Maybe Next Year, Maybe Never

A Working Exploration of Yearning — and a Door Suddenly Wide Open

Rainer Kriester’s “Big Hand” (1973), Hakone Open Air Museum

1.

On my 32nd birthday, I wake up in a dark A-frame cabin on the Sunshine Coast, January rain pitter-pattering on the skylights. My husband sleeps soundly next to me, our dog stretched long and slinky between our legs, and my first thought is: It’s my birthday, and I am so glad I don’t have children.

It’s a strange thought with which to wake a new year, but my thirties are snagged by the mental tug of will we / won’t we. It claws at any silent moment I offer myself — or find myself in. The shower. The car. A quiet bedroom on the morning of my birthday. Will I ever want to have children? Why don’t I feel the ache? Another year is here, and I am so glad I don’t have to spring up and tend to another person — and why is that?

In my notes app, while the Airbnb lies still, I write.

The vulnerable truth is that I have no desire to mother human children. I do not wish to be pregnant, I do not wish to give birth, I do not wish for a creature to latch onto my breasts, I do not desire to rear a person from babyhood to adulthood, and beyond. I do not wish to add more chaos to my mornings. I do not wish to chase a person around the beach when I just want to have a cocktail and relax. I do not wish to clean food off highchairs, change diapers, worry about development, bullies, school shootings, consent, and post-secondary education, and whether I’ll like their spouse or not.

This is a caressing confession. There’s nothing wrong with me; the gig just sounds like shit. My birthday is peaceful and affectionate, and I tell myself: maybe next year, maybe never.

2.

I toss the word motherhood around my mouth like a lozenge and let it melt on my tongue — hoping its potency will cure my confusion, but all it does is disappoint me. My algorithm spoon-feeds my fear. Much of it is confessions of unhappy parents, or stories of women and couples who chose the no-kid route. These videos massage me. I don’t think I want kids, and these strangers on my handheld computer seem to support that movement. I feel like I am getting away with something by liking them — sending a quiet flare of my resistance.

3.

We get married young, but we make no declarations about parenthood in our vows or in our pre-marital conversations about what we imagine our lives to look like. I am relieved not to be seen as a mother. Parenthood is TBD, and we leave the future in the hands of who we will become. Possibility hangs over our heads like icicles.

Over the next decade, we check in often about the kid thing. I cry every time the topic is broached, no matter how carefully, no matter by whom. I can never pinpoint why it swallows me whole, but I am always gutted, always bruised. I straddle the line of being deeply, wholly satisfied with my current situation, and sucked into a cosmic vacuum of fear for all that I cannot understand, and all that I worry I am missing out on. But deciding to bring a person into a world where they will have to get a job and deal with the CRA feels like a task I should not be trusted with. Life is hard. Why impose that on someone who didn’t ask to be here?

4.

Nobody knows the right thing to say to the person who is waffling about the decision to have children. It’s a tricky condition, and everyone is well-meaning and kind and awkward. They’ve been there, or they haven’t. They are in the thick of a shitty season themselves, and they don’t want to scare me. They are happy, content, and fulfilled, and they don’t want to impose with that, either. I conceal my anguish, or I don’t. Depends on the day and if the conversation is paired with a martini. I receive a lot of advice that I pocket and thumb through. My door is closed, but not locked — I repeat it like a politician’s tired, frumpy slogan.

In the summer, I sit next to a gay couple on vacation at a hotel pool. We get chatting, as one husband keeps half an eye on their son, playing with another family in the pool and the other orders a nice bottle of white wine to share. They ask me if I have kids, and I smile and tell them no, but we’re figuring it out.

“If you want my advice: don’t wait. They really are the best years of your life,” the one with half an eye on his kid says to me, and both of them nod emphatically. Who the fuck is he to tell me that? I think, bitterly. I also think that their situation looks very nice. And I scold myself for being visibly thrown off by their comment. I don’t know what the best years of my life are supposed to look like. I don’t know if I buy into that platitude. I don’t really believe in best years, only best moments, pockets of life that make you happy to still be on this mortal coil.

But now all three of them are playing games in the pool, I get a little bit wistful, and my yams fries start to look like my ovaries are getting really old.

5.

I fill my cup, and the best years of my life, by whispering into my dog’s ear every night, by sending soft printed onesies and custom toys in the mail to my friends’ wonderful children. I cry with joy at baby showers, and send flowers to my pregnant friends, and wonder if that’s all it will ever be for me. The heavy base of the Parenting Club music throbs in the distance, but I just can’t bring myself to get out of the house.

The algorithm sends me for a loop and is not sure what to do with me. Am I the drunk friend among the married, put-together parents? Am I the irresponsible jet setter? Am I the “rich aunt”? No, I am none of these things. Do I want a slew of temper tantrums on an airplane to convince me that I’ve made the right call? Jesus, I don’t know.

6.

An Instagram-friend hosts a little “what does being a parent feel like” AMA on her stories. I bite.

Being a parent is like taking a drug, and you can’t describe to someone why the feeling of the drug is so good. The love for your kid is not like anything else. AND that doesn’t mean you have to do it. She writes generously. I wish I could print and frame this DM.

7.

It’s a busy work season, and I am happily in the thick of it. I am finally getting back on my feet after two years of debilitating grief, depression, and massive change. In the evenings, my husband is at work. I take an hour to zone out on the couch after he leaves for his shift, scrolling and texting my friends back. I have so much to do, but my Couch Comatose Hour is a delicious, temporary lobotomy. Without warning or prompt, a voice interrupts my phone time: I wish I were putting a baby to bed right now, it says, and I am startled, immediately clocking it as foreign. I didn’t let it into my house. How did it get in here?

I meet my sneaky, unexpected narrator again on vacation. I see mothers all over Japan with babies strapped to their chests. We make eye contact on the train and exchange sympathetic smiles. My voyeurism confuses me; all I can really think is: next time I come to Japan, maybe it will be on my maternity leave. Maybe I’ll bring my baby. I feel possessed. A host for a new brain, with a whole new agenda. But public bathroom stalls in Japan have baby seats, conveniently placed so parents can use the restroom safely and hygienically. I fixate on them every time I go to the bathroom in a restaurant or train station, picturing a set of chubby baby legs swinging in front of me while I use a glorious Japanese bidet. Maternity leave in Japan sounds really nice.

My best friend is pregnant, and I divulge this strange inner dialogue to her via text message on long train rides between destinations. A lot of exclamation points are shared. And I savour this secret in our vault.

The intrusiveness of this fantasy is brought to my husband’s attention over beers and yakitori. We toss the idea between each other for the rest of the trip like a game of catch. What would we do? When would we do it? How would this work with our lives? Who will we be? And who are they?

8.

Yearning is in. In culture, and my home. And my mind. These days, my favourite pastime is yearning. I yearn to hold a warm bean bag body that I built from scratch.

To borrow a phrase from a Gen Z in my life, I am launching the biggest rebrand of the year. The girl who wakes up on her 32nd birthday, grateful for her childfree life, now has recurring dreams about birth; there are ovulation tests in my cabinet, folic acid in my vitamin routine. My algorithm is all about fertility, ovulation windows, and hot, jacked moms lifting heavy through pregnancy (my ultimate goal).

I do not make a decision. Nothing about this rebrand is really up to me. It started with an intrusive thought, and now my body is yearning, aching, for something it never thought possible. Much like a trip to the eye doctor, this revelation feels like the lenses are clicking and expanding, bringing a whole new world I couldn’t even imagine into view.

Of course, all of this is a fantasy for now. I am miles away from pregnancy. Everything is an extension of a yearning culture that remains a pipe dream for a little longer. I have no control over the massive tidal wave of biology smacking me in the face, and I have no control, for the most part, over what the next few years will look like, either. I know I’ll be fulfilled either way, come what may, but the anticipation — the waiting, wishing, and scheming — peppers a little more colour into my world. I am taking stock of our frivolity — thoroughly enjoying going to the movies — and, otherwise, making friends with Surrender.

At night, right before I go to sleep, I slip into the corridors of the universe and search for the person I know I am meant to meet. I have so many questions. What will they eat for breakfast? What will their special talent be? Will they enjoy coming home from somewhere far to go out for an extravagant dinner with mom and dad? Will they be obsessed with dogs like me? Who will they love? What will their hand feel like in mine, on the walk to school? I know who they are — but I have so much to learn.

9.

Last year, I was in New York, heartbroken and anxious, in the chair of a psychic shop helmed by a mother and daughter named Mandy and Diamond. Next year, Mandy says, next year: one pregnancy, two children. Not this year, but next year. I laugh with a deep undertone of fear and swat it away. No children, no twins, and no pregnancies for me, I say defiantly. Then why did you ask me if you will ever want it? The cards are just a reflection, Mandy says, her New Yorker energy, a little bit threatening, stretching one French-manicured nail toward the spread of frayed cards in front of her. I am just telling you what your guides are telling you.

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