Non-Breeder: Waiting Online
I'm single, childless and addicted to parenting blogs.
by JL Scott
February 12, 2007
At the end of my freshman year of high school, I wrote a letter to myself listing things I wanted to do before age twenty-five. I recently found the letter while going through old papers in my childhood home. For the most part, no matter how specific the goals were, I've reached them. Live on Avenue B. Check. Get an article published. Check. Get a tattoo. Check. Have a kid.
That hasn't happened yet. And, since I don't even have a real bedroom in my East Village shared apartment, but instead live in a curtained-off area of the living room, I know this is a good thing. For the most part, I live a rated-R, single-girl life, complete with dates with men twenty years older than me, occasional blackouts and accidentally wearing see-through shirts to work. Practically, there is absolutely no room in my life for a child — or even a proper boyfriend — for at least the foreseeable decade.
As naïve as it sounds, having a kid seems to me the official mark that one has crossed the finish line into adulthood. To me, having a kid provides some sort of stamp of legitimacy on life. Suddenly, someone else depends on you. I know that wanting someone to depend on me is a reason why I would be a pretty crappy mom right now. Still, I think, if not now, when?
I remember reading somewhere that a woman's fertility begins to decline at age twenty-seven. That number sticks Sylvia Ann Hewlett's book is completely alarmist, but what if it's also sort of true?in my head. Then there's Sylvia Ann Hewlett's 2002 book Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (in which she says that, to have it all, smart women should settle down and get baby-making out of the way in their twenties, then concentrate on their career). It's completely alarmist, but what if it's also sort of true?
At this point in my life, just two years away from that age twenty-seven marker, I find it semi-ridiculous that it's even possible for me to have a child. I still trip over the curb and walk around with scabbed-over skinned knees. I don't know how to cook. Even getting it together enough to have both milk and cereal in the apartment seems like a Herculean feat of timing. I have had what can only be described as temper tantrums when my coffee order turned out wrong at Starbucks. In a way, my life has a lot of parallels to a toddler's. I feel wobbly and shaky and want everything to go my way now.
Still, I can't help but be fascinated with parenting, because it is something that I casually assume will happen in my future. And yet, in my motherhood fantasies, a father figure never enters the picture, not even when I'm involved with someone. "I could see you doing the single mom thing," a guy I was dating once said. When I asked him why, he shrugged it off. "You just seem like the type."
©2007 JL Scott and Nerve Media
About the Author
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JL Scott is a writer in New York City. |
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