These Precious Days: Essays

by Ann Patchett

Flexibility was what writers got instead of health insurance.

What I didn’t tell him was that I would never have children, and that I had known this for a very long time. I was thirty years old.

The nuns worked with children and were happier once those children had gone home. After all, none of them had children of their own. They had made that choice, and from my vantage point, they didn’t appear to have any regrets.

To have a child and neglect her in favor of a novel would be cruel, but to simply skip the child in favor of a novel was to avoid harm altogether.

I couldn’t quite envision what she was suggesting: a man who wanted children; a man who wanted to have those children with me; a man who wanted those children with me so much that he would claim half the work, half the love and responsibility, and I would be able to believe that he was telling me the truth, and that the truth wouldn’t change a few months in.

I shook my head. I had never met such a man, nor did I believe in his existence.

How I came not to care about other people’s opinions is something of a mystery even to me. I was born with a compass. It was the luck of my draw. This compass has been incalculably beneficial for writing—for everything, really—and for that reason I take very good care of it. How do you take care of your internal compass? You don’t listen to anyone who tells you to do something as consequential as having a child. Think about that one for a second.

It is possible to love someone with all your heart and still know your union would never have survived having children together.

I am deeply moved by what a woman’s body is capable of, but just because I could do something didn’t mean that I should.

The uncertainty, the complete lack of autonomy or control, leaving places you never wanted to leave to go to places you never wanted to go, the fear, the bullying, the helplessness, the awkwardness, the disappointment and shame, the betrayal by your own body.

To have a child required the willful forgetting of what childhood was actually like; it required you to turn away from the very real chance that you would do to the person you loved most in the world the exact same thing that was done to you. No. No, thank you.

No, but it would have come closer to changing my mind than the hypothetical man who might have taken half the responsibility for our hypothetical offspring.