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For other elderly parents, the changes made by the pandemic have helped clarify their boundaries in painful ways, even if they bring something akin to wisdom.
Sarah Balcomb, a writer who has a 9-year-old daughter and lives in Lexington, Va., realized that she was permanently done with reproduction as Hemingway once described fracture: gradually and then all at once.
Ms. Balcomb, 47, had been trying various fertility treatments for years and was considering an insured IVF treatment in early 2020. But she and her husband adopted a puppy in late March, and her nocturnal trips from the crate to the yard and back have given her some punishing instinctive flashbacks in the first months of her life with a newborn human.
The second night, he said, the sleep deprivation produced an enlightenment. Going to respond to the puppy’s whining, he said, “The weight of all this has come down on me,” citing the pandemic, polarized politics, climate change, economic inequality, and systemic racism as causes. “I knew that night was over.”
Now, though she regrets a little that her daughter doesn’t have a sibling, she said that there was nothing that could change her mind except the sudden outbreak of a utopia. “Even if we’re super rich and can get full-time help, no thanks. If the planet was miraculously corrected and there was no more war and we were rich, then. …”
There are also epidemic divorces. Rates increased nationwide after the first year of the pandemic (though it’s hard to say whether these are related to the pandemic, of course; the lump could be the result of a massive court closure). For parents of young children who have not survived the pandemic with their relationships intact, the odds of having more children in the future seem much lower than they once were.
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