I can't believe I forgot to have children

You’ve seen it.  The pop art Roy Lichtenstein 50s-ish cartoon of the woman in tears bemoaning the fact that she “forgot to have children”. 

I decided to use this photo not because it’s true but because I thought it was funny.  With that said, I did think it might be fun to do a little breakdown of my attitude towards being a mother through my years.  It helps me to understand myself and also other women where they’re at on this topic based on their age and experiences.

18 – When I was around this age I was suddenly overcome with the thought of being a mother.  I think it was largely because I was without direction in life and thought this would give me purpose.  I was also dating a much older, dominant and (as it turned out) abusive man who was the only person ever to ask me to marry him (whew!  Dodged that bullet), so it seemed like a possibility.

20-30 – These were the childless and carefree years.  I don’t think I thought about motherhood much at this time, which I believe is normal.  I was building a career, swept up in my new hobby, enjoying this wild life of late nights and obsessions.  I thought kids were horrible and why would anyone want one?  They ruin your life, don’t you know that?  They take away all your fun!

30-35 – At this age a funny thing started happening.  All, and I mean ALL, of my single girlfriends started getting married and having babies.  Suddenly no one was available for long leisurely strolls at the mall or lingering over dinners or movies on week nights.  God bless ‘em, they tried, but when a two year old is done, he is DONE.  This close knit group of friends I had spent years cultivating started to fall apart as everyone except me started pairing off and having kids.  It hit me that everyone had turned inward; their husbands and babies were their priorities now, not me.  If I needed emotional support, forget it, they’ve got a baby to breastfeed.  If I wanted to do something spontaneously, better be prepared to do it by myself.  I personally didn’t feel anything like a ticking biological clock, but I did bitterly come to understand something nobody ever warns you about – that as you get older, everyone around you gets married and has kids and your carefully constructed fun single life starts to collapse, and HARD.  This was also the era when I decided it was time to grab some of that lovin’ for myself, so I signed up on every internet dating site available (YES, including e-harmony, which is a total rip off by the way) and went on hundreds, and I mean hundreds, of dates, none of which ever led anywhere.

35-37 – At this point I gave up.  Every even brief dating experience I had (and they got briefer as the years went by – most not making it past three or four dates and one very disappointing attempt at something resembling sex) only confirmed what I already knew- that it was too late, that there was no one out there for me, that I wasn’t going to find someone in time to have a kid of my own.  So I stopped.  I decided to honor the life I did have, live it to the fullest, and try to make the most of it.  And this was a positive impulse, and one I’m really glad I followed through with.  I stopped the manic search for a mate and slowed down and enjoyed my life.  I met new people, I saw the world.  I can’t say I felt a biological clock at this point, although I did think about it a lot in a sad, “oh, well,” kind of way.  At one point around 35 I got really into the idea of international adoption (oh, I’m sure it was some Oprah episode that put the idea in my head), and I laid out this whole plan of how if I hadn’t met anyone by 40 I would start the process of adopting an older child from Russia or Ukraine.  And I’m not saying this is a bad idea or isn’t still an option for me.  However, a couple of things happened – one, the home equity I was going to use to finance one of these $40,000 + adoptions disappeared.  Then I started hearing horror stories of some of these orphanage kids – how they have “attachment disorder” and turn into violent little monsters.  Then the whole international adoption system got turned on its head and as far as I know has still not returned to the early 2000s free and easy system it once had.  I also was going through the horrendous “split” with my mother that kept me emotionally occupied for a couple of years; thinking about parenting at that time would have been totally impossible. So, I let that one drop.  I got a dog instead.

38 – or the “Catch-38” as that Sex and the City episode so eloquently put it.  As discussed earlier, the end of a seemingly promising brief relationship coupled with my aunt’s death a week later sent me into a tailspin of grief, guilt, and lost opportunities, and suddenly it was like my genes were crying out to be propagated.  My very body was telling me, “you need to do this, and you need to do it NOW.” 

So, now I get it when people talk about that clock.  It’s not that I forgot to have children (does any woman alive ever not think about having children?), that I actively didn’t want them (except for those early 20s years where I think it’s appropriate to not want children yet), and it’s not that I didn’t do my damndest to create a nuclear family once I hit my thirties.  It’s that a confluence of events occurred just at the right time and place to make me realize there’s no better time than the present.  I wish it had been earlier, but I understand why this would have been impossible.  And I would NEVER be the kind of person to push other women into parenthood with that old, “don’t wait too long!!!” panic-ridden stance that I used to find so infuriating.  I guess the moral here is to respect everyone’s choices – the women who get right in there and have kids young, the women who wait, the women who pass.  It’s all good.