I feel so sorry for your kid," he sneered at me. We were near a playground, and I was watching some kids do the usual dopey things kids do on playgrounds: try to climb up sliding boards, jump on and off moving merry-go-rounds, walk from one end of a seesaw to the other.
I was cringing as we watched the children flirt with hurt. I think I may have wondered aloud where their parents were and why nobody was watching them. I was having to fight the urge to rescue some of the more reckless tots. I had bitten the bejeebers out of my tongue on a seesaw once when I was 5.
His declaration was theoretical, a projection into the future. I don't have children. And in that moment, as he looked me in the eyes and said those words, I suddenly saw very clearly that I certainly wouldn't be having any with him.
Maybe I won't ever have any. Maybe I shouldn't; maybe that former boyfriend was right, and I would worry too much. Being a parent creates such a fundamental change in a person's life, it's hard to predict what it would do to you. I imagine myself swaddling a baby in bubble wrap, removing everything made of glass from our home, requiring that a helmet be worn on the swings.
I never know what to do with other people's babies. I'm afraid to hold them. It's a liability thing. I'm terrified I'll break them somehow. Every other woman I know instinctively reaches for the new baby being shown around the office, but I am content to hang back and admire the tiny hands and little socks from a few feet away. Does this mean I have no instincts? Motherhood, after all, isn't for everybody. It almost wasn't for my own mom.
She was 39 when I was born, which is about the age I might be if I have a child. Unlike me, she'd been married since she was 30. But like me, she had a good job, enjoyed traveling, and she and Dad had a spontaneous, busy life and disposable income. Dad was 44. They had not particularly planned on expanding the family. They were having fun.
Mom was never fussy about children. She has never had big, silly attacks of squealing and goo-gooing around babies; she's just not that kind of person. She had not been particularly hounded by maternal instincts or the ticking of her biological clock.
But when the diapers hit the fan, she rose to the occasion and made one hell of a terrific mom.
She quit her job to keep her personal eye on me. That was a big deal to my parents: In my entire childhood, I had a baby sitter only once. They didn't trust other people to do as good a job keeping me out of trouble as they could.
She got into the mother thing pretty heavily. She watched me do everything, and I mean everything. She can describe how I learned to walk, including details of the layout of our living room furniture at the time. She informs me every few years that my first food was strained squash.
Of course, for a woman used to living an adult life, it was a big transition. "I wonder what her little voice will sound like?" she often wondered aloud when I was an infant. She couldn't wait to hear it. When I started to talk, I didn't shut up for about 15 years. There were difficult moments.
She remembers being in a grocery store with me at a time when my every sentence began with "Mommy!" "Mommy! Look at me!" "Mommy! What's that?" "Mommy! Come here!" "Mommy!"
Unable to bear the broken record, she came face-to-face with me for an urgent lecture.
"Stop saying 'Mommy,' " she said.
"You can call me anything else. You can call me 'Hey you.' You can call me 'Lady.' You can call me 'Marge.' You can call me 'Frank.' Just please, for God's sake, stop saying 'Mommy.' "
She knitted and cooked and made my clothes. She brought home dented cans from the supermarket to save a little money. "El Cheapo strikes again!" Dad and I would say.
She returned from church teas with treats for the unwashed layabouts at home. "Here comes your mother with a purse full of smashed cookies," Dad would announce.
These days, after a visit, she still sends me back to Pittsburgh with a shopping bag full of food, as if I were incapable of feeding myself. I am 35 years old, but she worries I'm not eating. It started with the strained squash, and it probably will never end.
Which is fine. It seems all women are fated eventually to become their mothers. I'm doing it without even having a child. But I consider myself lucky. If I have to turn into a mother, mine is a splendid one to turn into, and I don't feel sorry for my kid at all.
Gene Collier's column does not appear this week; send e-mail to gcollier@post-gazette.com Send e-mail to Samantha Bennett at sbennett@post-gazette.com For an archive of works by Post-Gazette columnists, visit www.post-gazette.com/columnists
E-mail this story 
