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iffeelscouldkill · 5 years

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Adjusting [Part 2: Park]

A/N: Here’s Part 2! Many thanks to @dragonsthough101 for beta reading this and for the lovely, encouraging feedback💖💖💖

If you haven’t read it or want to re-read, here’s a link to Part 1!

Summary: It turns out that there isn’t a blueprint for quitting your job, turning your back on the organisation that you’d built your life around, committing treason and abandoning your friends and family to go travel across the galaxy with a band of wanted criminals. Fortunately, RJ now knows some people who have been there.

Or: Five times that RJ McCabe shares a late-night drink with someone on the Iris 2.

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About a week later, RJ is feeling slightly more at home on the Iris. It helps that it’s a new ship for the rest of the crew, too, and so everyone’s a bit at sea, missing things they used to take for granted and sometimes finding themselves unexpectedly at a loose end.

One of the things that RJ finds hard to get used to is how chatty the crew of the Rumor is. They knew about this from listening to the recordings, but knowing about something and being on the receiving end of it are two very different things. In the IGR, supervisors tended to frown on idle chatter (everything was about maximising productivity, after all) and people were cautious about volunteering details of their personal lives, never quite sure who might be trying to inform on them or get them written up for having a hobby that wasn’t quite above-board. You couldn’t exactly enjoy a conversation with someone when you were constantly watching your words.

But here on the Iris, everyone talks so much, about anything and everything. RJ isn’t used to people honestly trying to get to know them, or to the level of genuine interest that many of the crew have taken in their past, their hobbies, their thoughts, and their likes and dislikes.

RJ knows that Krejjh and Brian mean well, and that Sana cares about every member of her crew (the idea that RJ is included in that category already is still hard to wrap their head around), but it can still be a little much sometimes. They prefer to spend time around Violet, who is more tactful; Park, who is familiar; or Arkady, who is mostly silent except when she’s cracking some honestly hilarious sarcastic jokes.

Nights are still hard, and RJ has more or less become used to taking hours to get to sleep, or waking up in the middle of the night from confused and anxious dreams, but they’re finding things to do with the extra time. Park, who is an incurable bookworm, gifted RJ with a truly staggering number of audiobook files that he’s been keeping on a jailbroken telecomm (a sort of souped-up comm device that Republic employees are issued as standard). RJ has learned things about their former boss’s tastes that they never expected.

(“Park! You know a jailbroken telecomm is considered a Class E banned item, right?” RJ says when Park shows it to them.

“Oh no,” Park replies, deadpan. “Do you think I’ll get in trouble for it?”)

Even more unexpected, though, are the downloads that RJ was given by Krejjh and Brian after they expressed curiosity towards something called ‘Sh’th Hremreh’ that the two were always discussing. Krejjh’s eyes lit up and they immediately began to wax lyrical about the plot and the acting, Brian chipping in with relevant details. Before they knew what was happening, RJ found themself in possession of two whole seasons of a Dwarnian soap opera.

(RJ doesn’t speak Dwarnian, of course, but Brian has a solution for that. “I’ve created my own fansubs,” he says happily. “It’s been a good exercise for my translation skills – don’t want them to get rusty – and it helped Krejjh with their English, back when they were still learning. I upload them to a Dwarnian video site under a pseudonym.”

“They’re very popular!” Krejjh adds proudly.)

So, between audiobooks and Dwarnian soap opera episodes – which are oddly engrossing – RJ has a few ways to take their mind off things, but sometimes it still isn’t enough. On nights like these, RJ makes their way to the kitchen. The crew had made a brief stop-off at an extremely sketchy and borderline lawless moon where a heavily disguised Sana and Arkady did a run for basic supplies, so the tea stocks are replenished – although it’s not great tea. (Apparently, one night of quality herbal tea was enough to turn RJ into a bit of a tea snob).

What they don’t expect is to run into Park, sitting in the darkened kitchen at two o’clock in the morning. The lights flicker on as RJ enters, which means that Park must have been sitting still long enough for the motion sensors to deactivate.

“Oh – McCabe,” he says, looking up. “I mean… RJ, sorry.”

“You can still call me McCabe,” RJ tells him as they pull out the stepping stool, carry it over to the cupboard, and climb up to reach the highest shelf. Park watches in bemusement. “I mean, I still call you Park, unless you’d prefer-”

“No, just Park is fine,” Park assures them. “What are you doing?”

“You’ll see.”

RJ pulls down the little cardboard box, sets it on the table, and opens it to reveal an orderly collection of teabags in rows. “We’re running low on camomile, but I think the peppermint is caffeine-free.”

“What if I want caffeine?” Park asks, eyeing the collection of teabags warily. He looks terrible, with dishevelled hair and dark circles under his eyes.

“That’s too bad, because you’re not getting any,” RJ tells him primly, and takes a bag of peppermint tea out of the box. Park laughs as though it’s been startled out of him.

“Fine.”

As they wait for the water to boil, RJ surveys Park out of the corner of their eye. They realise that they’d subconsciously been thinking of Park as ‘further ahead’ than they were with adjusting to life as an outlaw, given that he’d turned against the Republic first, and actively worked with the crew of the Rumor to carry out the plan on New Jupiter. During the day, he puts up a good front, but RJ can see now how much of that is a front. This hasn’t been easy for Park either.

RJ pours out the tea into two dinged-up tin mugs and hands one to Park. For a while, neither of them says anything.

RJ and Park haven’t talked about the Republic much since leaving New Jupiter. RJ has made the odd quip about working with Agent Goodman, or referenced things that happened in their shared office, and both of them have been providing intel that Sana relays to the resistance movement via the other Violet Liu, but they haven’t had a real conversation about what – and who – both of them left behind. Park seems disinclined to talk about his time in Zone Z, and RJ had convinced themself that the best way to adjust to their new life on the Iris was to draw a line under everything that came before it. There was no point in bringing up old memories.

Except that now, they’re struck by how much they want to talk about it.

“Park,” RJ says in a rush. “Do you… ever miss… being back on New Jupiter? I-I don’t mean the last… part of your time on New Jupiter,” they add hurriedly when Park looks at them. “But… is there anything that you miss about… before?”

Park frowns in consideration. “I miss the amenities, for sure,” he says slowly. “I don’t care what Sana says – the water pressure is not the same in vacuum.” RJ snorts in amusement at that. “And the food was better down there.

“Maybe I miss being on the right side of the law, or thinking I was on the right side of the law – being able to safely move across IGR territory, being able to use my real name and identity. The kinds of things you just take for granted until you can’t do them anymore.” Park pauses, seeming to weigh his next words.

“But the thing is… I never felt safe under the IGR either. You remember what it was like.” Park looks at RJ, and there’s a darkness in his eyes that RJ has only seen there once before: shortly after Park’s return from Zone Z, when they had asked about what happened to his eye. At the time, it had been quickly suppressed, leaving RJ with a vaguely unsettled feeling that they couldn’t pinpoint the source of.

“Everyone constantly trying to inform on everyone else. People disappearing one day without a trace. Wondering if it would be you next. Constantly watching what you said, analysing what you did, looking over your shoulder.” Park gazes off into the middle distance, remembering things that RJ can only guess at. They unconsciously hold their breath, afraid to do or say anything to break Park’s reverie.

“When Major General Frederick came to take me away… there was a part of me that wasn’t surprised. I think I’d almost been waiting for it. The investigation wasn’t going well, and they were looking for someone to scapegoat. It was only a matter of time. Under a regime like the IGR-”

RJ manages to suppress their instinctive flinch at hearing Park describe the Republic in those terms, but only just. In spite of everything they now know to be true about the IGR, it isn’t easy to alter a lifetime of thinking a certain way. Or of not being allowed to think a certain way.

“-you never know when the ground is going to shift beneath your feet. You might cross the wrong person, or do something that you know to be the right thing, and still wind up ‘disappearing’.” Park pronounces the last word with an uncharacteristic bitterness. “So no, I don’t really miss how things were on New Jupiter.”

“Yeah,” RJ says shakily. “You, uh, you make some good points. Hadn’t… hadn’t thought of that.”

Park blinks, and immediately looks stricken. “McCabe– I’m sorry, I really shouldn’t have – I don’t know why I said all of that. I know it wasn’t what you were asking. I’ve just been carrying a lot of-”

“Park, it’s fine. You don’t need to apologise,” RJ says over him. “And you don’t need to try and sugarcoat anything for me. I was a naïve kid when I joined the investigation, but I’m not now. I saw you get taken away, and other people as well. I was terrified. But I found ways to justify it in my head, because I didn’t know what else to do.”

They say this last part, quietly, to the tabletop.

Park rubs his good eye. “I never wanted you to have to go through that.”

“But that wasn’t your fault,” RJ tells him. “It was theirs.”

Silence descends for a few moments, and RJ casts about for a change of subject. “So, uh, have you… heard from Shelley?”

Park shakes his head. “I asked the other Violet to get a message to her, because I wanted her to hear the truth from me and not whatever lies the Regime has decided to put out, but she warned me that it could take a while. I’m not sure if or how Shelley will be able to reply.”

RJ nods, their mouth twisting in sympathy. Shelley is Park’s twin sister, and the two are extremely close. Park hasn’t shared many details about his family life, but RJ has inferred that their parents aren’t around anymore, and that Park and Shelley are each the only family the other has left. It must be incredibly hard for him to be away from her – maybe the hardest thing of all.

“What about, uh… Have you thought of getting in touch with yours?” Park asks, his voice rough. RJ shakes their head.

“No. It would just be…”

RJ hunts for the right words for a long moment, and finally says, “It wouldn’t make much of a difference. To them, the truth would be just as bad.”

Park looks troubled, but he nods. “Okay.” He drains the last of the peppermint tea and smiles a little. “All right, I’ll admit it – the tea has helped. I didn’t even know there was a stash in here.”

“I split the cost with Violet and Arkady,” says RJ. “But it’s meant to be for emergencies only.” When Park quirks an eyebrow, RJ adds, “Insomnia counts as an emergency.”

Park gives that small smile again. “Fair enough. I appreciate it, anyway. You using up your emergency tea on me.”

RJ considers pointing out that they’d been going to make a cup anyway, but decides not to ruin the sentiment. “You’re welcome.”

“I guess I should head back to…” Park plants his hands on the table and levers himself up, wincing like he’s aggravating old injuries. Maybe he is. RJ still has no idea what the IGR did to him in Zone Z, besides the… eyeball thing.

“Park,” they blurt out, and Park looks at them, his face open and concerned. There are a lot of things that RJ didn’t realise were unique about Park until he was gone. The fact that he genuinely cared about RJ, and looked out for them, was one of those.

In many ways, Park is a different man since he came back from Zone Z. But that much hasn’t changed.

“Is…” RJ hesitates, not wanting to give voice to the nagging fear that lurks at the back of their mind – and increasingly, at the front.

“Is there going to be another war?”

Park hesitates, but he doesn’t try to offer up platitudes or empty reassurances. “Not if we can help it,” he tells them.

#TSCOSI #The Strange Case of Starship Iris #fic #post-episode 10 #RJ McCabe #Agent Park #late night tea drinking #RJ McCabe's home for disaffected IGR agents #I love these guys #and their friendship #the conversations in this were hard to write #I mean Park definitely has some kind of PTSD from Zone Z but I am in no way equipped to Go There #on a lighter note though I am particularly fond of RJ bossing Park around for his own good #in some ways although Park is The Adult and more emotionally mature #deep down I think he's more of a disaster #he just hides it well #I can imagine RJ trying hard to add 'self-care' to Park's vocabulary

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bluewatsons · 7 years

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Julia Moore, Facets of Agency in Stories of Transforming from Childless by Choice Mother: From Childless by Choice to Mother, 79 J Marriage & Family 1144 (2017)

Abstract

Family scholars have explored in depth how and why some women choose to never have children. However, some childless-by-choice (also termed childfree or voluntarily childless) women—who have declared their desire and intention to never have children—ultimately become mothers because of changes in choice or circumstance. Through a qualitative analysis of interviews with mothers who once articulated themselves as permanently childless by choice, this article presents three facets of agency in women’s stories about childbearing transformations: accidental conception, ambiguous desire, and purposeful decision. Participant interviews indicated that each facet of agency was enabled and constrained by multiple individual, relational, and cultural considerations, including self-described biological urges, partners’ childbearing desires and intentions, and cultural stigma against abortion. Pathways from childless by choice to mother often encompass multiple facets of agency and include movements in and out of various fertility desires and intentions before conceiving.

During the past 4 decades, scholars have demonstrated that women’s choice to never have children is culturally devalued in comparison to motherhood (Ashburn-Nardo, 2017; Gillespie, 2000; Houseknecht, 1979; Veevers, 1980). Although U.S. national surveys have shown that some women who once said that they never intended to have children end up expecting to have children or having children (Heaton, Jacobson, & Holland, 1999), fewer scholars have engaged in systematic investigations about how or why women who never wanted to have children come to be mothers. “Reproduction has been so taken for granted,” wrote Franke (2001), “that only women who are not parents are regarded as having made a choice—a choice that is constructed as non-traditional, nonconventional, and for some, non-natural” (p. 185). Exploring the ways that women become mothers after articulating themselves as permanently childless by choice provides deeper insight into the fluidity of child-bearing intentions. Scholars have already begun to consider childbearing desires and intentions as enabled and constrained by many factors (e.g., Bernardi, Mynarska, & Rossier, 2015; Letherby, 1994; Meyers, 2001; Miller, 2011; Park, 2005), and attending to the shifting familial formations of previously childless-by-choice women adds a novel layer of understanding to, and recognition for, women’s lived experiences of (never) having children. To add to this conversation, I engaged in a qualitative thematic analysis of the life stories of mothers who once told others that they never wanted to have children to analyze three multidimensional facets of agency that characterized women’s stories of childbearing transformations.

Background

Birth rates have diminished since the late 1960s and early 1970s in the United States as a result of access to abortion and oral contraceptives for adults and minors, delays in marriage and child- bearing, and women’s increased participation in the labor force (Brewster & Rindfuss, 2000; Guldi, 2008). In 2013, the U.S. total fertility rate, or estimated number of births per woman during her lifetime, was 1.86 births per woman, down from 1.88 in 2012, 1.89 in 2011, and 1.93 in 2010 (Hamilton, Hoyert, Martin, Strobino, & Guyer, 2012; Martin, Hamilton, Ventura, Oster- man, & Mathews, 2013; Osterman, Kochanek, MacDorman, Strobino, & Guyer, 2015). Simultaneously, scientists at the National Center for Health Statistics estimated that the percentage of childless-by-choice women—who have made the decision to never have children and are also termed childfree and voluntarily childless (Moore, 2014)—rose from 2.4% in 1982 to 4.3% in 1990 to 6.6% in 1995 (Paul, 2001). Abma and Martinez (2006) analyzed the National Survey of Family Growth to estimate that the percentage of voluntarily childless women aged 35 to 44 years grew from 5% in 1982 to 8% in 1988, peaking at 9% in 1995 and then declining to 7% in 2002.

However, statistics about voluntary childlessness are scarce and muddled; it is difficult to estimate the number of childless-by-choice individuals because many large-scale surveys do not delineate between individuals who delay childbearing and those who desire never to have children, between childbearing desires and intentions, or only survey married individuals (Abma & Martinez, 2006; Bernardi et al., 2015; Moore, 2014). Furthermore, it may be impossible to cleanly isolate “voluntary” from “involuntary” childlessness when considering how delayed childbearing may contribute to infertility or how infertility may contribute to the choice to not pursue alternative avenues such as adoption or assisted reproductive technologies (Jeffries & Konnert, 2002; Lundquist, Budig, & Curtis, 2009). Regardless, in the United States, the rate of childbearing is on the decline while the rate of voluntary childlessness appears to be on the rise, indicating that more women are choosing to never have children.

Pathways to Voluntarily Childlessness

The choice to never have children is not only a decision but also an identity that is often stigmatized (Moore, 2014; Moore & Geist-Martin, 2013; Park, 2002). Scholars have adopted multiple perspectives to understand women’s pathways to voluntary childlessness, including the study of motives and dyadic decision making (Blackstone & Stewart, 2016; Houseknecht, 1979; Lee & Zvonkovic, 2014; Park, 2005). Motives for choosing childlessness include the influence of negative parenting models, the desire for an adult-oriented lifestyle, personality and lack of parenting skills, ambitious career goals, negative feelings about children, and concerns about population growth (Houseknecht, 1979; Park, 2005). Partnership, better health, higher education, and more prestigious employment also correlate with chosen childlessness (Mynarska, Matysiak, Rybinska, Toccioni, & Vignoli, 2015). Delineating motives for choosing childlessness is complex because many individuals only justify their decision after the fact when called to do so, long after the choice has been made (Veevers, 1980). Therefore, pathways to voluntary childlessness are often processual, lengthy, and complex (Blackstone & Stewart, 2016).

To delve deeper into the complexities of dyadic decision-making, Durham and Braithwaite (2009) investigated what happens when married couples come together with similar or different childbearing intentions. The researchers developed a typology of family planning trajectories of couples based on each spouse’s childbearing preference. In the accelerated-consensus trajectory, each spouse entered the relationship with similar preferences for never having children, resulting in high levels of satisfaction. In the mutual-negotiation trajectory, each spouse was uncertain about family planning preferences, resulting in variable levels of satisfaction. In the unilateral-persuasion trajectory, one spouse persuaded the other never to have children, also resulting in variable levels of satisfaction. In the bilateral-persuasion trajectory, one spouse desired children while the other did not, resulting in a low level of satisfaction. Alternatively, Morell (2000) adopted a poststructural perspective to identify two contradictory experiences of voluntarily child- less women. Some participants experienced a “wavering no” where their comfort with childlessness was temporarily disrupted, whereas others transformed the “vacant emptiness” of childlessness into a “radical openness that allows for various possibilities” (p. 319). Morell emphasized how childbearing choices are processes that can be contradictory and emotionally challenging. In the present study, I sought to build on these results by analyzing how and why the childbearing desires, intentions, or statuses of formerly childless-by-choice women change over time.

Pathways to Motherhood

“Mother” is also an identity, but it is often culturally praised as a moral imperative and natural turning point in women’s lives (Ashburn-Nardo, 2017; Sevón, 2005). However, parents and intended parents do articulate motives for having children and timing considerations. Langdridge, Sheeran, and Connolly (2005) found that couples who intended to have children often reasoned that doing so would offer fulfillment, please their partner, make a family, be part of both parents, provide the child with a good home, and satisfy their biological drive. Many women also delay parenthood, especially those who obtain higher education, are employed in higher status careers, and value self-reliance (Dion, 1995). However, child- bearing motives are not clear-cut because an individual’s fertility desires and intentions do not always align (Iacovou & Tavares, 2011; Miller, 2011). Furthermore, many women experience ambivalence or indifference rather than a clear-cut decision to have children (Miller, Jones, & Pasta, 2016). In a study of pregnant women’s stories of becoming mothers, Sevón (2005) argued that timing, ambivalence, and heterosexual relationship quality all informed pregnant women’s choices to become mothers. Disagreeing with earlier arguments that mothers do not think much about their reasons for having children, Sevón revealed that women’s desire for motherhood “often involved considerations about whether one had the maturity to be a mother, whether it was possible to have a child under the prevailing financial or living conditions, and, especially, whether both partners were ready for parenthood” (p. 478).

Bernardi et al. (2015) further typologized six distinct categories of fertility intentions based on childbearing desires and the time frame of intentions: (a) definitively yes described a clear desire for children within a concrete time frame, (b) contingent intention described a clear desire for children paired with reasons that interfered with having children soon, (c) far intention described a desire for children but not in the near future, (d) indifferent intention described the absence of a strong desire or negative desires with a noncommitted perspective toward possible childbearing, (e) ambivalent intention described an uncommitted oscillation between desiring childlessness and desiring a child, and (f) definitively no described clear negative desires with no or a very unlikely possibility of ever having children. Furthermore, childbearing intentions sometimes change over time, especially when people are in their early 20s or as a result of their partners’ expectations (Bernardi et al., 2015; Iacovou & Tavares, 2011). Although these researchers explored shifting fertility intentions, particularly changes in timing and number of children, I could locate no research that analyzes the shift from definitively no to certain or uncertain childbearing desires and intentions.

Agency

The pathways to motherhood and voluntary childlessness can be understood through feminist theorizations of agency. Agency describes self-definition and self-direction, where self-conception is always informed by social relations and the ability to follow through on goals without dissuasion (Abrams, 1998). Agency also acknowledges that a middle ground exists where individuals always act within the symbolic and material conditions of a particular culture or context (Campbell, 2005). Studying life courses allows scholars to study agency, resilience, and meaning within families (Umberson, Pudrovska, & Reczek, 2010). Agency in terms of fertility intentions specifically encompasses desires and intentions (including childbearing, child number, and child timing; Miller, 2011) and the constraints that make specific desires and intentions possible. “A clear difference between desires and intentions,” wrote Miller, “is that the for- mer simply reflect a wish to achieve a goal through some sort of action, whereas intentions involve a specific decision to pursue an actionable goal” (p. 78). Agency, then, considers how decisions and actions are enabled and constrained by various factors external to an individual’s cognition. Agency informs path- ways to motherhood because agency accounts for how and why individuals make choices that are always contextualized and constrained.

Therefore, I posed the following research question to guide the present study: How do women who once articulated themselves as permanently childless by choice become mothers?

Method

I approached this question as a feminist qualitative researcher interested in making sense of the lived experiences of women. Wood (2006) wrote that feminist family scholars often critically inquire, “Which aspects of family life should be foci of research?” (p. 208). Therefore, I employed the feminist concept of agency to reframe the dominant pronatalist narrative of women as inherent future mothers (Gillespie, 2000; Moore & Geist-Martin, 2013; Park, 2005) by building on Bernardi et al.’s (2015) discussion of changing fertility intentions over time to demonstrate the complexity of shifting childbearing desires, intentions, and identities. I analyzed different pathways from childless by choice to mother using thick description (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and conceptual development, which “builds theory beyond the existing literature and offers new and unique understandings” (Tracy, 2013, p. 241). In this section, I detail the present study’s participants, recruitment methods, interview guide, and data analysis procedures.

Participants

Because so little research has attended to mothers who once told others that they never wanted to have children, besides to show that they exist (Heaton et al., 1999), I maintained inclusionary criteria for participation to fully explore the complexities and nuances of these women’s childbearing transformations. I welcomed participation by women who had biological children, who conceived via in vitro fertilization, who adopted children, who became stepmothers through marriage, and who became guardians of children (e.g., through the death of a family member). I required participants to meet two primary criteria to qualify. First, participants needed to have previously told others that they never wanted to have children. Some voluntarily childless individuals keep their desire to never have children private from others (Park, 2002), so I specifically sought out women who were vocal about their choice. This resulted in a coherent sample of women who desired and intended to never have children instead of women who were uncertain about having children or were postponing childbearing until later in life. Second, to ensure that participants had time to experience motherhood, I required that participants have at least one child who was, at a minimum, 1 year old.

A total of 32 women participated in the present study. All participants had at least one biological child, and three had at least one additional stepchild. Of the 32 participants, all were in heterosexual relationships when they conceived their children. Children were a mean age of 6 years, ranging from 1 to 43 years old, and the number of children per participant ranged from one to four. Participants were an average age of 35 years at the time of the interview, ranging from 22 to 64 years. Participants who were in relationships at the time of the interviews all identified their partners as male; 22 were married, four were dating or in a non-married relationship, four were single, and two were single and divorced at the time of the interview. Of the participants, 14 had bachelor’s degrees, seven had some college coursework completed, seven had master’s degrees, and four had doctoral degrees. A total of 23 worked outside the home, and nine identified their occupation as stay-at-home mother, with three of these stay-at-home mothers also in school. Of the participants, 28 identified as White, two as Asian, one as Latina, and one as multiracial, and 21 identified as nonreligious, six Christian or Catholic, three spiritual, one Jewish, and one Pagan. Participants lived in urban, suburban, and rural locations across the United States.

Recruitment

Notably, no online or offline community currently exists to bring together mothers who once told others that they never wanted to have children, so I recruited women from various parenting groups and forums. Tracy (2013) argued that qualitative scholars “should strive toward a purposeful sample, in which data and research questions/goals/purposes complement each other” (p. 135). Therefore, I sought out participants through a variety of avenues to help ensure variation in lived experiences. Three primary recruitment strategies yielded the majority of participants, wherein I distributed a recruitment script seeking participants for “research on women who at one point in their lives communicated to others that they were permanently childless/childfree by choice, but ultimately became a mother.” First, I posted my call for participants on my personal Facebook page, asked my Facebook friends to share the call, and emailed the call directly to various members of my social network. Second, I posted my call to a public Reddit forum for mothers with more than 20,000 members. Third, I posted my call with permission of the administrators to an online regional parenting newsletter that goes out to more than 30,000 parents each week. When participants contacted me to participate, I answered any questions they had and then sent them the informed consent document via email. After gaining informed consent, I engaged each participant in a two-part life story interview.

Interviewing

Interviews “provide opportunities for mutual discovery, understanding, reflection, and explanation via a path that is organic, adaptive, and oftentimes energizing” (Tracy, 2013, p. 132). To retrospectively capture stories of childbearing transformations, each participant engaged in a modi ed life story interview with me between November 2014 and January 2015. One interview took place in person, 14 via Skype or FaceTime, and 17 via phone. Reconstructing life stories allowed each participant to “construct her own deeply personal, written and oral history, thus allowing sufficient space for the woman’s voice to be heard” (Campbell, 1999, p. 12). Atkinson (2012) noted that life story interviews also allow participants to tell their life experiences in any way they choose to tell them. McAdams (1993) further systematized the life story interview process by asking participants to begin by thinking about life as a book, where participants divide their life into chapters, which I adopted in the present study. First, I asked participants to describe their journeys from childless by choice to mother in terms of book chapter titles, which named moments and phases relevant to childbearing and childrearing in their lives. The purpose of this prompt was to encourage participants to remember, reflect on, and compose their journeys into a coherent framework before the interview. Most participants completed the life story chapter prompt, although three participants declined, stating a lack of time or creativity. Second, after completing the book chapter exercise, to gain a general description of each salient moment and phase in the participants’ journeys, I asked the following questions: “Please name this (first, second, third, etc.) chapter in your life story”; “Give me an approximate date—when did this chapter begin?” and “Describe your story in this chapter—what happened?” The interviews averaged 67 minutes in length. Once I completed the interviews, I engaged in thematic analysis.

Data Analysis

To analyze the interview data, I engaged in inductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to articulate and analyze what I term facets of agency across the participants’ stories of childbearing transformations. First, I familiarized myself with the data by transcribing and rereading 517 single-spaced pages of interview transcripts. At this point, I began to think about how to make sense of participants’ childbearing desires, intentions, and agency during their transformations. Second, I generated initial codes and marked examples of the codes on the interview transcripts to describe participants’ childbearing desires and intentions, their partners’ childbearing desires, and why, how, and when participants had children. Third, after coding every transcript, I constructed higher level themes and subthemes by categorizing codes together, paying particular attention to participants’ childbearing desires and intentions at the time of pregnancy.

At this point, I engaged in data conferencing, a method of peer validation (Braithwaite, Allen, & Moore, in press). I organized a meeting with scholars versed in qualitative approaches to family communication research, where I gained feedback on developing analytical categories and theoretical applications. Shortly thereafter, 14 of the interviewees participated in follow-up member reflections (Tracy, 2013), where we brie y dialogued about the initial results via phone, Skype, or FaceTime. Based on participants’ feedback and the continued reading of scholarly literature about fertility intentions, I reread the transcripts again and engaged in an analysis of how facets of agency—including accidental conception, ambiguous desire, and purposeful decision—are not necessarily discrete, and sometimes multiple facets emerged in a single participant’s story. Sensitized by a feminist conception of agency, I paid particular attention to the relationship between participants’ internal desires and external constraints related to these facets of agency in participants’ stories of childbearing transformation.

Results

Before describing the three facets of agency I developed from the interview data, it is important to note that during the interviews the participants overwhelmingly framed their former voluntary childlessness as authentic. In other words, participants articulated that they were not pretending to desire permanent childlessness while actually desiring to have children and were not postponing motherhood or unsure about motherhood. Marilyn, for example, emphasized that her voluntary childlessness “was all authentic, it was just part of my life.” Similarly, Carleen stated, “I feel like in the moment I really meant it. I really, really did. And it wasn’t anything that I kept a secret.” Melinda explained how she felt like being childless by choice “was what was important to me at that time. It felt significant to me at that time, that that was part of my identity.” Kylie also clarified how she still views her choice to never have children as a part of her life story when I asked her if she talks to other people today about being formerly childless by choice: “It’s a part of who I was. It’s my identity, you know, it’d be like lying about who you were.” Although participants became mothers at differ- ent ages, in different phases in their careers, and in differing relational circumstances, research indicates that many women do know from a young age that they never want to have children (Morison, Macleod, Lynch, Mijas, & Shivakumar, 2016; Veevers, 1980). Therefore, I considered all participants to be equally authentic in their previous intention to never have children. Participants’ descriptions of living their lives as vocally childless-by-choice women closely aligned with research on the topic about motives and stigma management (Gillespie, 2000; Park, 2002, 2005; Veevers, 1980).

Although the participants were consistent in maintaining the authenticity of their previous choice to never have children, they were not consistent in their stories of transformation. Therefore, I offer three facets of agency represented in participants’ stories of their childbearing transforms. Drawing on Bernardi et al.’s (2015) typology of fertility intentions, I first describe participants whose stories centralized one facet and then explicate the fluidity of these facets by explaining how they often shifted and overlaid.

Accidental Conception

Many participants underscored accidental con- ception in their stories of becoming mothers. These mothers expressed de nitively no child- bearing intentions (Bernardi et al., 2015), but then conceived unexpectedly. Many continued to desire childlessness well into their pregnancies. These women were in their late teens to mid-20s when they became pregnant, except one who was in her early 30s. They were all unmarried at the time of conception, split between dating rela- tionships and single. Many of these participants were taking hormonal birth control that failed, and others never used pregnancy protection and assumed infertility because of a doctor’s diagnosis or never experiencing any pregnancies since becoming sexually active.

Upon learning that they had conceived, these mothers overwhelmingly recalled visceral, negative reactions to learning that they were pregnant. Sonia, who was vocal with her husband about not wanting to have children, and whose “greatest fear was to be pregnant and give birth,” recalled the moment she took the test after miss- ing her period while on the pill: “I just immediately was crying, super upset, ‘My life is over.’ I was like, ‘I don’t even know how far along I am but I’ve got to be pretty far.’” Jasmine, who spent “probably a couple of years thinking that I would just never have kids,” became pregnant at 19 after losing her birth control pills midway through her pack and recounted her reaction: “So I looked at the test and I was like, [whispers] ‘Oh shit!’ So I like slam it down and I’m like, ‘Oh my God,’ and like, ‘This is the worst ever.’” Amber, who described how by high school “everybody knew that I was not going to have kids,” found out she was pregnant in her early 20s while on an international vacation with her boyfriend and friend. She stated, “My first thought was, ‘Literally my life is over. I don’t want this child. I don’t want to have a child. I don’t want to raise a child. This is the absolute worst thing that can happen to me, ever.’” These mothers can be described as early articulators who made the choice to never have children at a young age (Veevers, 1980). Although young women who are not voluntarily childless who experience an unexpected pregnancy might react similarly, these participants’ reactions were also informed by a disruption in their intention to never have children.

Although most mothers whose stories empha- sized accidental motherhood explained this moment as devastating, one recounted her much more subdued—but still negative—reaction to learning she was pregnant. Esther, who at age 13 or 14 “was introduced to sort of a radical version of feminism, and in my sort of White, privileged life, to me that just meant I wasn’t going to get married and have kids,” described experiencing a more “numb” reaction when she unexpectedly became pregnant in her early 30s with her long-term boyfriend:

The entire 4 years we were together, we never had protected sex, which [scoff]. I was kind of going off the idea of these doctors telling me it was hard to get pregnant, and he always pulled out, and I guess it was also just sort of that feeling that, “Nothing bad will happen to me.” . . . The night I found out I was pregnant, I was actually on the phone with [my boyfriend] Peter while I was taking the test at home. And, “Oh my god, I’m pregnant.” And he’s like, “Okay, take the test again, make sure.” So I took the test again, “I’m pregnant,” and just I was very numb. Just it was so—it was like me just saying, “I’ve got a hangnail.”

Although Esther did not recall feeling as much alarm as the other mothers who emphasized accidental conceptions in their stories, per- haps in part because of her relatively older age, her initial reaction to learning she was pregnant was still a problem to be remedied.

Most of the mothers who conceived accidentally considered the possibility of abortion, if only brie y. Sylvia, who explained that in her hometown “everybody knew I didn’t want to have kids” by age 9 or 10, but then became pregnant at 17, simply stated, “I didn’t believe in abortion and I couldn’t give him up for adoption either to an unknown party or to a family member.” Whereas some participants who conceived accidentally did not believe abortions were right for them, others felt that they could not have an abortion because it was too late or too many people already knew they were pregnant. Sonia, who became unexpectedly pregnant in her early 20s, explained her thoughts about abortion after returning home from job training:

So I came home from training and went to the doctor’s and found out I was 11 and a half weeks along. So basically I had to make that decision within 2 or 3 days. And I felt like I just couldn’t go through with an abortion that late. Especially when so many people already knew.

Thus, some participants’ perceptions of how others would react informed their choice to con- tinue their pregnancies. The stigma associated with abortion as well as the cultural norm of keeping abortions secret from others (Major & Gramzow, 1999; Norris et al., 2011) influenced the choice of some mothers to continue their pregnancies.

In addition, the participants described the impact that their partners’ childbearing desires had on their choice not to terminate their preg- nancies. Jolene, who recalled that since high school, “the idea of having kids was just a no,” explained how if her then boyfriend “had been like, ‘Oh, I want to have an abortion,’ I would have been at the abortion clinic.” Although Jolene’s boyfriend did not ask her to terminate, Jasmine recalled the overt pressure she felt from her boyfriend and others to continue her pregnancy when she was 19:

I’m like, “Look at the test! It has two lines!” And he’s like, “What does that mean?” And I’m like, “It means we’re having a baby.” And he got all excited, he was like, “Oh my goodness this is the best!” And I’m like, “This is terrible!” . . . I talked to him [my boyfriend] about it, and kind of said, “I don’t want to have your baby, I don’t think this is good.” And he was so upset, I mean, and it was really interesting, he had said, “Well, I don’t want you to do this, you can just have the baby and you don’t have to have anything to do with the baby, but I’ll take the baby, if you’ll just have the baby.”

Esther also described how she believed that her boyfriend’s pressure for her to continue the pregnancy were part of his plan to trap her permanently in a relationship with him: “So I took a while, had a few conversations with Peter. He oddly and to my surprise was starting to subtly push for me to keep the child.” Esther later learned that this was an abusive attempt to preserve their relationship: “He straight admitted to me long after I had the child, he thought if I had the kid, it would bring us closer and keep me stuck with him, essentially.” Esther’s choice to have children, then, could be considered both agentic and coerced because she chose to continue her pregnancy within the constraints of her relationship.

Participants whose stories centralized accidental pregnancies often described how their childbearing agency, or ability to act within broader constraints, was primarily constrained by their own views of abortion, their perception of others’ reactions informed by cultural stigma against abortions, and perceptions of their partners’ childbearing desires. Similarly, many participants who emphasized ambiguous desire also experienced visceral, negative reactions to learning they had conceived.

Ambiguous Desire

Participants who underscored ambiguous desire in their stories of transformation previous articulated the definitively no, but then shifted to indifferent intention, where the participant felt open to either having children or not having children, or ambivalent intention, where the participant felt conflicted about having children or not having children (Bernardi et al., 2015). Although Bernardi et al. typologized indifference and ambivalence as separate, in the present study participants often fluctuated from one to the other, so I discuss both together in this section as stemming from ambiguous desire. All of these participants were in committed relation- ships or marriages when they became ambivalent about having children and often stopped actively trying to not have children by stopping the use of birth control. However, many explained that they still felt conflicted when they learned that they had conceived.

These participants described multiple considerations that contributed to their transformation from childless by choice to ambiguous desire, emphasizing that it was not a single event that led to their shift, but a confluence of factors. Melinda, who in high school “arrived at the conclusion that I was not going to have children,” explained a particularly salient event that contributed directly to her shift from definitively no in her mid-20s:

I took a walk in the evening in our neighborhood, and it was around dinner time, and it was summer so people’s windows were open, and I remember seeing all these families who were sitting down to dinner with their kids, you could hear their chatter through their windows. . . . And I had this lightning bolt feeling of like—and it came sort of in stages. The first stage was like, “Hey, you’re never going to go back to be a kid again, and have that experience again. That’s in the past, it’s never going to happen again.” So then the second part of that was, “And if you want that feeling again, the way you’re going to experience now is not as a child, but as a parent.” And that blew my mind [laughs].

Although Melinda explained a specific, personal event that contributed to her shift away from permanent childlessness, she did not shift immediately to definitively yes intention but instead to a mix between far intention and indifferent intention, where she thought that they would have children one day, but simultaneously expressed an indifferent desire (Bernardi et al., 2015). She described her conversation with her husband after her desire lightning bolt moment:

I was like, “So, I think I want to have kids.” And he was like, “What?” Because it was so out of the blue. We talked about it, and we kept talking about it off and on over time. And we sort of reached an understanding of like, “Yeah, we feel like we would like to have kids at some point in the future that is yet determined,” and it rested there for a while. . . . At some point, we sort of agreed that like, “We’re not trying to have kids, but we’re not trying not to either.”

Thus, Melinda’s experience of becoming indifferent incorporated both individual and relational moments that catalyzed her reconsideration of the positives associated with having children.

Other participants described how their partners’ desire for children led them to become conflicted about having children, which previous researchers have documented (Bernardi et al., 2015; Durham & Braithwaite, 2009; Letherby, 2002; Meyers, 2001; Sevón, 2005). Lisbeth, for example, who began telling others in high school, “I’m never having kids, I just want to be able to do what I want to do,” described how her husband influenced her transformation from childless by choice to ambivalent. He never wanted to have children in his early 20s but then began talking to Lisbeth about his desire for children in his late 20s. Lisbeth described how she and her husband seriously discussed having children after an interstate move in their mid-30s:

My husband brought the subject up again, and he’s like, “Well, you know we’re nearing 35 so apparently you don’t want to.” So I half-heartedly agreed, “Okay, I am willing to go off birth control and just see what happens. And if it happens, it was meant to be, but if it doesn’t happen, it was not meant to be. And I don’t want to go through any crazy measures to try actively to have a baby.” . . . And I had myself for some reason convinced that I wasn’t going to be able to get pregnant. There was no medical reason [laughs] I just kept telling myself, “It’s not going to happen.” So I’ll half-heartedly agree to do this but I didn’t really think it would happen.

Lisbeth was not fully comfortable with the idea of having children, but was also not sure that she certainly did not want to have children, and therefore embodied an ambivalent intention before becoming pregnant.

Although many participants felt indifferent or ambivalent about having children, some described the feelings of conflict that they experienced upon learning they were pregnant, even though most were not actively preventing pregnancy at the time of conception. Delila, whose desire for permanent childlessness “was just kind of always my thought,” recounted her reaction when she found out she was pregnant right before she was scheduled to enter the Peace Corps in her early 20s. After college, she and her high school sweetheart discussed the topic, and “I had become more open-minded about having kids but I definitely wasn’t thinking that now was the time, you know?” But when she found out she was pregnant, Delila recalled the following: “First I was shocked, and then the longer it set in I just got sad. I was like, ‘Man, this changes everything.’ I was like, ‘This is all the plans I had gone.’ And so it was really rough in the beginning.” This exemplar indicated how her definitively no intention shifted toward a combination of indifferent intention and far intention before pregnancy and then ambivalent intention after conceiving.

In addition, many of the participants who experienced indifference or ambivalence prepregnancy seriously contemplated abortion. Melinda, who developed an indifferent intention after seeing the happy families eating dinner in her neighborhood recalled the following:

It happened when we’d just moved into a new house, there were all these things we want to do, and it just felt like being pregnant would derail everything. And we actually got to the point of making an appointment to have an abortion. I remember sitting on the couch, and we were sup- posed to be putting on our jackets and going out the door, and just sitting there, and sitting there, and sitting there. And finally just saying, “I can’t do this.” He was like, “Yeah.”

Although Melinda and her husband decided to continue the pregnancy, her ambivalence persisted throughout her pregnancy.

Another participant explained how her choice to continue her pregnancy was partly influenced by the fact that others knew she had conceived. Lilian, who “was very vocal about it to my friends that I never wanted to have children” but then became ambivalent about having children when her former boyfriend discussed children in a positive light, reflected on how she might have considered an abortion if her current boyfriend’s sister had not told everyone she was pregnant:

She told everybody, not just his ex-wife, because his ex-wife had to call and gloat about it, thinking I hadn’t told him yet, which she ended up calling literally 15 minutes after I tell him that I’m pregnant. And so she told my now in-laws who I also had a history with. . . . Here I am, I’m pregnant, I’m not married, I have a man who has no obligation to me. And now I couldn’t even go through with an abortion!

Lilian ultimately experienced a miscarriage at about 6 weeks into the pregnancy. “I struggled with that; I felt so guilty because I felt like I killed it with my thoughts,” she recounted, “I mean, I don’t know, at that point I was like, I think I wanted it.” Lilian’s back and forth between desiring an abortion and then desiring to carry her pregnancy to term clearly demonstrates ambivalent intention toward having children, where participants “oscillated between the desire to have and not to have a child” (Bernardi et al., 2015, p. 120).

Although Bernardi et al. (2015) considered indifferent and ambivalent intention to be dis- tinct categories, these participants sometimes oscillated or switched over time as their child- bearing desires remained ambiguous. Ambiguous desire might not be easily recognized as agentic, but the shift from definitively no to ambiguous or indifferent intention does describe a shift in trajectory and self-awareness about how feeling conflicted does not align with cultural ideals of what feelings pregnancy and motherhood should evoke (Sevón, 2005). Alter- natively, participants whose stories centralized purposeful decision recounted smoother transitions to motherhood.

Purposeful Decision

Many women’s stories described neither accidental conceptions nor ambiguous desire and instead underscored the facet of purposeful decision. These participants moved from definitively no to definitively yes (Bernardi et al., 2015). These mothers, who previously never wanted children, but then shifted to assuredly desire and intend to have children before becoming pregnant, were aged between their late 20s and late 40s when they conceived and were either married or in committed relationships when they desired motherhood and became pregnant. These mothers generally pursued childbearing by stopping their use of birth control and sometimes pursuing medical fertility interventions. Similar to women whose stories centralized ambivalence, women who centralized purposeful decision often transformed slowly over time.

Those who emphasized purposeful decision often articulated multiple considerations that contributed to their change in childbearing desire and intention. Some participants explained how they still felt unfulfilled after they achieved their personal, relational, and career goals. Tanya, who leaned toward never having children in junior high and then by college having children was “something I didn’t think I’d ever do,” shared how life circumstances in her early 30s contributed to her change in childbearing desire before she and her husband married:

So we get the house, we get the dog, and got to do a lot of traveling, which was one of the things that was important to me. . . . There was a lot of time when life was just kind of stable and I just realized I was still wanting something more, and still like—I don’t know, if this is my life for the rest of my life, this is how it’s going to be and there was nothing wrong with it, I just felt like that wasn’t enough.

After pondering her changing childbearing desire and talking to her coworkers about their experiences with having children, Tanya recalled how she disclosed to her now-husband that she wanted to have children: “I was like, ‘So, I’m thinking that I might want to have kids.’ I mean, I guess he was kind of surprised, but not really.” Tanya continued, “He always thought he would have kids, so it wasn’t a big deal for him to be like, ‘Well, yeah that’s kind of something I always wanted anyway.’” Although Tanya explained that her husband never pressured her to have children, and ultimately their decision to try to conceive was straightforward because he already desired children when her desire changed.

A few participants alternatively attributed their change in desire to their biological clocks. Aileen recounted how her feelings changed immediately when she stopped taking hormonal birth control in her late 20s and within 2 months she

wanted to have a baby so bad, and I’ve never in my life wanted to have kids. And so I felt like my brain was like, “No, you don’t want this. This is not what you want out of life. You do not want to be a mother, you want to travel, you don’t want kids.” And then my heart was like, “No, you want kids so bad!” . . . The first couple weeks this was happening, I felt like I was going crazy and I never said anything to [my husband] Paul. And finally we were driving in the car and I said, “I have to tell you something. I’ve been thinking about having a baby.” And then he waited a second, and then he said, “Well, yeah I’m kind of thinking about it too.” And that was it.

Presumably coincidentally, Aileen and her husband’s shifting childbearing desires shifted simultaneously to definitively yes, and once they communicated this, it also shifted their intentions.

In addition, the participants who centralized purposeful decision in their stories sometimes described how deaths in the family caused them to rethink their choice to never have children. Sandra, who in college “was getting a little more militant in my views” about never having children as a result of environmental and overpopulation concerns, explained how her feelings about having children changed in her mid-30s when she witnessed her mother grieving her father’s death:

I do remember distinctly being like, “I can’t imagine going through that alone.” I can’t imagine, if I lost [my husband] Bradley, like going through that alone. . . . I remember just finally saying to Bradley, “I really want to talk about adoption. Like I want to get serious about it.” And he is like, “Well, why don’t we just have our own?” And I was like, “hm.” And it was like the first time that I seriously entertained it. And I was like, “Maybe, okay.” And so, it was just sort of like we decided then.

Sandra’s recollection of her father’s death contributed to her reconsideration of the role family members play during difficult times. She did not want either of them to be left without the support of close family members, including children, when one of them passed away.

Most participants who emphasized purposeful decision in their stories described agreement from their partners. Most pregnancies occurred when the participants were actively trying to conceive with their partner and were planned and relatively uncomplicated. For example, Marilyn, who decided together with a former boyfriend to never have children, described how she uneventfully became pregnant in her early 30s with a new boyfriend after deciding that they wanted to have a child together, thereby moving from definitively no to definitively yes: “It happened fast with us, but we were actually trying. I did the pregnancy test. So it was standard. We didn’t have protection on purpose.” Similarly, Carleen described the ease with which she became pregnant after she and her husband decided to start trying in her early 30s: “It was like the easiest pregnancy ever. Like it didn’t take any- thing for me to get pregnant, I was pregnant the second month.” These mothers’ uneventful conceptions contrasted sharply with the tumultuous experiences of participants whose stories highlighted accidental conceptions or ambiguous desire, who often felt conflicted about their pregnancies, and sometimes considered abortion. Because these mothers intended, with certainty, to have children, they rarely experienced anxious emotions upon learning that they had conceived.

A few of these participants also recounted their struggles with infertility after their childbearing intention transformed from definitively no to definitively yes but involuntarily childless. Tanya, who realized that she wanted something more after settling into her career and marriage, explained her conversation with the fertility specialist in her early 30s after her family doctor discovered her low egg count and her husband’s low sperm count:

Basically she was saying things were so bad on both of our sides that our only option was in vitro fertilization, that basically there was no point in trying anything less than that because it just wasn’t going to work. . . . And so I remember being at work waiting for her to call with the results [of the pregnancy test] and so when I got the phone call, I was excited.

The few participants who pursued fertility treatments described how they experienced joy when they learned that they had successfully conceived, demonstrating the enthusiasm for their purposeful decision to have children.

The transformation from definitively no to definitively yes is the most obviously agentic facet because these women reworked their self-definition before becoming pregnant. This facet of agency particularly demonstrates the ease through which motherhood is embraced and lauded within U.S. culture (Ashburn-Nardo, 2017; Franke, 2001). However, it is important to note that the facets of agency sometimes intersected with one another, thereby complicating participants’ experiences of childbearing desire and intention.

The Multidimensionality of Facets

The facets of agency in the participants’ stories of childbearing transformation often intersected, changed over time, and sometimes seemingly contradicted one another. I explored how participants’ (a) stories of accidental conceptions often interlaced with ambiguous desire and purposeful decision during their pregnancies, (b) stories of ambiguous desire often overlaid with accidental pregnancies yet simultaneously experienced purpose during pregnancy, and (c) stories of purposeful decisions sometimes overlapped with accidental pregnancies and ambiguous desires during pregnancy.

First, some participants experienced both ambiguous desire and purposeful decision during their pregnancies. As illustrated in the Accidental Conception section, childless-by-choice women who conceived unexpectedly were often unsure of what to do about their pregnancies and often experienced ambiguous desires about becoming mothers. Joy, who planned to never have children with her husband, felt ambivalence toward her unintended pregnancy because she assumed that she would miscarry when she found out that she was pregnant because of a diagnosis of early menopause. She said to her husband, “I’m not going to really think about it too much because of the medical stuff, I’m prob- ably going to end up miscarrying. So I’m not going to worry about it.” Most of the interviewed mothers who conceived accidentally also eventually found purpose in having their children. For example, Esther, who desired permanent childlessness but then accidentally conceived, explained how she found purpose in her pregnancy because she considered termination but ultimately made the choice to keep her son:

I pretty much just felt, “I am never going to do anything with my life that is going to justify having an abortion.” Like I just I didn’t have any grand plan, I couldn’t say, “But I want to accomplish these things.” Having a child really wasn’t going to fuck up any life plan of mine, because I didn’t have one! On top of that, I have a very, very steady job, I have good pay, I have good insurance. Like it just seemed—I’d always been told I could never get pregnant, so there was the whole idea of, “This is my one and only shot.”

Thus, the agency to choose motherhood instead of abortion allowed some women to feel autonomous and purposeful, even when their pregnancies were unexpected (Sevón, 2005), thereby reframing their childbearing agency as enabled rather than constrained.

Second, many participants with ambiguous desires conceived accidentally but ultimately found purpose during their pregnancies. Jade, who from aged 19 to 24 years was “really vocal with people in my [future] husband and my lives that that wasn’t the life that we were going to choose,” recalled how she became unexpectedly pregnant after she and her partner agreed that either having or not having children would be acceptable in her late 20s:

We just kind of stopped being careful. [laughs] And we didn’t really talk about it together for a long time. It just—we got more and more careless. ... [The pregnancy] was totally unexpected and finding out was the most terrifying thing ever. . . . I was like, “Okay, we’re here, but that doesn’t mean we have to do it. We have to make sure that it’s something we want to do, like I’m not going to say we’re stuck because I got pregnant.”

Although Jade ultimately continued her pregnancy, her story is akin to participants with ambiguous desire who stopped using birth control but then felt conflicted when they did become pregnant. However, most participants who centralized ambiguous desire, similar to the participants whose stories centralized accidental pregnancy, found purpose during or after their pregnancies. Melinda, who had experienced indifferent and ambivalent intentions and then lacked attachment to her child during the first few months of the baby’s life, explained how it was only when her daughter started talking that she felt purpose: “It was just like so exciting to me, and to see that growth and experience that growth of getting to know this person has been just thrilling.” Thus, the participants found purpose not only in the choice to have children but also in the experience of bearing and raising children.

Third, the mothers who articulated purposeful decision occasionally conceived unexpectedly and sometimes felt ambivalent about motherhood. From middle to high school, Kylie thought, “I’m never having kids. No way. I’d be a horrible mom, I’d be a horrible mom! I hate kids, I don’t like kids.” However, she recalled how she and her husband decided that they wanted children after they got married, thus moving from definitively no to far intention, but then accidentally conceived before they wanted to during their 1-year anniversary vacation in Florida:

We were obviously newlyweds in love. And at this point I think I was very accepting, I was like, “Yes, we’re going to have kids.” . . . And so we thought we’d still wait a few years....So then we go to Florida and I was a little nervous because I thought I was a little late, I’m super regular. And we have a couple of drinks, but I’m scared. And I’m like, “Charles, I think I might be pregnant. I have a test.”

A few of the mothers who emphasized purposeful decision experienced accidental pregnancies, although they described feeling more optimistic early in their pregnancies than the mothers who emphasized accidental conception or ambiguous desire.

These excerpts indicated that facets of agency sometimes overlay and shift over times and how facets of agency that appeared constraining (e.g., accidental pregnancy) were often reframed as enabling. Participant interviews demonstrated how childbearing desires are neither in-born nor determined by cultural pressures; rather, childbearing agency—constituted in desire and intention—is complex, and change in childbearing agency is often enabled and constrained by a variety of circumstances and considerations.

Discussion

According to Sevón (2005), “The choice to become a mother is a multilayered process and not a clear-cut one” (p. 462). Agency, a concept central to gender equality emphasized in contemporary third-wave feminism, opens up space for pluralism and change in women’s lived experiences (Snyder-Hall, 2010). Grounded by a research question about how women become mothers after articulating themselves as childless by choice, I have offered a qualitative analysis that constructs knowledge through the voices of women and focuses on agency in the movement between fertility intentions. Specifically, I articulated three facets of agency from participants’ stories of transforming from childless by choice to mothers, including (a) accidental conception, (b) ambiguous desire, and (c) purposeful decision. This categorization is useful because it represents an array of the complex considerations that contributed to participants’ change in childbearing choice or status over time (Meyers, 2001; Sevón, 2005).

Theoretical Contributions

The present analysis extends Bernardi et al.’s (2015) research about changing fertility intentions by investigating agency in women’s stories of transforming from definitively no to ambivalent intention, indifferent intention, far intention, or definitively yes. Because Bernardi et al.’s typology focuses on intentions, it does not fully account for accidental conceptions, which were central to many participants’ shift- ing childbearing statuses. Thus, it is not only through changing priorities that fertility intentions transform (Bernardi et al., 2015) but also sometimes the material condition of pregnancy that catalyzes a change in childbearing intention. Importantly, the pathways from childless by choice to mother include agentic steps in and out of different categories of childbearing desires, intentions, and identities, and categories of fertility intentions are also not always discrete or clear-cut, as illustrated by the participants’ stories that indicated simultaneous indifferent and far intentions. I do not mean to suggest that voluntarily childless individuals will or should became parents; instead, I seek to legitimate agentic movements between fertility intentions as more common than acknowledged in contemporary pronatalist culture. Furthermore, women who transform from definitively no to definitively yes, indifferent intention, or ambivalent intention considered their choice to never have children as valid, authentic, and a fundamental chapter in their life story.

Thus, it would be remiss to describe these women as simply delaying childbearing, because postponers desire and intend to have children eventually, even if the timeline is undetermined (Lee & Zvonkovic, 2014). To state that these women were delaying childbearing would not legitimate their previous self-definition as childless by choice. Scholars have demonstrated that the experiences of voluntarily childless women, involuntarily childless women, and postponers are quite different (Heaton et al., 1999; Lee & Zvonkovic, 2014). Rather than categorizing individuals’ fertility intentions through an end point or even start and end points, scholars should explore the twists and turns that characterize contemporary childbearing choices. These pathways do not always lead to the same destination, but it is attention toward the journey that sheds light onto the complexities of childbearing agency, and how individuals “ oat in and out of various family forms” throughout their lives (Baxter, 2014, p. 13).

Choice, of course, is framed retrospectively in the present analysis. Participants made sense of their pathways to motherhood through differing descriptions of agency, whether it be by moving firmly into the definitively yes category before attempting to conceive or by finding purpose in the decision to not undergo an abortion. However, choice was also constrained in participants’ stories because of individual, relational, and cultural factors, including insatiable biological urges, partners’ childbearing desires and intentions, cultural stigma against abortion, and in one case coerced pregnancy (Langdridge et al., 2005; Norris et al., 2011). The choice to become a mother after articulating oneself as permanently childless by choice is always afforded by constantly shifting factors. Thus, choices are sometimes dynamic rather than decisive, constricted rather than autonomous, and contradictory rather than unified (Abrams, 1998; Campbell, 2005). The notion of choice must be appreciated for its intricacy and fluidity, which the theoretical concept of agency affords.

Limitations and Future Directions

Although this study lends insight into how women move in and out of childbearing desires and intentions, the analysis is limited in three ways. First, participants were disproportionately White, educated, middle to upper class, and nonreligious. Life courses are heterogeneous (Umberson etal., 2010), and future research should adopt a feminist intersectional lens (Few-Demo, Moore, & Abdi, in press) to explore agency within and across race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, education, and class, especially in terms of cultural and material considerations that enable and constrain child- bearing agency such as access to contraception and abortion. Second, the sample included women who had biological children in heterosexual relationships, even though the call did not specify this criterion. Future research could consider the transformation from childless by choice to adoption or surrogacy, which would likely not emphasize accidental conception, but would lend insight into other nuances of individual, relational, and cultural forces that impact agency in nonbiological contexts. Third, this article focused on the individual, relational, and cultural factors that contributed to women’s transformations from childless by choice to mothers but did not explore the implications of this shift on women’s identity management as they moved from a stigmatized to privileged social location. Future research should con- sider how these women negotiate this drastic identity change within these mothers’ social and familial networks, with particular attention to how “choice” is strategically employed in conversation about childbearing transformations (Morison et al., 2016).

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