JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Journalist Ruthie Ackerman grew up hearing difficult stories about her grandmother and her great-grandmother.
RUTHIE ACKERMAN: I come from a long line of women who abandoned their children, or at least that's what I'd been told.
SUMMERS: And she thought those stories would dictate her future.
ACKERMAN: I decided when I was, you know, in my 20s and early 30s that I wouldn't become a mother because I thought that there must be some sort of flaw in my genetic code that would make me abandon any children I might have.
SUMMERS: But years later, she learned not all the details she'd been told about abandonment in her family tree were true.
ACKERMAN: I had actually been basing my decisions about whether or not a mother on what I now call kind of half-truths and conjecture.
SUMMERS: Ackerman's journey is the subject of her new book, "The Mother Code." On the other side of her research about her family, Ackerman had a realization. Maybe she did want to be a mother. I asked her if she remembered when that first became clear.
ACKERMAN: What happened was I was sitting in my therapist's office, and she said to me, on a scale of zero to a hundred, do you want to be a mother? And I just blurted out 55%. And she said, well, there you go. And I was like, wait. I thought I needed to be all in to be a mother. If I was going to annihilate my dreams and my identity and all of these images I had of sort of "The Brady Bunch" or tradwife mom, I should be all in, right? And my therapist said, why isn't 55% enough?
SUMMERS: One of the reasons that I was immediately drawn to this book and why I wanted to talk to you is because I feel like I'm sort of at a similar point, where I spent my entire life thinking didn't want to have kids myself. And then - bam - early 30s hit, where I started to question, like, what if this thing that I have told myself my entire life - since I was a kid - is not exactly what I want? And saying out loud that maybe, maybe I have that 55% and I want a child, there's power in it. But there's also a heaviness and, frankly, a lot of scariness. And I wonder how you dealt with that moment.
ACKERMAN: Absolutely. I spent so much time wondering, what's wrong with me? I had so many friends that said - that were in the hell yes camp, as I...
SUMMERS: Yup.
ACKERMAN: ...Call it, and a few friends in the hell no camp when it came to kids. But I was in this middle - it sounds like you are, too - in this middle limbo space of really not knowing. And going back to my great-grandmother and my grandmother, there was a lot of generational inheritance and trauma I was terrified of. I also have a half brother who has a triple-whammy of rare disorders, as I say in the book. And I just was absolutely not sure. And so this - I - one of the things in my research that was, I guess, an aha moment - if I'm going to name anything - was when I realized that maternal ambivalence is the norm. It is...
SUMMERS: But we don't talk about it.
ACKERMAN: We don't talk about it, exactly. Maternal ambivalence is the norm, and yet we're told that people that are hell yes are the norm.
SUMMERS: There's a moment that you talk about, early in the book, that I think really illustrated how much you wanted this child. You wrote that you bought a syringe and planned to try to impregnate yourself with your then-husband's sperm without him knowing, which feels like an extreme moment for you.
ACKERMAN: Yeah.
SUMMERS: Can you talk about that?
ACKERMAN: Yeah, that was really rock bottom in the book, both in the writing and in the realization once I wrote it. And that wasn't originally in the book. But my best friend knew all the stories, obviously, and she said, you have to put that moment in. Readers need to see just how desperate you were in that moment that you would do almost anything, even going against all of your values, to try to have a child and keep this marriage intact. I didn't ultimately end up going through with it, but it was this moment sort of, like, am I going to become this person?
SUMMERS: So Ruthie, this is a memoir, but you also spend a lot of time interrogating and investigating so many parts of the different journeys and paths that a person can take to becoming a parent. You also point at the inequities, and that's something you describe as the fertility wealth gap. Can you tell us what you mean by that?
ACKERMAN: Yeah. At the time, I didn't necessarily think about it. I spent $15,000 originally to freeze my eggs when I was 35 years old. And only in writing about it did I look back and think, wow, if I had taken that money and put it in a mutual fund, by the time I was 65, I would have had $300,000. And it just got me thinking that we know that women get paid less than men. So it benefits men, young men, and society as a whole, and companies, if women wait to have children. And yet, the burden of who pays for fertility preservation falls on young women alone.
SUMMERS: And we should just note that for many young women, that initial $15,000 that you paid wouldn't be accessible either. Some people can't afford that.
ACKERMAN: Absolutely. There were storage fees on top of that. And ultimately, those eggs - none of them were viable. I had 14 eggs, and none of them were viable.
SUMMERS: Ruthie Ackerman, this book is about your long and messy journey to becoming a mother. But it's also about saying yes to yourself and the life you wanted after years of stifling your own wants and deference to others or in deference to what society wanted from you. Can you talk a little bit about flipping that switch?
ACKERMAN: Yeah. I remember when I was married to my first husband, and I would go and talk to my friends and say, he doesn't want to have a baby. And my good friends would always say, but what do you want, Ruthie? And the truth is, in my book, what I discovered is realizing that I could be a self-actualized human and a mother. And I think what's interesting to me in this particular moment in time is that we're hearing from the federal government - they are trying to incentivize women to have children. And so the biggest incentive, I think, for motherhood, would be a society that truly believes that women deserve and can live a good life, whether or not we decide to get married and have children.
SUMMERS: Your daughter now is almost 5. Her name is Clementine. How - tell us a bit about her. What's she like?
ACKERMAN: Oh, my goodness. She's so funny. She's a little bit of the class clown, I guess, and she is so wonderful. I really feel like the things that I was worried about didn't come to fruition. I can't imagine a world without her. But that was something that came much later. So I think we do a disservice to ourselves and to all women when we say, you know, an alarm clock's going go off, or you're going to have an aha, when maybe that happens once we're already mothers. We grow into or become mothers through the act of mothering.
SUMMERS: We've been speaking with Ruthie Ackerman. Her memoir, "The Mother Code: My Story Of Love, Loss, And The Myths That Shape Us" is out now. Ruthie, thank you so much.
ACKERMAN: Thank you for having me.
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