Are You There, Moms? It’s Me, Idiot How Did You Know Whether Or Not You Wanted To Become A Parent?

Are You There, Moms? It’s Me, Idiot is an ongoing series dedicated to helping one very well-intentioned and dumb future-parent learn about the world of childrearing. Click here to see past columns.

I don’t really know how this happened, but at some point I just figured I’d probably have kids some day. I go back and forth on every possible other facet of parentinghow many kids I want, where we’ll live, how I’ll balance parenting and my career, for example. Mostly I prefer to not think about it, figuring it’ll all fall into place at whatever point I magically decide I’m ready to start trying to get pregnant.

For most of my life, I was ambivalent about the whole parenting thing. I went back and forth between wanting to have kids and wanting to tie my fallopian tubes into a lanyard, based on nothing in particular. It seemed to change every couple of months, but I was never particularly attached to either notion. I didn’t abandon the strong idea that I wanted kids or I never wanted to ever have kidsit was more of a vacillation between kinda wanting kids and kinda not wanting to be a parent.

And then, I don’t know. It just started leaning more towards wanting to be a parent at some point in my life (who knows when!). It’s been consistently like that for a while, which leads me to believe that parenting is hopefully in my future.

I know that for most people, you either know you want kids or that you don’tit’s cut and dry and doesn’t evolve, like my future plan did. So I want to knowwhether you want kids, have kids, or don’t want them at allhow did you know? Did you always know you wanted to be a parent or to be child free? Did it hit you in an aha moment? Or did you flip flop around like I did?