I started this post about 9 months ago. At the end of 2015, I was writing quite a bit about the year that was ending: my travel, my reading projects. This was to be part of that year-in-review, under the title The Year I Came to Terms with Not Having Children or something. I got straight through the first part: the moment of realization, but almost immediately after that I got stuck. In the intervening time, I've opened it now and then and added little bits and taken away other little bits, but it hasn't actually changed much until today. Now I think it's time to accept that, even if I have more I might say on the topic, it's all really directed at myself anyway; that this is enough and I can just stop. So, here we go:
I can pinpoint the moment I came to terms with the idea of being childless. It was in July of last year and I was riding in a car with my dad somewhere in upstate New York. I had been restless for several months; or maybe years. I was thinking about selling my apartment, paying off all my debts, and moving somewhere cheap. I'd been floating this idea off and on for some time, and last summer it was very much on. Anyway, I was in the car with my dad driving through a lovely part of upstate New York and it hit me in a way it had never hit me before. I could sell my apartment and walk away from everything if I wanted. I could do whatever I wanted. I could move anywhere. I would never have to pay anyone else's college tuition. (For some reason the college tuition thing hit particularly hard; that was the singular thought that crystallized it all for me.) I realized that I only had to worry about getting myself by until, well, death and doing that didn't sound so hard. That may come off as selfish or morbid or both. But I felt like a huge weight was suddenly lifted off me.
I wanted kids. I was 23 when my ex-husband proposed to me and before I accepted, I said, "You know I want kids." I was married to him for 6 years. They were all financially insecure years and kids were always presumed to be in the future for us, until there was no future for us.
In the 10 years since we split up, I've been in a couple relationships, but mostly I've been single. The idea that having kids might not be in the cards for me (at least in the conditions I'd imagined: natural children who were the product of a relationship) first hit me around the time I turned 35. At the time, it was just one part of a larger life reevaluation. I realized I was not at all where I had expected to be at that age and decided to make some changes. The big change I made was going back to school for a master's degree, something I never thought I'd do. I figured that if my personal life wasn't where I wanted it to be, I might as well throw myself into my professional life. I told a few people at the time that I was starting to accept I might never have kids. I think I was testing the idea to see how it felt. The universal reaction at the time was that I was speaking too soon, that I had plenty of time. These days people don't say that. I'm 40 and very single (not in the 'dates a lot' way, these days, but in the 'doesn't date at all' way), so it's hard to argue with. When I still hoped I might have kids, I used to mentally give myself until 42 -- the age at which a former supervisor of mine got pregnant after marrying for the first time at 40 -- but turning 40 (in fact, being 39 and anticipating 40 on the horizon) seemed like a good enough time to just call it.
