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I’m Terrified to Have Kids, but Still Want to
People say if you’re not 100% sure — don’t. What if it’s not that black-and-white?
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When I was a little girl, I liked playing with dolls. I liked inventing stories in my head, and acting them out using Barbies or Groovy Girls or Bratz. Remember Bratz?! My stories usually revolved around romance and adventure. They almost never involved kids, unless I had some child dolls laying around — then maybe they’d play a small side character.
My sister, on the other hand, played with toy babies. She liked playing the role of the mother — feeding the baby, burping it, changing its diaper.
She grew up always knowing that she wanted to have her own kids someday. By age 28, she’d birth two beautiful boys.
The older I got, the more convinced I felt that I would never have kids.
I stood firm on this until I was about 28. At the age my sister decided she was done having kids, I started thinking I might want them.
One conversation with Alex, the man who would become my fiancé, flipped that switch in my mind. I realized it wasn’t that I didn’t want kids — I just didn’t want the typical 9–5, middle-class parent life I grew up around.
When I would envision what motherhood looked like, I thought of myself sweeping vigorously to try to work some extra baby weight off…
while something cried in the other room…
and my husband was at work, possibly flirting with a receptionist…
and the peak of my week was Fishbowl Fridays at Boston Pizza with my girlfriends.
I never believed that parenthood could look different — that I could fit it into my life, rather than trying to reshape myself into it.
After having latent romantic feelings for me throughout our 14-year friendship, Alex had written me off because I’d always said I didn’t want kids. Then one evening while a bunch of friends were in his hot tub, he asked me, “What makes you not want kids?”
I said, “I just don’t think I’d be happy as a mom.”
