Anonymous Contributor

Today I am certain: I'm single, forty, and I do not want children. I'm sure of my choice, and here's why.
As simplistic as it sounds, I don't like getting up early; I'm a greedy sleeper, and my body needs at least eight hours if I want to be on top of my game when I teach my college students and write my novel. Without a solid eight hours, I'm sluggish, resentful, grouchy. I like that I'm always wide-awake ready for the long days ahead, that my body doesn't have to continually yawn itself alive to function because a baby has stolen those precious hours I need every night.
Two, my time is mostly my own. Sometimes, even after writing for eight straight hours with only pee breaks, my whole body jerks with annoyance when one of my cats cries to go out. If I'm resentful of thirty seconds in eight hours, how can I possibly take care of a child? They need a little more than that, don't they?
Three. I love to get up and go. No, not to Paris or Venice, or even to New England to visit my family (who has the money for that as an adjunct instructor?). But when a friend calls and says, "C'mon, meet me," I love that I can. Without hesitation, without a second thought–after all, the cats can go eight hours or more without my attention. No babysitters, no early hour to get back because babysitter Brittany has a test in the morning, no diaper bags full of bippies and wipees, no worrying about smoky restaurants and delicate lungs and naptime and on the go breast-pumped bottles.
Also, I love that even in my thirties, and up until now–forty almost forty one–I bypassed the agonizing rites of so many other women I knew and know: always looking for Him, waiting, hoping, eyes hunting left hands for the ring, eyes chasing down the barely hopefuls, brains doing the timelines again and again. If I meet him in the next six months, and we get engaged quickly, and I get pregnant in the first year... I love and am proud that I'm waiting for the "ridiculously in love" relationship, and won't settle for anything less. Even if it means not having children, because, really, who wants to spend the days and nights hoping and searching and praying that the next guy you meet is finally the right one? Not just the love of a lifetime, but the father? None of that internal tick tick ticking for me. "Listen up, eggs," I said once in the shower recently, " do whatever it is you need to do, have at it." Only a great love for me, or nothing.
Five: I love to teach, but being an adjunct instructor is a joke–you really have to love it to put up with the long hours and barely-there compensation. And I do love to teach, and even more, I love my students. I love these on-the-brink adults who waver so precariously between fierce intelligence and arbitrary emotions. But let's face it, the exorbitant cost of adoption, the absurdly limited options for single-mother adoption even if I did have the start-up money, means that in order to keep doing what I love I'd need to work another job, maybe even two other jobs, if I was lucky enough to bring a child home (and then we're back to that nagging issue of time again–never mind sleeping or writing, who raises this child if I'm always off working?). Even the ostensibly less costly option–insemination–isn't really something I have to agonize over. As my OB-GYN recently told me this summer, "We don't work with single mothers. We don't want more orphans out there if anything happens to you." Sort of a relief, right? Who needs that kind of pressure on top of everything else?
So that's it. I don't want children, and that's what I choose. I love that I can drowse until 10:00am on Sundays, and sometimes even Tuesdays, Wednesdays; that I can sit in a chair in front of a computer and write write write and my only worry is opening a door; that I can speed off–albeit locally–in a moment's notice; that when I meet the right guy, wow, is he going to be right; and that the little money I make is at least enough to keep me fed and sheltered and I never have to worry about orphaning a child I can't afford in the first place.
That is today.
But tomorrow, or the next day, or sometime next week, I'll wake up–maybe at 10:00, or even 10:30–and I'll stroll into a bookstore, or a coffee shop, and the sight will almost knock me over: a mother nuzzling her little girl in the checkout line. The little girl's arms possessively and casually slung around her mother's neck. The language of touches, the million signals of endless tenderness passing seamlessly between them. And I'll see this little girl's shy smile when she sees me staring, and I'll smile back, maybe even wave or say hello. And then I'll leave that coffee shop, or grocery store, or bank, because I have the freedom to do that. To come and go as I please. But always, always as I make my way back to my car (perfectly clean, no cookie crumbles and sticky books and ketchup stains and the warm, curdled smell of milk), I wonder: is it really my choice? Or am I just a forty year old woman who doesn't make enough money, who still has no clue at all how to meet the right man after all this time, and whose eggs don't need any encouragement or permission from me to follow the natural progression of time. Am I really just a forty year old woman, almost forty-one, who hopes that the list of reasons I made today will be enough for tomorrow, because the choice was never really mine in the first place.