Dear Queenie,
I am at a point in my relationship where I think love may no longer be enough. I have been with the same man, on and off, for more than ten years. We've had good periods and bad periods. We've separated and found our way back to each other. Despite everything, I love him and have always imagined that eventually we would settle properly into a life together. I also want a baby. Not vaguely. Not "maybe one day." I want to become a mother. He already has a child from a previous relationship. I don't. I have been pregnant before, but unfortunately I miscarried. More than once. Those losses were extremely painful, but they didn't change my desire to have a child. If anything, they made me more certain about what I want. I've made changes to my life with that goal in mind. I've been taking better care of myself. I've changed habits. I've tried to get healthier. I've made decisions based partly on giving myself the best possible chance of becoming a mother. In my head, I suppose I thought I was working towards our future. Recently, we finally had a serious conversation about having a baby. His answer was that he has to think about it. Queenie, we've been involved for more than a decade. How much more thinking is there to do? I understand that having a child is enormous and nobody should agree to it because they're being pressured. But I'm also aware that time isn't standing still while he decides. He already has the experience of being a parent. If he ultimately decides he doesn't want another child, he still gets to be a father. If I stay and wait for him and the answer eventually becomes no, I may lose something I desperately want and cannot necessarily come back for later. I don't want to give him an ultimatum. I don't want a baby with someone who only agreed because he was afraid I would leave. But I also don't want to wake up years from now angry with him, or with myself, because I waited for an answer that never came. I love him. But I want to be a mother. Should I stay? —Waiting for Maybe
Dear Waiting for Maybe,
This may be one of the hardest relationship questions because nobody has to be the villain for the relationship to be wrong. He is allowed not to know whether he wants another child. You are allowed to know that you do. But those two positions cannot remain suspended indefinitely when biology, fertility and your own life plans are involved. And there is something important in what you wrote. You said: "What I hope is our goal." Before anything else, you need to find out whether it actually is. Because you've been making changes and moving towards motherhood while he may still be standing at the starting line deciding whether he wants to enter the race. That's not a small difference. Nor is this a disagreement about where to live, whether to renovate the kitchen or whose family gets Christmas. There is no compromise between having a child and not having one. You cannot have 40 percent of a baby. And you should take him seriously when he says he needs to think. Don't translate it into the answer you want. Don't turn: "I need to think about it" into: "He'll probably say yes." But don't automatically translate it into no either. Instead, ask the question that matters: "I respect that you need to think about this. But becoming a mother is important to me, and I can't leave the question open indefinitely. How much time do you realistically need to decide whether having another child is something you genuinely want?" That's not an ultimatum. It's a boundary around your own time. Give him a reasonable period to think, not another indefinite chapter in an already on-and-off decade. And during that period, do some thinking of your own. Not: "How do I convince him?" Ask: "If his answer is no, what will I choose?" And perhaps the harder question: "If his answer remains maybe, how long am I willing to live inside maybe?" Because "maybe" can become a decision by default. Month follows month. Then year follows year. Nobody actually says no. But eventually circumstances say it for you. Your history of miscarriages makes this more emotionally complicated, but it also makes one thing especially important: don't make decisions about your reproductive future based only on assumptions
