Am I Too Old to Have Kids?

I’m sitting at a restaurant near my house, where I often go for lunch. It has a counter that runs alongside the kitchen, where you end up sitting beside people you don’t know. Sometimes I end up chatting with them.

This one time, there’s a guy who reveals in the course of the conversation that he’s just recently had a kid. Maybe his fifth or sixth? I don’t remember, but I remember he had a lot of kids.

But what really caught my attention was that he also mentioned that he was seventy six years old. As soon as he said that, I started doing the kinds of evaluations that I fear other people do to me, which is to see if I could perceive his age in his appearance more accurately now that I knew what it was. He was in good shape, it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that he was in his seventies. But now that he mentioned it, I realized it was pretty clear he was dying his hair.

One the one hand, hearing about people having kids at ages older than I am now gives me a sense of still having a future that could include kids. But also I feel myself making judgements about why and how anyone would end up having kids so late.

Through his demeanor and the other things he was saying, this guy that I was talking to didn’t exactly fill me with confidence that he was having kids because of a stable base that he had successfully carried on…