By Rachel Lehmann Haupt

The Sweetness of Doing Nothing is excerpted from In Her Own Sweet Time: Egg Freezing and the New Frontiers of Family by Rachel Lehmann Haupt (Nothing But the Truth, 2016)


It is freezing outside, one of those February days when the city sidewalks shimmer and seem warmer than the air. I’m sitting by the window in my apartment, staring out at a pink and orange sunset over the glassy buildings of Hoboken, New Jersey. Flocks of pigeons swoop down in circles over the rooftops of the West Village. It’s windy, and whitecaps dot the thin slice of the Hudson River that I can see from my window.

I usually love this view, my tiny sliver of the world—¬especially at this time of day, when the golden light warms the faded red brick of the old AT&T building. When I’m anxious or sad or have a big decision to make, watching the light and the water calms me.

But today this view is not making me calm. I’m stressed and overwhelmed; my sliver of the world feels claustrophobic. A few days earlier, Will, one of my best male friends, and I were talking on the phone, and I told him how down I was feeling. I’m tired of all this thinking about family and the future.

I’m fed up with dating and the pressure I’ve put myself under to create a family on a tight schedule.
Will was sympathetic. He told me that he and two of his friends were heading down to the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica in a few weeks, and he asked me if I wanted to join them as a way to chill out. But I don’t really feel comfortable with the idea of being the only woman in a group of male friends; I worry that I’ll feel like a fourth wheel.

Whenever I feel confused in this way, I usually call my friend Mollie. She is the friend I laugh with the hardest; we see the world through a similar lens of absurdity. She is also the friend who seems to constantly lap me in relationships. In the time that I’ve been looking for love, Mollie has married, divorced, and fallen in love—twice, I think. She is about to move to New Zealand with her latest love for no reason other than to see what it’s like to live upside down like a Kiwi for a while. The way Mollie lives her life is a constant reminder that marriage and happiness aren’t the same thing.

Mollie’s exuberance comes from within her, regardless of whether she’s in a relationship or not.

One of my favorite memories of Mollie is a weekend we spent at her parents’ house on Martha’s Vineyard. One afternoon we paddled plastic kayaks to her favorite spot in the bay to go clam digging at low tide. Mollie’s a pro—she was pulling clams out of the ground every minute while I kept coming up dry.

“I’m never gonna find a clam, I’m never gonna find a clam,” I griped.

By the end of the afternoon, my bikini was covered in ocean mud and salt. We decided to head back home. But just as I was getting into my kayak, I stepped backward and felt a hard edge. I bent down, dug around in the sand, and pulled up the biggest clam I’ve ever seen.

“Mollie, look!” I yelled, holding up a monstrous five-pounder.

“Wow! You found the mother of all clams,” she said, in a deadpan voice.

We both collapsed into the mud in hysterics.


Mollie is one of those intensely sensitive people who always understands the kind of mood I’m in without my having to explain too much. So today, I call her and say, “I don’t know. . . . I’m just feeling constricted and stressed about the future.”

She’s quiet for a few seconds, then responds. “I think you need to let go of everything, just live your life, and be still.”

My immediate question, of course, is, how exactly will I do this? I’ve never been very good at being still—in fact my entire personality is the opposite of still. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been a thrill seeker and an adventurer. My father’s theory is that it’s connected to when I was twelve and a half months old and my parents woke me up in the middle of the night to catch an early plane to Puerto Rico. “You just loved the excitement of being up and moving when no one else was.”


That’s the way I’ve been for as long as I can remember—thrilled by the great unknown. Climbing a glacier in the Trinity Alps of Northern California, staring into a marble mine in western Portugal, kayaking on the Sea of Cortez, camping in a thunderstorm on a black sand beach on the big island of Hawaii, or dancing in the desert under a pink parasol at the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada—these are the times when I’ve felt most alive.

But since I moved back home to New York and began focusing on my career, I feel like I’ve lost touch with my adventurousness, as if it’s something I need to abandon in order to become more serious, focused, and adult. And all of the time I’ve spent trying to find Mr. Right hasn’t helped either.

Dating with intent is definitely a huge time suck.

I realize, ironically, that what she means by being still is that I need to remember how to live in the moment again and let go of worrying about the future as if marriage and children are the only routes to becoming a legitimate adult woman in the eyes of my peers. I tell Mollie that she’s right. I need to start enjoying being single, looking at it as a positive experience of freedom instead of getting bogged down and beating myself up for not having achieved the things that are supposed to be the keys to a happy life.

And who knows, after all, if the keys to happiness even work? The divorce rates in America are staggering, after all, and I know plenty of women—single friends, widows, divorcées—who seem perfectly happy to be on their own. I push our phone conversation in this direction after Mollie reminds me that she discovered after her divorce that marriage with the idea of creating a family was not the be-all and end-all. Even if you think you’ve found Mr. Right, she reminds me, there are no assurances that life after that will go according to plan.

Mollie’s right, of course. While I believe personally that life is sweeter in love and partnership, lots of other women seem to feel differently—especially after choosing the wrong partner.

And there is, in fact, a good deal of evidence that achieving the so-called happy life—a monogamous partnership and children—may not make us so happy after all. In his book Gross National Happiness, Arthur C. Brooks argues, based on extensive research and number crunching, that although people who are married tend to report that they are a little happier than people who are not, having children makes them unhappier. “The evidence is that marital happiness takes a nose¬dive as couples move from childlessness to having their first baby, and it continues to plummet until about the time the oldest child starts school.” He also finds that a couple’s happiness plummets again when the kids become teenagers—and only rises back to pre-child levels after the youngest has left home. His most important finding, perhaps, is that people who decide not to have kids are just as happy in later life as the people who did have children—and they don’t regret not having them.

I tell Mollie that maybe this goal I’m so obsessively focused on might not even be the answer I’m looking for, that maybe I just to need refocus my energies on trying to be happy right now, just as I am.

I start thinking that maybe a trip to Costa Rica isn’t such a bad idea after all, and I mention the invitation to Mollie.

“Go!” she says.

Maybe this is my chance to try being still.

______




Rachel Lehmann-Haupt is one of the nation’s premier experts on the future of family life, career timing, and the influence of science and technology on fertility and pregnancy. In her writing and speaking, she gives a personal face and offers life strategies to the most relevant social trends that intimately affect women’s lives. Learn more about In Her Own Time at inherownsweettime.com, at Facebook.com/InHerOwnSweetTime and follow Rachel at @rlehmannhaupt.


Photos courtesy the author
Published: July 13, 2016