I have a best friend that I send random in-the-moment messages to.  It’s my way of keeping in touch and letting her know where and how I am at any given moment in time.  Yesterday, as I was waiting in American Eagle while my partner tried on the latest in 70s-esque low rise jeans, I was struck by a revelation and fired off a text. “I’m in American Eagle, B’s trying on jeans. There are hordes of teenagers in here all wanting to be the height of radness. I don’t want to be anyone’s mother.”  All afternoon, I thought about the message I’d sent and why.  Although I don’t have any children, I do occasionally have flashes of desire for familial bliss and can imagine having children at some point in my life.  I found myself wondering if not wanting to be anyone’s mother is the same as not wanting to have children, or are they different?  More importantly, is that how I really feel? 

I don’t make sexy-time with boys, so babies aren’t something that will just sort of happen to me. If I decide to have a child it’s going to take some serious planning and commitment, which opens up a huge bag of questions around process, timing, expense and so forth.  It’s a lengthy and complicated conversation. I wasn’t a planned pregnancy myself, and I can only think of one or two folks in my circle who were on their parents’ to-do list. I know in the movies women are always talking about the ‘biological clock’ and its incessant ticking but I don’t hear many women talk like that in real life. Personally, I don’t like to think about my uterus as a timepiece or a bomb or a leaky faucet that drips monotonously and keeps me awake at night.  Furthermore I think mine might be broken; my clock that is, not my uterus. I love my own mother dearly and many of my friends’ mothers as well.  In fact, there’s a whole team of mothers that have kept me loved, watered and sane at different times throughout my life, but I don’t know if I’m up to the task. 

My partner and I are good friends with a couple who have a sweet little baby boy that we adore, but our lack of child-savvy is evident whenever they come for a visit.  All of our liquor, knives, cleaning products and other implements of destruction are all at head height—baby-head height—and we don’t have doors on our cupboards.  We’re not irresponsible, we don’t let him roam the halls unattended and we’re always quick to replace the shiny sharp ‘toy’ with a wooden spoon or other innocuous object. Luckily our friends are incredibly relaxed parents and they continue to come over for dinners and trust us with their child despite the baby-gauntlet that is our home.  We’re always thoroughly exhausted from baby-chasing after a day out with our friends and we marvel at the energy required to be a parent, and we agree that if we were to become parents, we’d want to be like them.

But do I want to be someone’s mother and what kind of mother would I be? Parenthood is an act of bravery in my opinion. I think about the turbulence of my misspent youth and I wonder how my mother survived my shenanigans. I’m not certain that I have that kind of strength, to love someone that much and let them leave the house everyday.