What If Kids Don’t Ruin You?

On the scarier possibility that they prove you were never fragile

photo by author

For anyone outside Medium’s walls, here’s a free door in.

“Should I have a child?” a friend asked me over the phone. Neither of us had kids. “I’m afraid it will destroy me.”

But what if the real fear isn’t that children destroy who we are — what if it’s that they don’t? What if identity survives, toughens, and proves we were never as fragile as we liked to believe?

I understand my friend. I feel it too.

My fear has never really been about losing the identity I’ve built around writing. It’s not about my work drying up, or my friends drifting away, or my life turning into a swamp of Lego bricks and pediatrician appointments.

What I really fear is something I once wrote in a poem and then tried to forget: Maybe I need to break myself so badly that I finally know what I can do.

Not because I want pain. But because sometimes the only way to know yourself is to lose the option of escape.

Jobs end, lovers leave, apartments can be packed up in a night. Even life itself feels reversible in its own dark way. But a child? A child is the one thing you can’t undo at 3 a.m. They’re the end of deniability. The ultimate test.