Identity crisis: Has self-pursuit inhibited women from having children?

The faculty office where I met Angela was dimly lit by a single window behind her desk. “I can’t exactly say that I’m a paragon of self-care,” she quipped. And “let’s be honest, I don’t have a published book. That’s not happening. I don’t care. But it’s not happening, actually.” Angela grinned and tucked an unkempt wave of crimped black hair behind her thick glasses. “For some it’s fine. I’m not that person. Would I be a better scholar if I didn’t have children? For sure. Honestly, I mean, I used to work all the time before I had my children. So, for sure, I would.”

Teaching at a small liberal arts college, Angela is one of the American women who missed the memo about the small family thing. Though she married late after trying out the convent, she still managed to have five kids over 10 years while earning tenure. Her office walls are papered with messy artworks produced at a tiny table and chairs pushed to the side. It doesn’t surprise me she’s not doing a lot of self-care right now. Five kids in 10 years is no joke, even without a professorship.

Anyhow, she’s sorry she can’t have one more. “Well, you know, I’m actually sad. Believe it or not. It’s ridiculous. I know I’m 44 and the average 44-year-old is not having another child. But nothing has wound down yet. I love children. And (my youngest) won’t have a sibling close in age. I’d love to have one more, just so he could have a little friend. I would. I’m not going to lie, I would enjoy that immensely.”

Fewer of us are becoming mothers and we who do become mothers later in life than ever before . Most blame the economics . Some say we’re not socialist enough . Others say we’re too socialist . But birth rates are down everywhere , no matter how much we redistribute . Angela’s frank talk about demoting self-care and book-writing made me wonder about a darker possibility. Has a relentless pursuit of self-identity inhibited the transition to become selves who live for other selves?

To find out, I searched out the unicorns of mothering, women who didn’t just have one or two, but who kept going — embracing sleepless nights for more than a decade, trading off career milestones and personal interests for the sake of more children. In summer of 2019, I interviewed 55 American women with at least five kids, like Angela. (To protect their identities, pseudonyms are used throughout.) What I found convinced me that the mystery of motherhood hides under the branches of our selfhood. When Gen Z and millennials say it’s too expensive to have kids, they mean it — but the material payments aren’t the whole story. Mothers pay for their children with their selves. It’s not easy to opt in, especially when other choices are increasingly desirable. The mothers I met did so because they saw children as blessings, expressions of God’s goodness and the purpose of their marriages. They wanted children enough to put other things “on the back burner” — enthusiastically even.

“I’m most myself with my family, more than I ever even knew I could be.”

Angela’s opt-in was memorable. Children mattered so much to her that it almost derailed her engagement. “It was funny, it was right outside of Carnegie Hall, and he proposed to me, and I didn’t say yes right away. … I had to pause for a minute, and I was like, ‘Wait, do you want children?’ He’s like, ‘Yes.’” She laughed, “You know I didn’t want to commit without it, because we didn’t have that talk or anything.” Angela really wanted children. She credited her family background. “I had one sister, and that was not the choice of my parents. They would have loved a large family, but fertility is what it is. So, it was just the two of us. But I always wanted more siblings.”

She also credited her religious upbringing. “I’m Catholic, marriages produce children. And this is a positive thing. So, I didn’t overthink it.” But most who share her faith aren’t anything like Angela. If American Catholics used to have more kids than Protestants, that difference had vanished by the late 1970s . I probed for deeper motives. Just being Catholic didn’t explain it.

What emerged was a picture of a young Angela persuaded that her identity would be fulfilled, not canceled, by prioritizing kids. “There’s no shame in sharing yourself with people, and reliance on other people,” she said. “The best example I can give is it (used to be) really normal to stop by somebody’s house without calling first. No one would do this now. I grew up like this, and I miss it actually. Everyone I know who is not Black would be utterly horrified if you showed up on their doorstep, because they would feel judged, because of course their house is not perfect, you know, whatever.”

“I grew up in a predominantly Catholic area,” she said. “Almost everyone I grew up with is Irish or Italian. And they were Catholic Irish and Italians. So, I don’t know what to tell you about that, there was one other Black family, and they were Protestant.” She laughed, “It just is what it is. But I think Italians are a lot like this in my view, and I don’t know if I can talk about Italians, being Black, the Italians I know are similar to Black people this way, that there’s a sense of hospitality and a sense of openness.”

Angela struggled to convey a critical idea I heard from the moms I interviewed. Identity wasn’t in them. It was in their relation to others. And as relations go, nothing could be more meaningful, more identifying, than motherhood. Hannah, a Jewish mom of seven, declared, “What a better way to form an identity, you know? No regrets. Not a one. … I have inner peace in my life that I didn’t have then. I was searching. I’m not searching now.”

Angela went on, “I would most definitely make a connection between the culture of hospitality and the children. If you have an openness to the other, you have an openness to the other. And you don’t fear the loss of yourself in the openness to the other. I think that’s my fundamental point — that I’m most myself in the openness to the other.” Angela likened an open door for a Sunday visitor to an open womb for another child. I didn’t ask her whether an openness to immigrants might be linked to welcoming children, but maybe it was implicit when she described the ethnic and cultural diversity of her neighborhood growing up.

She said she “(didn’t) fear the loss” of herself, but I wasn’t convinced. What about that book she hadn’t published? What about her passions? She’s obviously talented. Who gets tenure with five kids? But she doubled down. “Am I following all my passions? I literally hate that word.” She laughed. “No, I’m not. OK, I can live with that. My hobby right now is sitting and watching soccer.” She went on, “That’s just reality. But since autonomy is not my primary value, it doesn’t matter. People are actually my primary value. ... And I have a home rich with persons. People matter. People matter. And they also — my sense of identity is sort of co-related to all (these) other people.”

When Gen Z and millennials say it’s too expensive to have kids, they mean it — but the material payments aren’t the whole story.

“It’s just, what do you value?” she asked. “I think that our values are more for individual self-fulfillment than they are for anything collectively. We value money and the means for making it over persons.” She seemed to walk the walk. Her clothes suggested she wasn’t shopping upscale. Of course, I know what professors make. She’s not raking it in for a family with five kids.

Angela also voiced Hannah’s solution for self-searching. “I’m most myself with my family,” she said, “more than I ever even knew I could be.” Maybe it’s not the pursuit of self-identity that hinders the path to motherhood, but getting it wrong about self-identity. The mothers I met had enough children to see a pattern in themselves. Monica, a former corporate lawyer with six kids, explained.

“When I first became a mother, I was sort of lost because I had previously identified as a successful high-achieving young professional. … And so, when I became a mother, I didn’t understand, I quickly realized that everything had shifted. My whole world had turned on the axis. And what did it mean? I just had no idea. It really was for so many years just about getting through the days. It was like, ‘We’ll get through this time, and I’ll go back to being that person,’ and that was sort of how I saw it. I had that person, not just that career but that person, on a hold. So, it was terrible, right? I was not allowing myself to be me. This (mom) wasn’t me and that (lawyer) was.”

Monica went on, “After my second one, I kind of came into the beginning of an awakening of myself and who I was as a daughter of God. As a person inside — a Christian, a wife, a mother. All of those things coalescing to an understanding, and when I say ‘me and who I am,’ I really mean why I’m here. So those things are so closely connected.” She figured out her identity wasn’t what she was doing. It was who she was for: God, her husband, her children. “For me, the self-discovery was in this total upheaval of everything I thought and knew and this completely different path of opening my life and my heart to all these little people who have taught me a ton about life.”

I understood the paradox they described. Years ago, as a young academic in an elite Ph.D. program, and against all normie advice, I fell in love, got married and had a baby. That baby was born on Mother’s Day 24 years ago. This year, he graduated from college with a degree in economics. He’s getting married in December to his college sweetheart, he works a great job, has a dachshund named Queenie and a host of interests that delight me as much as when he first pointed to an ant on the sidewalk and made up a funny word for it.

Maybe it’s not the pursuit of self-identity that hinders the path to motherhood, but getting it wrong about self-identity.

To the normies in my life back then, having a baby seemed like something anyone could do. But to me, being his mom wasn’t something anyone could do. Only I could be his mom. And it was so good to be his mom that we hoped for more and were blessed with seven more kiddos. Like Angela, believe it or not, it’s ridiculous, but I’d love to have one more. I’d enjoy that immensely. But the average 48-year-old is not having another child.

Would I be a better scholar if I didn’t have children? For sure, honestly; I mean, I worked all the time before I had children, so for sure, I would. But what a better way to form an identity, you know? No regrets. Not a one. I have inner peace in my life that I didn’t have then. I was searching. I’m not searching now.

Catherine Ruth Pakaluk is the mother of eight children and associate professor at The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. This essay is adapted from her book “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” (Regnery, 2024).

This story appears in the September 2024 issue of Deseret Magazine . Learn more about how to subscribe .