Delicate Mother-Daughter Subjects: Don't Talk, Write!

Today is the publication date for the paperback edition of Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? the book I wrote with my daughter Samantha Henig. To celebrate its release, here's the transcript of the story Sam and I told last February as part of the wonderful storytelling series Story Collider. Story Collider stories all relate somehow to science (check it out and listen to the podcasts), and the theme for our event was Love & Science (it was held a week before Valentine's Day). It took place at the Lower East Side bar Drom, which was much too cool for me but just right for Sam.

You can listen to the podcast of our performance—but what you can't hear, on the podcast or in the following text, is the thump-thump-thumping of my own heart. Telling a story in front of a live audience is SCARY.

So here goes:

ROBIN: My daughter Samantha and I have always been close.

We formed a mother-daughter book club when Sam was in 5th grade that lasted all the way through high school graduation. It was a great way to talk about things without really talking about them. When we read a book by Alice McDermott called That Night about a pregnant teenager when the girls were about 12 or 13, I remember Sam saying that the scariest thing about having sex for the first time was knowing she would have to tell her mother about it.

SAM: And I did tell her about it—and also that our first time hadn't really worked, because we couldn't find my vagina.

ROBIN: In her early 20s, Sam lived with a boyfriend, and then later, with another boyfriend, and in those two stretches we talked a fair amount about her relationships. But when she was 25, the love and sex chatter basically stopped. Sam started living the life of a single woman in New York, and she didn't tell me much about her dating life. I didn't know who she dated, I didn't know IF she dated. I didn't know if she was still on the pill, even though I had been the one who'd made the gynecologist appointment for her to start it back in high school. It was the first time she was so closed down about her love life, and I think it was because she sensed that I was too eager for her to pair up again.

And then just in case I hadn't made it clear, I put my foot in it.

My husband and I were at a restaurant with Sam one night when I asked her about a date she'd just gone on with a guy she'd met at a friend's wedding. I asked her how the date had gone. Sam said he had been a perfectly nice guy, it had been a perfectly nice date, but it wasn't going to go anywhere because he didn't make her feel "glowy."

"Well, you know, Sam," I said. Even I could tell from my tone that I was about to say something I'd regret, but for some reason I couldn't stop myself. "You're almost 27. Maybe you shouldn't really be expecting to feel 'glowy' anymore."

Of course, as soon as I said it, I thought, "Oh, shit, what did I just say?" My head knew that she was way too young to start talking about settling for something less than glowy, but my heart was kind of worried about whether Sam would ever find a guy in time to settle down and have a family. I knew she wanted kids, and I definitely wanted grandkids. But I was already picturing a future where she kept talking herself out of whatever perfectly good guy she met, and that in the end she'd be left alone and looking for a sperm donor.

SAM: Just to fact-check for a moment about that “glowy” line—my mother didn’t say “You’re almost 27.” She said “You're 27.” Which I wasn’t. I was still 26. Like, just to hammer home the point that she was jumping the gun on my need to settle down, she was already inflating my age.

ROBIN: BY TWO WEEKS.

OK, so that was pretty awful as it was for me to have said that. I totally agree. But it was even worse than you'd think. This wasn't just a stupid mother saying such a terrible and obnoxious thing to her 27-year-old daughter. This was a stupid mother who had just signed a contract to write a book with that 27-year-daughter about what it's like to be in your twenties.

SAM: Yeah, I was a little worried that night, thinking that we were going to be writing a book that was specifically about being in your twenties and either married or not married.

The book is called Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? It started as an article my mother wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 2010 that was the most emailed story of the year, and when publishers came to her asking her to expand it into a book, she said she'd only do it if her daughter could join her as co-author. The way we decided to write it, we focus on the twenties as the time of life when people are forced to start making choices and closing some doors, after having been told their whole lives to leave their options open. The book is mostly about behavioral and social science research into such matters as decision-making, employment trajectories, brain maturation, the psychology of regret, changes in fertility, that sort of thing.

Since my mother was the one with the long history of science writing, and I was the one with a full-time job, we decided that she would do most of the researching and writing. Mom wrote about the research and a little bit about her own twenties, and my job was to add my own personal perspective and tell my own stories.

To head off any major blow-ups, I set a couple of ground rules. The main one was that just because I wrote something in a draft did not mean that the subject was open for further discussion. I had to be able to write experiences that had upset me without my mother getting all pouty and sympathetic and trying to help, or to talk about crushes without her breaking out some Ben and Jerry's for an all-night gabfest. This was business, and the emotions and stories that I put on the page had to stay there. She could critique the way I was presenting the stories, as a co-author and editor, but she couldn’t engage with their content matter as a mother. She basically abided by that, but not always.

ROBIN: OK, just to show you how restrained I had to be, here's one of the things Sam wrote: "I've already let go of my previous notions of how long I should be dating someone before we get married." What Jewish mother would fail to ask a follow-up question to that statement?

Or this: "At 27, I have an ever-increasing string of non-marital romantic relationships in my wake—I'll leave the exact number vague, as one does when one's mother is present."

SAM: And I'll continue to leave the number vague, since my mother is still present.

It would make a nicer story if we could say that in the process of writing the book, we came upon some reassuring studies that made my mother feel better about me being single. But in a way it only made it worse.

There was one study, for instance, that looked at people who got married at different ages and assessed how happy their marriages were, and it found that the people who had the happiest marriages had gotten married between the ages of 22 and 25. That was not reassuring.

There were also the findings from a couple of studies looking at what accounted for happy long-term relationships. And they found that the people who were happiest in their marriages were not the ones with the longest string of sexual partners. In fact, according to researchers from the Kinsey Institute, the higher the number of lifetime sexual partners in the men they studied, the lower their satisfaction in their current relationship. And in another study that looked at overall happiness, for maximum happiness, guess what was the ideal number of sex partners in the previous year? One.

So these studies brought us to the end of Chapter 5, "Love and Marriage," with my mother not feeling a whole lot more sanguine about my singledom.

ROBIN: Luckily, there was Chapter 6, which we called "Baby Carriage."

At first I assumed this chapter would dig us in even deeper and make it all even more upsetting for me, because I REALLY want grandchildren.

SAM: I KNOW.

ROBIN: We thought we'd find a lot of evidence about waning fertility. And as it turned out, there WERE several studies that showed that it's harder to get pregnant once you're out of your twenties, including harder to get pregnant through IVF. But there was one little nugget of a positive finding that we both have been holding on to, and it's this—according to John Mirowski of the University of Texas, the "best" age to have a baby is a lot older than you'd think.

Mirowski tried to figure out the "best" age according to the different ways of defining "best." If you mean the age when you're most likely to get pregnant and keep a pregnancy, Mirowski says that it IS the late teens or early twenties for a first baby. If you define "best" in terms of the health of the infant, he says that's 26. Neither of those made me feel much better about Sam's future.

But if you define "best" in terms of what's best for the mother, older is better. According to the studies that Mirowski analyzed in his paper, the best age at first birth in terms of the mother's long-term health is 31. And the best age at first birth in terms of the mother's overall longevity is even older, 34.

So if the reason I was obsessing about Sam being single is that I worried that she was getting too old to have babies, the Mirowski study helped me relax a little.

SAM: Oh, yeah, I must have missed that moment of relaxation.

After we finished our book, there was an article on page one of the New York Times about the trend of mothers paying $15,000 for their unmarried daughters to freeze their eggs. I thought I should tweet that and say I could totally see my mother doing this for me and my sister. But instead I got an email from my mother asking if we should write a blog post about it.

ROBIN: I thought that a blog post about the article would be a good opportunity for book publicity.

Sam and I had mentioned egg freezing in our chapter about childbearing. While we were writing it, I remembered, I had actually raised the subject with her. I asked her whether she had ever thought about freezing her eggs.

And she had said, "Are you crazy? I'm only 27 years old, it's way too soon to be thinking about that." I actually did NOT think it was way too soon to be thinking about that, I thought it was exactly the right moment to be thinking about that. But I'd already learned my lesson with the glowy thing, and I kept my mouth shut.

But I figured it would be OK to slug it out in a blog post. So I wrote to the editor of the Motherlode blog of the Times to see if she wanted us to write something in response to that article, and she said yes.

SAM: The next day Mom and I went back and forth with our writing via email. She sent me a draft saying that she was upset to find that the average age of women who freeze their eggs in the US is 37.4. She thought that was much too late, and that studies showed that probably only about 1 in 10 with them would be able to have a baby if they tried to have IVF in their 40s using those eggs. So her conclusion was that parents should be having conversations about egg freezing with their daughters a lot earlier, when their daughters were in their twenties and their eggs were still young.

That attitude really pissed me off. I emailed back a version with my inserts, saying that I thought it was really funny that my mother's view of how to fix this problem was to get parents involved in their daughter's decision-making even earlier. I wrote, "Who says they should be involved at all?" I wrote that this was all about infantilizing single women, that my parents never inserted themselves into the reproductive choices of my older married sister.

I also thought that egg freezing as a twentysomething would feel like admitting defeat too soon. It cost some serious money, and involved some serious hormones and other health risks, and I thought it was crazy to go through all that just on the off chance that my marital timetable might not go according to plan.

ROBIN: I understood Sam's criticisms and kept them all in. In fact, I'd say that most of the commenters on that blog post agreed with Sam and thought I was an annoying intrusive mother who should get a life.

In a way, in this blog exchange we were going back to a habit we'd started when Sam was in fifth grade as our way of talking about touchy subjects. Something that might have been hard to talk about in a heart-to-heart at the kitchen table we were able to talk about in public, either in front of the other book club members when we talked about teenage sexuality, or in front of the millions of New York Times readers when we talked about twentysomething fertility. We're still in the habit of using book-talk to disguise some really tricky mother-daughter conversations.