I Never Wanted to be a Mother

My thirtieth birthday came and went. I realized that this was the point when I had to face facts: I was an adult in society’s view now, so I had better start acting like one. But I had no idea how to do that.

I left school and moved back to my home province. My boyfriend and I lived in the basement of his mother’s house for a year while we both tried to cobble together a life that resembled a typical adult life.

We both got jobs – mine was unrelated to my degree and was really just a way to make some money. His job was a good one, a real grown-up gig with benefits and a pension fund.

I eventually got a decent job myself. One where I dressed up in nice clothes and went to an office building downtown. We had money for the first time in our relationship, and we did all the things people in their early 30's do – went out to nice dinners, went on vacations, partied with friends.

But by this point I was approaching thirty-five and suddenly it hit me:

I had forgotten about the Having Kids part of (so-called) Real Adulthood.

I mean, I had been aware of the issue before then – mostly because people had been asking me “Are you going to have kids?” for years, despite the fact that I had clearly been living what amounted to an extended adolescence for most of my adult life at that point.

Besides, I had never experienced what one might call “maternal urges.” I did not dislike children – at one point I had even considered becoming a teacher – but I knew I was barely making it in the adult world myself, so the thought of being responsible for another human life kind of stopped any biological urges I might have had in their tracks. It wasn’t possible, so therefore, it wasn’t worth thinking about.

In fact, for years I had convinced myself I was infertile. I had no reason to believe this, except that I had never had an “accident,” despite not being all that diligent with birth control at times.

My boyfriend had also never brought up the topic of children. He was having a good time in his life at that stage, so I assumed he didn’t have any desire or need to change things.

I figured all of the above was a good indicator I wasn’t really cut out for motherhood. I hadn’t decided against having kids, exactly, but I didn’t really want a child, either.

And I figured that, ideally, one of the pre-requisites to having kids should be to actually want to have them. I mean, kids seemed like a lot of work – why do all that if you do not really want to?

So for awhile, I was decided: I did not want to be a mother. Therefore, I was not going to be one.

Then one day, around the time I turned 36, I felt this odd…feeling.

Not to be too corny, but I suddenly felt like someone important was missing. A person I had never met, but someone who I already knew on a level that ran very deep.

I am not a religious person at all – I was not raised with religion, and I consider myself an agnostic. I respect other people’s beliefs but to me, organized religion is something I just cannot relate to.

My non-beliefs aside, I am sincere when I say I this feeling was a epiphany of sorts. Borderline spiritual, but still very much grounded in the here and now:

I felt it in my gut, in my bones, and indeed in my physical heart, like an ache.

I began to have vivid dreams. I dreamed of a little girl, with her long, light-coloured hair in a ponytail. In my dreams, she was always trying to tell me something I couldn’t quite hear. And she was always walking or running away somewhere, but at the same time, I knew she wanted me to come get her. It was like an elaborate game of hide-and-seek I played with her, night after night in my dream world. I was frustrated but I also knew what I had to do: I had to make her real.

I was a bit hesitant to broach the subject of having a child with my boyfriend (we had still never married, and remain unmarried even today). He had never expressed a desire to have kids, but he had not really spoken against it, either.

Surprisingly, he seemed on board with the idea when I told him that, yes, I wanted to try, after all. It was like he had just been waiting for me to say the word.

A few months after that conversation, l went out one night to meet my sister for a couple of drinks. My boyfriend was away on a business trip, and I needed to get out of the house and be a bit social.

I ordered a glass of wine, took one sip of it, and it tasted funny to me. I asked someone at our table to taste it for me, and they said it seemed perfectly fine. I suddenly felt extremely hot. I told my sister I was stepping outside for some air, and she came with me to because she wanted to have a cigarette.

I remember standing a few feet away from her smoke, and her laughing at me for it. I also remember looking up at the night sky and feeling the cool early fall air, and thinking “Everything is going to change.”

When I woke up in the morning, the first thing I did was go to the drug store to buy a pregnancy test. I was not at all surprised to see two pink lines on the stick.

I finally met my daughter nine months later. I had just turned 39 years old a few days before her birth, and I knew that it was the exact right time for her to come into my life. I had not been ready for her before that moment. But when they laid her on my chest, something clicked into place, like a piece of a puzzle. I felt everything within me align towards the truth north that was this small human who was finally real, and breathing softly on me. I closed my eyes and I said “thank you.”