Doing My Little Part to Check World Population

I spent almost the whole day on Sunday in the kitchen. It was the kind of grey, cold January day that just makes you want to stay put and not really do anything useful or meaningful. The rain was falling steadily outside. I decided to make a chocolate buttercream cake from the first Barefoot Contessa cookbook. I took particular pleasure in picking a great soundtrack for my baking, hitting Marvin Gaye's What's Going On before firing up Hem's Funnel Cloud and Madeleine Peyroux's Half the Perfect World.

It was the kind of blissful day that was completely free of obligation. While the cake layers were baking and cooling, I ran some laundry, sent a few emails, and read a few chapters from the flighty little novel I'm reading. These days come along only every once in a while, but they refresh me completely and leave me ready for whatever is around the corner. At the end of the day, as I finished dressing the cake with luscious buttercream frosting, I had a single thought:

"This kind of day would be almost impossible for me if I had children."

It was last summer, after reading Anne Lamott's foreword to this book, that I finally realized that I Really Don't Want Kids.

I'll get her words all wrong here, because I don't own the book and returned it to the library months ago. But in the foreword, she says something like: "Some people think that having a child is the only real way to truly find yourself, connect with the deepest parts of life, and return your own gift to the world that you came from. But frankly, I think that is a total crock."

She pretty much nailed it for me with that sentence.

Of course, even months after arriving at this place, I still notice an edge of tension entering my body whenever the question comes up in conversation with others (especially other women). I'm not quite sure why. Billie Jean King famously defeated Bobby Riggs before I was even born; how is it that a single woman living happily on her own in this century even has to ask herself this question multiple times? (I should add that nobody's begging me to have children, anyhow.)

I really enjoy children and find them beautiful and fascinating, but I've never, ever longed for one of my own. Coincidentally, I also have a fairly mild gross-out threshold when it comes to baby drool, baby spit-up, baby poop, and any other type of waste byproduct emerging from these amazing creatures with the giant, reflective eyes and wobbly necks. I don't think I'm cut out to be a mother.

So I'll probably never know how it feels to buy one of those impossibly tiny pairs of baby socks for my baby's impossibly tiny feet. And I'll probably never know the absolute purity of holding a baby of my own in my arms and singing her to sleep. I think Sunday let me know that I'm really okay with that.