Kids on the side, please...

Several years ago, three or four to be exact, I felt my biology getting the best of me. I really had a strong urge to get married and have children. When a babysat, I luxuriated in the feeling of falling asleep with a baby nearby.

It was curious, because having children was something I always wanted, but had never really paid much mind to extensively. I dreamed about pregnancy, and battled the strong urge that was almost primal to hold a child in my arms that was my own.

Now, several years, a few heartbreaks and reality checks later, I am experiencing the inverse: I am seriously thinking about a life without marriage or children. Recently I told a relative that marriage was like having mustard on a sandwich, I could do with it or without it. Because of my religious beliefs, I would not have a child out of wedlock, although I wouldn't rule out adoption.

I am left to wonder what happened to that fuzzy flurry of maternal longings? It seemed to dry up. I suppose part of it is reality setting in. I am now living on my own, struggling to make it in my career, and realizing that I am at a stage where there are things I want to do that having a child now would prohibit. This, I believe is not a feeling of selfishness, but selflessness. I know a child takes most of your attention. Children need stability. How do we balance this in today's economy, when you have 25 year olds still living at home because they can't afford to make it? How do you balance that with your dreams and the Thing You Were Born To Do?

I wouldn't want to be a parent that worked so many long hours I missed seeing my child grow up, and yet, I also wouldn't want to be stuck at home with no other identity but mommy all day long, either.

I suppose I thought this business about "being grown up" was about freedom, but the reality is the freest moments we had may have been in childhood, before we had bills, and kids, and jobs. I'm not free, I'm indebted to the choices I have made for my life, and I guess part of me is saddened by that.

This leads me to wonder if I am fit for children.


Of course after you move closer to thirty than twenty, and people stop worrying about you having children pre-maturely, they start asking, if not now, then when? The answer is I don't know. I don't feel I am at the point in my life where If I wanted kids I would be ready for them yet, but the questioning, and the general pressures on women to as Chris Rock says to treat life as a sale and "...get the most out of life before things close down..." is upon me, which makes me feel anxious and rushed.

Of course men have the opposite problem. They are encouraged to wait as long as possible not to have children, and as a result, they usually end up having long tern relationships with numerous women who would probably make great mothers, of whom they have no intention of marrying. It is quixotic; I often feel it is unfair that men wait until late in life to "settle down" and when they do it is usually with a younger woman after they've spent most of their life being Georgie Porgies.

But the more I think about it I realize I am not ready to settle down, and it probably was a blessing I didn't get married and have kids at 25.


Lately I feel like my job is my child. I spend more waking hours at work than I do with family, developing my self, or even in worship. If I had more flexibility in the kind of work I do, like writing, and I could make a decent living at it, I think I'd feel differently about having a family.