I waited and waited and waited, all the while making myself look the beast - the perfect, new, sweet, gorgeous, six-pound beast - in the face. I would wait for the full-blown panic attack that would inevitably follow the realization that if I wanted this to be mine, I would have to figure something out right now, and even then, it would be a total unlikely crapshoot. Waiting to be washed away in waves of regret over bad relationship decisions, bad life decisions, bad whatever decisions that had brought me to this age childless.
Here, then, was the showdown I had been both looking for and avoiding: Here we go, this is it, no distractions now! If my biological clock, the unforgiving overlord of every woman’s life (or so we are conditioned to think, basically from birth), is going explode into 1 million pieces and rip my heart to shreds, now’s the time. There we would stay, silently together, and even after I was confident he was soundly asleep and knew I could safely open my computer without waking him, I would force myself to continue to stare at him. Is there another deeper, more meaningful word for magical? It was that. We’d sit in the darkened, now-quiet living room, he’d hold my fingers, we’d gaze into each other’s eyes, and I would sing to him until he fell peacefully asleep. Every night while my sister put the kids to bed, or took some much-needed time to rest herself, I would take my nephew. The part that remains crystal clear in my mind, however, are the evenings I would spend alone with the newborn. The two weeks I spent there have since become a blur: overwhelming, glorious, exhausting. Four days before I arrived, she’d given birth to my nephew, and he was now home with my niece, 3 ½, and my other nephew, 5.
Then, last month I went to help my sister take care of her three children. What If You Just Don’t Know If You Want Kids? It was less a pressing need to have a child than a deep, nagging fear that I wouldn’t be okay without one. Having kids is not something a woman can back-burner forever, and as I’ve watched friends take the leap, the reality that I would not be able to leave to fate the matter of children much longer persistently crept to the forefront of my mind. This fall I turned 40 and found myself at the nexus of a particularly modern phenomenon: In the last year, many of my friends have either married for the first time, divorced for the first time, or had their first child. It was something I knew I was supposed to want, but never went after with the fierceness of some of my friends, or the fierceness I apply to other goals. I’ve been surrounded by children for much of my adult life, gratefully so - and yet for me, the idea of motherhood has always been a nebulous thing, hovering somewhere in the distance, out of my direct line of sight. I’ve known more than a few who, for reasons having to do with upbringing, genetics, economics, and so forth, have always known they didn’t and actively chose not to have them. I’ve known plenty of women who always knew they wanted children.
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