I liked kids well enough, but when I was younger I just didn't think I wanted to be the 24/7 caretaker that parenting can require. Plus, if I'm being brutally honest, babies scared the hell outta me. Maybe it took growing up, maybe it took meeting a person that I trusted to help me raise a child, maybe it was some combination of both--either way--once I found somebody that I was comfortable with calling a life partner I started to see parenthood as something I wanted to commit to.
Like you, Jeff, today I simply cannot imagine life without my child. I sound all geeky when I talk about her, but I view her as an amazing gift. Not a day goes by that she fails to make me laugh or make me proud. Yeah, she's 15, and we do have our days where we both are fairly hormonal with each other, but she's a long way from being the rotten kid I probably deserved to get.
When I first saw this discussion I immediately thought about my husband and his relationship to our daughter. I am positive that Kev would have ultimately faced the decision of having a child alone or not having one at all, and it is completely possible that he'd have chosen to go it alone. He wanted children, made no bones about it, and once we realized our relationship was serious, everything we did was pretty much with that plan in mind. I've never regretted it, and I think that (most days, anyway...) he's solid with that decision as well.
In the context of gender and the decision to parent, I have never seen any real difference between men and women. I think something happens to us all at some point in our adulthood and we start to look at and explore our abilities and interests in raising a child. They used to joke about the biological clock starting to tick, but in reality I think it is just a factor of age and self realization.
Laura
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