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"  My mother was the first to diagnose my fertility problem. She delivered her verdict not long after my thirtieth birthday, during a family vacation to Iceland a couple of years ago. After dropping my sleepy father off at the hotel, my mother, my sister, Alissa, and I had settled into a caf\u00E9; to discuss our itinerary over goblets of wine. Soon tipsy and looking back home with that distant, wide-screen perspective, Alissa and I began instead to fantasize recklessly about our life trajectories.  With a new wedding ring on her finger, a promotion at the bank, and private parking at the condo she and her husband own, Alissa, who is three years younger than I am, has all but the two-kids part of her plan. My own dreams have been more amorphous. For a long time, I only ever imagined a one-bedroom future for myself, in which I&amp;#039;d be busy writing and creating, reading and thinking. Not long after meeting my boyfriend eight years ago, I saw the merits of sharing a home and a life with someone. And then when I passed the 30-year milestone, I started considering expanding the walls of my future to accommodate a child or two.  When I mentioned this aloud, my mom&amp;#039;s eyes bulged and she slapped her palms on the table. &amp;quot;But you don&amp;#039;t want kids!&amp;quot; she bellowed. &amp;quot;From the time you yourself were a child, you&amp;#039;ve always said you don&amp;#039;t want any!&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;I know,&amp;quot; I said, feeling a little defensive but trying not to sound it. &amp;quot;And I&amp;#039;m not saying I want kids. I&amp;#039;m saying I might want kids. Not right away...but someday. Maybe?&amp;quot;  My mother drained her glass. Then she stared hard at me and forbade me to have children. She expounded on the exorbitant cost of child-rearing and the near impossibilities of juggling a career and family. She enumerated the sacrifices, financial and otherwise, that she and my dad had made for us. She confessed that raising us was harder than she&amp;#039;d ever imagined, and if she hadn&amp;#039;t harbored such an all-encompassing desire for children\u2014if motherhood hadn&amp;#039;t always been her aspiration\u2014she&amp;#039;d never have survived the journey.  When she was finished, she took a deep breath and said, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m serious. You and K. can&amp;#039;t afford to have a child right now, and by the time the two of you make enough money to raise one, you&amp;#039;ll probably be too old to conceive.&amp;quot;  Considering that I didn&amp;#039;t have enough money to pick up our drinks, never mind the flight to Iceland (my sister still doesn&amp;#039;t know that our parents covered my trip), Mom had a point. Still, it&amp;#039;s jarring to hear anyone\u2014much less one&amp;#039;s own mother\u2014refer to a baby as a line-item consideration. Women are supposed to talk about childbearing as an emotional or physical undertaking, not an economic one. Our maternal competence should transcend financial concerns, right? Try to engage parents of any age in a discussion about the expense of kids, and they tend to give you the Baby Field of Dreams speech, the essence of which is: &amp;quot;If you have them, you will find a way to afford them.&amp;quot; Variations on this include, &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll figure it out,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ll find a way,&amp;quot; and my favorite, the utterly unedifying tautology, &amp;quot;If everyone waited to have kids until they could afford them, then no one would ever have kids.&amp;quot;  K. and I have been living together for three years. We&amp;#039;re not married, but we&amp;#039;re warming to the idea. We make each other happy, and we think it&amp;#039;d be fun and meaningful to host a party celebrating our love and commitment to each other. However, we don&amp;#039;t feel any familial, religious, or romantic pressure to do this, and there are other goals that require our attention right now (such as establishing our careers, finding creative fulfillment, etc.). We just don&amp;#039;t see any reason to rush.  A child, however, would present an excellent reason to rush. And when it comes to starting a family, we\u2014especially I\u2014realize that we don&amp;#039;t have the luxury of time. This is a crucial decade for me, fertility-wise. But I&amp;#039;m missing something critically important, something that might push me off the fence and into motherhood: money. For example, if I continue to follow my current payment schedule, it will take me 11.15 more years to pay off my student loans. I&amp;#039;ll be 43\u2014an age at which doctors say it is rare to conceive a first child without expensive fertility treatments.  K. and I appear to be doing okay, especially given the current dismal state of our economy. Our household income, just over $100,000, is double the U.S. average for our demographic. I&amp;#039;m employed by this magazine to research articles and check facts, and I supplement my salary through freelance writing. K. works in production at an advertising agency. We rent a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn for below market value. It&amp;#039;s true that there&amp;#039;s lots of money to be made in New York: The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that Manhattan&amp;#039;s average weekly wage during the first quarter of 2007 was more than three times the national average ($2,821 per week compared with $885). However, K. and I aren&amp;#039;t the ones making it. We live in New York because we believe it provides fertile soil for our creative and intellectual aspirations. We each put down roots here more than 10 years ago and can&amp;#039;t imagine thriving anywhere else.  In the course of our daily lives, as we pay bills, buy groceries, and treat ourselves to a movie, we don&amp;#039;t feel poor. But when we&amp;#039;re hit with an unexpected dental expense, tax payment, or wedding invitation, or one of our cats gets sick, our finances are thrown into chaos. That&amp;#039;s when we realize we&amp;#039;re only one invoice away from more debt and depression. How are we going to come up with an extra $16,540 next year, or the year after? That&amp;#039;s how much the USDA says that couples who make an average of $116,900 and live in the urban Northeast are spending on just the first year of their child&amp;#039;s life.  &amp;quot;Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,&amp;quot; according to Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi&amp;#039;s 2003 book, The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents Are Going Broke. The mother-and-daughter team maintains that married couples with children are more than twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as their childless counterparts, and that families with children are now more likely than anyone else to lose the roof over their heads.  My mom&amp;#039;s fabled intuition had clued her in to a major shift. The challenges of motherhood have changed radically over the past two generations. Real estate prices aren&amp;#039;t syncing up with real salaries, competition for even mediocre homes in good school districts has reached a fever pitch, workdays have seeped into worknights and weekends, and tuitions, preschool to college, are skyrocketing. Average group child-care fees for one infant range from $4,388 to $14,647 a year, according to the National Association of Child Care Resource &amp;amp;amp; Referral Agencies in Arlington, Virginia. The average tuition for Brooklyn preschools is $8,451, and according to recent College Board reports, college tuition can range from an average of $6,185 per year for a four-year public school to $32,307 for a private school\u2014both up about 6 percent from last year.  The least economically prudent decisions K. and I have made in our lives are our MA degrees. Mine is in journalism, his is in painting, and together they&amp;#039;ve cost us about $85 grand, or $650 each month. (It could be worse: Debt for graduate degrees ranges from $27,000 to $114,000, according to the financial aid website FinAid.org.) In those years during which we pursued graduate degrees (and in my case, a new career), we basically borrowed money against our future earning potential. Another huge financial blow came when I spent more than two years freelancing and paying for health insurance out-of-pocket. I should also admit that after the Web design firm I worked for went belly-up in 2001, I didn&amp;#039;t just jump right back into another mid-level executive job. Instead, I moved to Japan for a year.  We&amp;#039;ve been living paycheck to paycheck for years, each month spending and owing right down to the last dollar and beyond. As a couple, we have no liquid savings, no emergency funds, no owned property, no vehicle (perhaps a blessing, given climbing gas prices), and minimal investments (under $10,000 total). The amount we&amp;#039;ve amassed in our 401(k)s would buy us about two to three years&amp;#039; worth of retirement, combined. Worst of all, while we&amp;#039;re both creatively ambitious, neither of us seems to be motivated by money.  Finally, the last reason that my mother has every right to be worried about the financial security of this potential baby is that K. and I both had the terrible luck of falling in love with someone as fiscally unpromising as ourselves. Although I believe that K. is my Prince Charming, it&amp;#039;s unlikely he&amp;#039;ll be able to rescue me from my money woes\u2014or that I could do the same for him.  I don&amp;#039;t think that many couples are capable of truly comprehending just how much it costs for the average middle-class family (the median household income in the U.S. is $48,200) to feed, clothe, house, transport, care for, educate, and raise a child. The U.S. Department of Agriculture&amp;#039;s estimate of that child costing its parents $204,060 from birth to age 17 is widely quoted and also widely criticized for low-balling line items such as the costs of child care, preschool, and housing\u2014as any young couple in a big city will tell you.  &amp;quot;Of course, there are the immediate expenses of having children, but the real issue is that these are not expenses that go away,&amp;quot; says Scott Burns, a syndicated financial columnist, investment adviser, and coauthor of The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know About America&amp;#039;s Economic Future. Burns has calculated that in order to avoid a declining standard of living after having a baby, family income needs to grow at least 7.76 percent a year for almost 18 years. My income increased by exactly zero percent last year and shot up a whopping 3 percent this year. Ditto for K. &amp;quot;The real blessing of having children when you&amp;#039;re young,&amp;quot; Burns says, &amp;quot;is that you&amp;#039;re really clueless about the size of the financial commitment you&amp;#039;ve taken on.&amp;quot;  My dad has never uttered the word grandchild in my presence. But he recently gave K. the book Jim Cramer&amp;#039;s Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer). When he was my age, my dad&amp;#039;s fond of telling me, he had a wife, a kid, a house, and almost two acres of land. Hold on. He&amp;#039;s been telling me that for seven years now, so make that two kids, two houses, and an MBA.  In her book, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, Anya Kamenetz, who was 25 when the book came out in 2006, reassured us that those of us in our twenties and early thirties aren&amp;#039;t simply slacking off. &amp;quot;Young people are falling behind first of all because of money,&amp;quot; she wrote. Tuition costs, student loans, credit-card debt, a dearth of stable living-wage jobs, not to mention satisfying and intellectually fulfilling jobs (and therefore an easy market for graduate schools), stagnating income levels, and lack of health-care coverage are just some of the factors that Kamenetz blames for stunting our financial growth. And check this out: The Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that annual adjusted average hourly earnings were actually less in 2006 than in 1975, the year I was born ($8.24 versus $8.48).  Children, the mother-daughter authors of The Two-Income Trap tell us, have become &amp;quot;the dividing line between the solvent and the insolvent.&amp;quot; Tyagi and Warren show that the typical two-income family in 2000 spent much more of its budget on non-negotiable fixed costs, like mortgage, child care, health insurance, a car, and taxes, than a single-income family did in the early 1970s\u2014leaving less money for extras and, more importantly, emergencies. This means that in today&amp;#039;s family, if one spouse loses a job, say, or the other has to take extended leave to care for a sick parent, or their kids&amp;#039; financial aid doesn&amp;#039;t come through, they&amp;#039;re screwed for the long term.  I&amp;#039;ve been talking to a college friend, C., about how she&amp;#039;s handling money as a new mom. At the close of one of her e-mails on the subject, she wrote, &amp;quot;P.S....I just asked my husband about this in front of my mom, and she said, `Oh, Corrie! Stop thinking.... You just do it. You&amp;#039;ll never have enough money to have kids if you keep thinking about it. It just works.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Note the presence of both C.&amp;#039;s husband and C.&amp;#039;s mother. Here&amp;#039;s one of the ways C. made it work: She sold their three-bedroom home in New Jersey last year so that she, her husband, and their young son could move in with her parents in Pennsylvania. This was mostly so that C.&amp;#039;s husband could take advantage of a career opportunity, but also because my friend, who works part-time, really needed some help with the baby. After 10 months of this arrangement, the couple is paying off business-school loans and has built a house nearby.  So let&amp;#039;s be honest here: If K. and I really wanted to have kids, there are some things we could do. We could relocate to a place\u2014another city, one of our parents&amp;#039; homes\u2014where the cost of living is cheaper. We could seek better-paying, perhaps less satisfying jobs. &amp;quot;Just think,&amp;quot; my friend B. recently reminded me about my life after the layoff, &amp;quot;if you&amp;#039;d stayed in your old career, you&amp;#039;d be making double your salary right now.&amp;quot; (She&amp;#039;s wrong. I&amp;#039;d probably be making triple. But I&amp;#039;d also be spiritually ravaged by marketing TV dinners and chocolate-flavored &amp;quot;dairy snacks&amp;quot; to kids.)  Then there&amp;#039;s the one option that could allow me to remain in this city, in this career, in this standard of living (or better!) and still have a baby or two: I could find a new mate who makes more money. K. could do the same. My mom&amp;#039;s sing-songy &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s just as easy to fall in love with a rich man as it is to fall in love with a poor man&amp;quot; from my childhood echoes eerily now as I think of people I know who were lucky enough to fall in love with wealthy partners. K. and I have both asked ourselves\u2014and each other\u2014if we&amp;#039;d feel so ambivalent about having children together if one of us made a decent salary, or had a trust fund, or was poised for financial success.  My answer? I&amp;#039;m still not sure I&amp;#039;d want a baby, but I&amp;#039;d definitely like to have the option. I&amp;#039;m frustrated at feeling priced out of the market.  For K., it&amp;#039;s not just our lack of funds\u2014 it&amp;#039;s my attitude toward our lack of funds. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think you&amp;#039;re ready to have a baby,&amp;quot; he told me on one of our morning runs (See? Could we do that as parents?). &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t even talk about money without getting all worked up. And if we decide to have a baby, we&amp;#039;re going to have to do some serious talking and make some serious decisions. You can&amp;#039;t handle that right now.&amp;quot;  At the same time, I&amp;#039;m the person driving our kid conversations. When prompted, K. has told me he thinks I&amp;#039;d make a loving, fun-yet-disorganized mother, and I think he&amp;#039;d be a caring, considerate, involved father. We both agree we&amp;#039;d have quirky kids. So we&amp;#039;re open to being coaxed into it by a partner\u2014but neither of us is eager to be that partner.  Then the discussion goes right back to money and, especially, success. There are couples who are able to convince themselves that having a baby in the city on a shoestring budget is an adventure, a big DIY project. I admire them. But K. and I have to admit to ourselves that instead of trying to find a bigger-yet-still-affordable apartment near good public schools and researching day-care options and negotiating telecommuting schedules, we&amp;#039;d rather focus on finding ways to make our talents pay off. Right now, the babies we need to nurture are our aspirations.   When my sister and I were young, my parents were excited about all the possibilities that were opening up for women. They saw in their daughters a spark of ambition and a drive to succeed, and they encouraged us. They assumed that as opportunities for women increased, social systems (e.g., subsidized child care, work-life policies, universal health care) would fall into place to help support our blossoming dreams.  Without those systems, it&amp;#039;s every mother or wannabe-mother for herself. Many of my friends are rising to the challenge. My most complex plan, so far, has been to bring my lunch to work for months at a time, only to blow my newly accumulated savings on baby-shower gifts.  I&amp;#039;ve put a lot of time, energy, and, especially, money into creating a person whose accomplishments and experiences I can be proud of. And I&amp;#039;m not quite there yet. How could I encourage a daughter or a son to aim for the stars in the same way that my parents did? I can&amp;#039;t afford to encourage their ambitions, and I also can&amp;#039;t bear to abort my own.  About a year ago, K. and I put ourselves on a test baby budget. I tracked our spending on a giant spreadsheet. When confronted with a pricey temptation, we&amp;#039;d ask ourselves, &amp;quot;Baby or shoes?&amp;quot; or, &amp;quot;Baby or dinner out?&amp;quot; We were showing remarkable restraint for a few months, until it came to, &amp;quot;Baby or trip to France for friend&amp;#039;s wedding?&amp;quot; Our resolve flagged.  That&amp;#039;s the tricky thing about children, and that&amp;#039;s what makes this investment, the biggest and most irreversible of one&amp;#039;s life, so daunting: You aren&amp;#039;t able to fully comprehend the benefits of a baby until you have one. So as a woman without a profound, innate yearning to be a mom, and with a surplus of ambition yet limited capital, it&amp;#039;s impossible to complete my cost-benefit baby analysis. I come up with too many costs and not enough benefits. I look at my friends who gave up their professional goals, their lifestyles, their homes, and even though I believe them when they say it was worth all the risks and all the sacrifices, I wonder if I&amp;#039;ll feel the same way. Maybe it&amp;#039;s not so much that I can&amp;#039;t afford a baby: It&amp;#039;s that I can&amp;#039;t afford the type of motherhood\u2014flexible, fulfilling, with room to keep pursuing my own goals\u2014that I want, that I think all women deserve.  After more than a year of baby-budgeting and dozens of conversations with K., I still haven&amp;#039;t the slightest clue about how the two of us could make it work. At the same time, we&amp;#039;ve been spending a lot of time with new-parent friends. I&amp;#039;ve been struck by how tenderly K. holds the infants, how earnestly he questions the moms and dads about their quotidian schedules. We don&amp;#039;t grill them about money. When we leave, we&amp;#039;re both feeling a little baby-giddy. But by the time we get home, open our mail, feed our cats, and settle into our small but cozy rental, that feeling has faded.  Back in Iceland, I put my mom on the spot. &amp;quot;Am I selfish?&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;No, I don&amp;#039;t think you&amp;#039;re selfish,&amp;quot; she told me. &amp;quot;But you have so much freedom. You&amp;#039;ll have to give all of that up. Knowing you, I just think you&amp;#039;ll be very unhappy.It was hard for women like me, and we wanted kids!&amp;quot;  Then she started backpedaling. She loves me, she loves K., she&amp;#039;d like to see us get to a point where we can start a family of our own. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to completely talk you out of having kids,&amp;quot; she said, and then began reminiscing about our family vacations and how much fun K. and I could have with our own children, &amp;quot;skiing, spending time at the summer cottage, traveling.&amp;quot; She paused. &amp;quot;Oh, wait. You won&amp;#039;t have the time or money for that stuff. Never mind.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a9266/cradle-robber-19687/>