I've never been interested in motherhood. I never planned how many kids I would have or by what age I would have them. I don't have an ironic, old-fashioned name picked out for a boy, or a hipsterish androgynous option for a girl. In my college years and early 20s, my peers and I were more concerned about finding a career, a boyfriend and an apartment in New York City with a dishwasher and an AC unit. Baby ambivalence seemed normal. Kids weren't on anyone's radar.

Well, maybe they were a little. During my senior year in college, a friend and I were playing a morbid rendition of that game Would You Rather? As in, Would you rather lose your sight or hearing? Gain 50 pounds or sprout a permanent layer of hair on your chest? Never be able to have an orgasm again or never be able to have children?

I'd laughed about the last one. "Too easy. Never be able to have children."

We'd been lying on the floor of the living room, flipping between Law & Order: SVU and Project Runway. My friend had rolled over and studied my face, wrinkling her brow as though she were annoyed, suspicious even. I knew I could be too cavalier, too hotly opinionated for her liking at times. "I would be absolutely devastated if I couldn't have children," she said, tartly.

"Really?" I scrunched my nose in disapproval. To me, people who needed children to have a full and rich life were provincial, unoriginal. "It wouldn't bother me."

I may be genuinely averse to tiny humans, but in college, still in rehearsals for adulthood, I believed that my position on kids said something fundamental about me before I could get out there and prove it in the real world—that I was independent, ambitious. I understood children made life harder. I wasn't so naive as to believe they completed a fairy tale. Anyone could be a mother, but it took skill, talent and tenacity to make it in New York City, which was where I planned to move immediately after graduation.

Of course, it's easy to declare your bold stance on children when they're a very long way off and the window of opportunity is wide open rather than closing. I'm 30 now, and my husband is 36, hanging on to the same fence that I am. ("If you want them, I want them. If you don't, I don't." Thanks.) He's unburdened, the way men get to be, by the threat of regret. With so many of our friends embracing this next stage of life, my baby ambivalence—really, our baby ambivalence—is suddenly pronounced, glaring and a bit suffocating. I'm not as cool and unconventional as all my posturing suggests, and I am terrified of waking up one day in my late 40s, mourning my decision to go child-free but unable to do anything about it.

This fear of regret is not new. Two conflicting streams have always run through me—I don't want kids, but I don't want to regret not having kids. I'd banked on desire and biology meeting eventually, a confluence where the two warring ideologies would merge. I didn't ever expect to turn into mush, melted by the sight of a babbling, cherubic bundle, but I thought maybe I'd see a cute young dad playing dress-up with his daughter and at least feel warmth in my heart. Maybe I'd even envision my husband, who would be a great father because he's patient and kind, in that frothy pink tutu, making our daughter shriek with laughter while he pirouetted around and around.