I’d always considered the question of whether someone wants children to be a binary one. Some people want kids and some don’t. Did I want them? Well, I didn’t not. So, by process of elimination, I assumed my answer was yes, I did want them. Never mind that I had never felt the smallest urge to have them. But since I was not a woman who did not want kids, I assumed it would arrive eventually.

But the urge never came. As I crossed into my thirties, then mid-thirties, and now late-thirties, most of my friends have had at least one child. So it’s not as if children were a far-off thought like they were in my twenties—on the contrary, they are crowding nearly all of my thoughts and social media feeds. Still, no urge.

What did develop, though, was a more intimate knowledge of what having kids would require. I’d have to find a partner. (I have no desire, let alone the financial means, to raise a child alone.) I’d learned that finding a partner, especially one I wanted to raise children with, would require sacrificing almost all my free time to the dating gods (demons?). Every year it became a little harder. The older I got, the more confident I became, proud of what I had to offer, secure in what I was looking for. Meanwhile, in the world of internet dating, where photos and age loomed as the only real signals of a quality partner, I was getting much worse. I was both swiping less and being swiped on less, a losing battle if there ever were one. And that’s just free time leading up to having a kid. I knew good and well that once I had a child, free time—that coveted space where I crammed nearly everything that brought me solitary joy—would be wiped out from under me.

What if not having kids is not the lack of something, but the presence of something else?

Still, everyone I knew repeated the rather cultish mantra that having children was life-changing, that the kind of love a parent had for their kid was unlike anything they’d ever experienced. I’ve never been good at dealing with FOMO. The idea that I would miss out on what everyone seemed to believe was the pinnacle of human experience felt unacceptable.

It seems most people either know they want kids or know they don’t want kids. As someone who was rather indifferent, I assumed the popular default. All my life I’d imagined I’d have children for no particular reason other than I’d absorbed the notion that they were part of what a successful adult’s life looked like. Like many women in the age of Sheryl Sandberg, I was set on “having it all.” To abandon that goal because it was too much work or wasn’t working out felt like giving up on the plan I’d set for myself. It felt like failure.

I’ve heard many writers say they never had a plan. This was not me. As a kid, I watched my parents suffer the mistakes of not having one. Though they are role models to me in so many ways and have always worked impossibly hard, we were frequently behind on bills and regularly had to acquire our furniture from curbside trash. In order to not be broke, I developed a precise and unrelenting life plan. I got into a good school, majored in an excruciating engineering discipline, got the highest paying job I could find, and steadily climbed the corporate ladder. Even when, years into my career, I desperately needed a change from the corporate world that was sucking my soul dry, my big risky adventure was to enroll in a top 10 business school to discover myself.

To let go of a version of yourself, to admit that the things you thought would make you happy—things you’ve worked very hard to get—won’t actually do the trick is not only sad, it’s terrifying. It means confronting the possibility that you might have to start all over again.

Around 30, I began dismantling my plan piece by piece despite myself. Apparently my dream job left me fairly dead inside. My relationships weren’t actually that enjoyable. The suits I’d always admired in J. Crew magazines, the essence of a powerful woman to my young mind, proved far less comfortable than a cozy hoodie and a worn pair of jeans. Over time, I allowed myself to tweak the plan. But the changes always felt reversible—if I ever wanted to throw on a button-down or go back to tech, I could. The question of kids was different. If I didn’t have kids by a certain age, I couldn’t go back. And I was afraid I’d be left with a big gaping hole in my plan.