I used to be anti-kids. Now I’m ambivalently anti-kids, which is somehow worse. It’s a soft no, like a drawer left ajar—tempting, uncertain, faintly humiliating.
In my partner’s friend group, someone’s pregnant: Stav. I told her it feels brave, becoming pregnant. She asked why. I said, “Because I’m afraid of getting lost.” She tilted her head. Lost? I meant losing myself—my routines, my quiet, the small pleasures I spent years cultivating. My body. My brain. My ability to read a book without interruption.
I’ve watched my sister and her husband with their kids. It’s loud, chaotic, occasionally luminous. Those small tethering moments—the ones that supposedly justify all the upheaval—I haven’t seen. Maybe they exist. They probably do. I probably just haven’t noticed.
There’s a subtle shift, though. Stories of women my age who spent decades certain they didn’t want kids and then… did, linger in my mind like unanswered questions. I recognize the uncertainty, the slow flirtation with possibility. It’s alluring, and terrifying.
I want certainty. I want courage. I want to know, definitively, whether this desire is mine or just the script everyone expects me to read. But all I have is this suspended middle ground, pacing endlessly between fear and curiosity, a spectator in the theater of my own life.
Being ambivalent is exhausting. It’s lonely. It’s honest. And perhaps that’s the point: the middle, the gray, the softly beating hesitation is the only place where I can still see myself clearly.
For now.
