11:32.460And so that was one piece of the puzzle.
00:11:35.920The other piece of the puzzle is that and I want to state this really clearly, I don't believe in God.
00:21:27.140I think we're seeing a lot more versions of this. Now, when I was on my quest that I talk about in
00:21:32.980the book, that was really 10 years ago when we didn't have as many open conversations. But we're
00:21:38.560starting to see a lot more of this now. I think we are seeing a lot more of this. Talk to me about
00:21:43.300your journey to become a mother. How did you end up getting there? Yeah. So I ended up meeting
00:21:51.520my now second husband, Rob, about a year and a half after my divorce. And we had both been
00:22:00.820recently divorced. And I knew I wanted a baby right away. And he thought that he probably
00:22:08.120wanted to have a kid, but had no particular timeline. So you get to read those juicy scenes
00:22:14.020in the book, too. And eventually we decided that we were going to thaw the eggs that I had frozen.
00:22:21.520when I was 35. And at that point, I was already 41 when we decided to thaw them. And we thought,
00:22:29.100okay, well, we'll thaw them and then see how many we have and we'll get pregnant, you know, soon-ish.
00:22:35.760But what ended up happening is that when we thawed those frozen eggs, none of them were viable.
00:22:41.460And so suddenly, my path to motherhood looked a lot more uncertain because now I was 41,
00:22:50.080almost 42 years old and had no idea how I was going to have a kid. And the fertility doctor
00:22:56.980was basically saying, you have, you know, a 10 ish percent chance of being able to have a baby
00:23:03.280at this point. And I had gone from when I had froze my eggs at 35, they told me I had an 80
00:23:08.800percent chance of having a baby with those eggs. In no world did I think, oh, I'm going to be in
00:23:14.60020% that none of the eggs are viable. I'd gone from that 80% to now being 10%. And I, you know,
00:23:22.880gave it a good try. We tried doing two rounds of IVF and both of those didn't work out. And then
00:23:30.760my doctor said, Ruthie, you will have a, you know, less than 10% chance, single digit chance of having
00:23:38.760a chai with your own eggs. Or you can try donor eggs and you would have a 65% chance.
00:23:46.940And I should bring in something else here, Joe, because that was a lot of money to be spending.
00:23:54.540Like that year of thawing my frozen eggs, the two rounds of IVF, that already cost probably,
00:24:04.280i'd have to do the math on it exactly but it was around fifty thousand dollars it's a lot of money
00:24:09.980i mean we do not talk about the economics of baby making nearly enough we don't and you know
00:24:19.740some people are lucky and they have insurance companies that pay for that or live in states
00:24:26.700where it's mandated that it's paid for through a loophole in uh i worked uh at a company
00:24:35.420headquartered in new jersey at the time and through a loophole in new jersey law my company
00:24:40.580did not have to pay for my ibf so all of this was out of pocket it was savings but it was supposed
00:24:46.780to be like our like uh like if we ever lost a job whatever that's called like my our nest egg
00:24:52.980In case we lost the job and needed it. And we just like took $50,000 and basically threw it out the window because we have nothing to show for it. And so then our doctor said we could try donor eggs, but we knew donor eggs were going to cost somewhere between $40,000 and $50,000 as well.
00:25:13.900Wow. I did not know that that's what donor eggs cost.
00:25:17.520Yeah. I mean, there's different levels of them and different ways that you can go about it. And some are less expensive. But yes, $40 to $50 and up. I mean, the sky's the limit, really, in terms of the cost.
00:25:31.540And so we knew we could do, we could try IVF with my own eggs one more time with a single digit chance of success, or we could try one shot at donor eggs with a 65% chance of success.
00:25:47.180And so it was just a numbers game at that point.
00:26:22.920And the aha moment really only came for me after I had Clementine.
00:26:30.240And it was really in the caretaking and commitment and the love that I felt for her as I saw her grow and developed a relationship with her that I had that aha moment that was like, oh, yeah, this was the right decision for me at this moment in time.
00:26:51.060I always like to say, though, that because others have asked me, well, did you make the right decision back then when I, you know, did younger Ruthie make the right decision about whether she should have had a child?
00:27:06.040And the truth is, I don't feel like I can answer that question.
00:27:10.400No matter which decision I made, I think I would have had a good life.
00:27:17.620I think I, if I didn't have a child, I had a lot of other things that I was wanting to do
00:27:24.180and a lot of other, you know, cool, creative ideas and books I would have written. And you
00:27:30.560know what? I had a child and I'm now on this path. But what I can say is from this viewpoint,
00:27:35.600I know that I made the right decision for current me and current me feels like the aha moment came
00:27:43.900in realizing that becoming a mother isn't an instantaneous, like, alarm clock going off
00:27:51.140or a signal or there's no sign, but it's something that happens over time.
00:27:58.340I do think that we become mothers over time. I think that there has long been this cliche
00:28:04.840that a baby pops out of your vagina and all of a sudden you know exactly how you're going to be1.00
00:28:10.320the perfect mother. And I don't think that's the case. I mean, I, I finally feel like I know what0.99
00:28:17.500I'm doing and I've got three children now. Um, it's been eight years of breeding and now I'm
00:28:25.080like, Oh yeah, I've got this. I'm, I'm doing okay now, but it took a really long time. How are you
00:28:33.700mothering? I mean, what have you taken from your research to create your own mother code?
00:28:40.320So, it's really changed me. First of all, mothering has really changed me, as I said, but also how I look at inheritance has changed since having a child, especially because of donor eggs.
00:28:57.460the fact that I was so worried about what I had inherited from my own family and what I would
00:29:07.480pass on to my child. And that, of course, ran in genetics and bloodlines and all of those kinds of
00:29:13.940things. But now when I think about mothering Clementine, I think about what I passed down
00:29:19.760to her what she'll inherit from me as almost like character traits. Like, I hope she inherits
00:29:29.880my sense of humor. I hope she inherits the ways that I love her and I tell her
00:29:39.200how special she is no matter what she does, that sort of unconditionality. I don't know
00:29:46.260what to call it. Um, but that is what's important to me in mothering is not necessarily the like
00:29:55.420ancestral line anymore, but really, uh, what the mothering differently than I was mothered
00:30:03.460parenting differently than I was parented and being able to, um, uh, see the ways that I do
00:30:12.240have an imprint on her? Because I will say this, Joe, when I found out that I was going to use
00:30:17.380donor eggs, it was a really hard decision because I it's not like I heard about donor eggs and I
00:30:23.580was like, OK, cool, let's try it. I thought I was going to be looking for my replacement that some
00:30:30.180there was going to be this shadow mother who I talk about in the book that would somehow replace
00:30:35.680me and that I was going to be sort of this vessel for this baby and not have any imprint on her.
00:30:42.240But we didn't know it was going to be a girl, but on the baby, I was not going to have an imprint. And what I've learned and seen is that, of course, nature matters. Of course, genetics matter. But all the ways that I do have an imprint and an impact on her and how much nurture matters, too.
00:31:02.020let's let's take one more quick break and and when we get back i want to just talk actionable
00:31:07.740advice for for women who are thinking about becoming a mother for women who are on the
00:31:14.300fence who are 55 you know wanting to be a mother maybe um to go through and like what is actionable
00:31:21.220advice for women about like how to make this decision
00:31:25.720i didn't like what you said odin pauses about the future this is the love story of real hinge
00:31:38.380couple odin and edward written and read by me curtis garner listen to the free audiobook now
00:31:45.100okay we are back talk to me a little bit about what you would tell a woman now who says i don't
00:31:58.660know who says what you said to your therapist i don't know if i want to have kids help me figure
00:32:02.180it out well i think i put my therapist in a very hard position it is very hard for anybody to tell
00:32:12.540you. And I don't know, actually, that anyone should tell anyone whether or not they should
00:32:16.900have a child. But some of the things that I think that I wish I had thought about or I wish I knew
00:32:23.640then, what I know now, are a few things. One, there are things like egg freezing. And I want
00:32:32.240to say that even though it's something that didn't work for me, I think that it's a tool in the tool
00:32:39.740belt, let's call it, in the fertility tool belt to give you some peace of mind, maybe. Although
00:32:48.340I will say this, it's definitely not an insurance policy. I've heard it called an insurance policy,
00:32:53.620which really irks me. It's definitely not an insurance policy. It's one of those things where
00:32:58.980it's like it might work, it might not, but it's an option. Of course, if you can afford the option
00:33:04.780though, too. So that's a big a big if. So there's that. The other thing I would say is a lot of
00:33:11.900people told me to look deep within myself and figure out what I really wanted, which was
00:33:18.100really not helpful because as a woman, as women, we're told to people, please, to contort, to
00:33:26.320pretzel. And I didn't know where I would have to go to be outside of the sort of white noise
00:33:33.840machine of the patriarchy to be able to hear my deepest desires.
00:33:39.180So I think that is really unhelpful.0.98
00:33:41.900What I did find helpful was reading books by other women, which is one of the reasons
00:33:47.520I wanted to write my book, because there wasn't a book that I felt like used a personal story
00:33:53.380to explore maternal ambivalence and to actually say, here are the things that I thought about.
00:34:00.820I'm not definitely not telling anyone to follow my path.
00:34:03.840But that these are some of the considerations I had.
00:34:07.620And I read books, even like Sheila Heddy's book, Motherhood, which is a novel about whether, you know, her quest to decide about having children.
00:34:16.860But I still think of that book as sort of a sister book to my book in conversation with mine.
00:34:24.060And the other thing that helped me was talking to other people about people that are mothers, people that aren't, about their decisions and why they made them and how they made them.
00:34:37.380And I thought that was really helpful.
00:34:40.640What was not helpful was people telling me to babysit a friend's kid or get a dog or water my plants or any of those kind of things.
00:34:50.820Were people actually told you that stuff?
00:34:52.560people said well first you know a dog is sort of like a smaller like a stepping stone to a child
00:35:01.220like i don't actually think that is true you'd be surprised the thing people said even when we were
00:35:07.540deciding whether to use donor eggs people were like well if the child's not going to be from
00:35:12.540your eggs why don't you just adopt uh so people will just kind of say the craziest things um
00:36:44.340And I'm hoping that we'll start to see celebrities talking about donor eggs, too, because when when these celebs are having kids at, you know, 46, 47, 48, whatever the age is, more likely than not, they probably use donor eggs or some sort of help.
00:37:01.460And I'm hoping that some of that stigma can be broken when people that are much more famous than me start talking about it.
00:37:07.940yeah it is fascinating how the the kinds of opinions that people have about mothers i mean
00:37:15.800just just that they they genuinely feel like they can they can say these things out loud
00:37:20.860that should be inside your head thoughts yes exactly someone said oh she really looks nothing
00:37:31.140like you thanks a lot yeah but then i also just as often get she looks exactly like you
00:37:38.440so people will see what they want to see people people will see what they want to see well also
00:37:45.760i my kids look nothing like me uh and i'm pretty sure that they come from my eggs and they look
00:37:53.560exactly like Nick Astor so yeah and now that she's older like I see some of her like kind of
00:38:03.360you know quirks little things that I do that she does and and she mimics me and I see more of the0.85
00:38:10.840similarities but she always like she'll take me into the bathroom and put our faces together and
00:38:15.440be like mom we're twins aren't we and I say yes of course we are um and we do talk about it there
00:38:22.300books? Because one of the big questions I also get from people is, are you going to tell her?
00:38:27.780And of course, I mean, I was surprised that was even a question. Of course, I'm going to tell
00:38:32.200her. It's her it's her origin story. And we already have three or four books that we've been
00:38:38.460reading. So she understands as much as a four and a half year old can understand. And I'm sure that
00:38:44.100will evolve. But yes, we we are going to tell her her story. Which I mean, yeah, it is amazing that
00:38:53.980people would wonder if you are you going to lie to your daughter? Are you going to keep are you
00:38:57.880going to keep a secret from her? No. But I think it feels like, you know, back in the day, let's
00:39:04.340I don't know the exact years, but let's call it like in our parents generation, like the 50s,
00:39:08.540the 60s, when adoption, when there were closed adoptions, people didn't necessarily tell their
00:39:15.600kids that they were adopted. And I think that there is still this sort of, because of the shame,
00:39:22.900we do have these, whatever, the groups of people, let's call them, I don't know who they are,
00:39:28.560I don't know any, but that are thinking about, you know, trying to keep it a secret. We don't
00:39:33.540want our kid to know. And I think that secrets always end up in a bad place. I just don't think
00:39:40.700that that's going to ever go over well. Yeah, no, I totally, I totally agree. You just wrote a great
00:39:47.540piece for Time about motherhood ambivalence. And I really like the way that you end it, where you
00:39:54.760say, I just wish someone had told me that 55% was as good a number as any. Yeah. Yeah, that's0.59
00:40:06.860exactly right. Because I think that we're shown, and again, going back to these binaries, we're
00:40:13.460either the trad wife or the childless cat lady. And so we're shown these images that if we're
00:40:20.960going to be the trad wife, those women look like they're 150 percent in. And so 55 percent just
00:40:28.480feels so measly. It feels like, wow, you must really, you know, hate your kid when that's not
00:40:36.540true at all. And when we're in this moment in time where the federal government is trying to
00:40:43.980incentivize women to have bigger families or to have children at all with baby bonuses and medals
00:40:51.940and and these kinds of ideas it really um it's i've just been thinking more and more about it
00:41:00.000because for me the way to incentivize women to have children or at least what would have worked
00:41:07.160for me to want to have children sooner. Support and policies that give affordable health care
00:41:17.000and reproductive care and child care and all of that stuff is number one. But the other thing
00:41:22.840that would have really helped me is knowing that society thinks that I deserve to have a good life
00:41:30.900outside of marriage and motherhood, the idea of self-actualization and motherhood going hand in
00:41:38.580hand. If we lived in a country or a world where women knew that they could be all the things they1.00
00:41:46.680want to be and mothers to, I think a lot more women would be having babies.1.00
00:41:51.440Absolutely. Absolutely. Where, you know, just a world that took care of women,1.00
00:41:55.080just it's just a thing that i keep asking for and often feels like no one is listening
00:42:02.640often feel like we're listening we can just talk to each other about it joe right i know we're just
00:42:09.420in the echo chamber ruthie tell everyone where they can find your book you can find my book at
00:42:14.820your local indie bookstore you can find my book on amazon it's called the mother code my story of
00:42:22.480love, loss, and the myths that shape us. And if you are in New York City, I'll be at Housing Works
00:42:29.980on May 7th for the launch party. And if you pre-ordered the book, you'll get it on May 6th,
00:42:35.920which is my launch day. I have a workshop, a free Write Your Own Mother Code Story Masterclass
00:42:44.620the night before my launch on May 5th. And I'll be reading a sneak peek from the book. And no one
00:42:51.020has seen a book yet because it hasn't come out. So it'll be a treat and then we'll do
00:42:56.040some writing exercises and it will be super fun. So fun. I love that. Thank you so much
00:43:01.260for being on. Thanks for having me, Jo.