Who's Your Mommy?

I knew that becoming a parent would change me. I just didn't know how.

- Olga Khazan

In the spring of 2022, I was 36 years old and jumping up and down in my bathroom, trying to figure out my future. I had ordered a fertility test online that said it would provide fast results with just a few drops of blood. The videos on the company's website featured a smiling blond woman jumping-to stimulate blood flow, naturally and then effortlessly dribbling blood from her fingertips all over a little strip of test paper. All I had to do was be like her. Joyful. Sanguineous. Fertile.

For years, my husband, Rich, and I had gingerly walked the prime meridian between wanting and not wanting kids, usually leaning toward the "no" side. Having a baby had seemed unaffordable and impossible. On days when I finished work at 8 p.m., the thought of procreating made me laugh, then shudder.

Recently, though, I'd begun to reconsider. I was in the midst of an admittedly strange-sounding project: I was spending a year trying to change my personality. According to a scientific personality test I'd taken, I scored sky-high on neuroticism, a trait associated with anxiety and depression, and low on agreeableness and extroversion. I lived in a constant, clenched state of dread, and it was poisoning my life. My therapist had stopped laughing at my jokes.

But I had read some scientific research suggesting that you can change your personality by behaving like the kind of person you wish you were. Several studies show that people who want to be, say, less isolated or less anxious can make a habit of socializing, meditating, or journaling. Eventually these habits will come naturally, knitting together to form new traits.

I knew that becoming a parent had the potential to change me in even more profound ways. But I had no idea how. My own mother once said to me, "I can't picture you as a mother." The truth was, neither could I.