A marriage proposal for a woman at 38 is rarely really a marriage proposal. Or, rather, it’s not a choice of two people; it’s a choice of child or no child. It’s a last chance.

I got engaged on the Mekong River, sitting in the front of a kayak, while my boyfriend attempted to get on one knee behind me. I noticed the sudden trembling of the kayak. The Mekong’s generally not a river you want to fall into. The one knee struck me as provincial in a way that might be appropriate for other women, but not for me. I held my paddle, stared ahead for a moment at the murky brown water. It was dry season. The river was low. I said yes.

I’d had two other marriage proposals. To one, I’d said no. He asked four or five more times, until it got to be a joke between us. He was my dear friend. But I said no every time, then vowed to marry him if I was still single at 40, at 45, at 50. I’m 46 now. My answer would still be no.

I said yes to the other, and then almost immediately regretted it. I was 21, and I didn’t belong anywhere, and I didn’t know how to get out of my acceptance, so I backtracked. We got engaged too soon, I told him. Let’s just date again. We did. We got committed too soon, I told him. Let’s date other people, too. We did. I hoped if I hung around long enough I’d find some way to love him. I didn’t. He came over one day, slump-shouldered, and broke up with me. O.K., I said. I hadn’t even opened the screen door all the way for him.

Two months after I got engaged on the Mekong in my kayak, I was pregnant. I had looked at that little stick and sworn. Because even then I didn’t know.

I don’t trust women who are utterly sure they want to have children. I think they haven’t lived inside themselves fully yet. How do they know who they could be, what they could achieve, without children?

And yet I don’t trust women who are utterly sure they never want to have children. I think they haven’t experienced having one, so how could they know?

Maybe is as close as women like me ever come.

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I had a sense of what it took to raise children. My father and stepmother had one baby boy and then another when I was a teenager. There were four of us teenagers then, two from her, two from him. We did not like one another. We loved the babies. For as many years as we could, we let those boys be our bridge to one another. Neutral territory. But eventually, even our collective love for them couldn’t keep us from exploding with vicious rage at one another, and so we came home one Sunday afternoon to find four empty suitcases lined up in the foyer. The foyer had mirrored wallpaper. We could see our blurry reflections, the hazy suggestion of distant people. We packed. We left. We never lived under one roof again.

My stepsiblings went to live with their grandmother. My brother, who was 17, moved to the Y.M.C.A. and finished his last year of high school. I quit school and lived those first months out of my car, staying on the couches of friends, people I knew from the restaurant that had hired me to bus tables. Occasionally, my father would sign for a room for me at the Green Tree Motel if I had nowhere else to sleep. I was 16.

When I had been gone from my home for three months, I wrecked my car in a snowstorm and was thrown into the windshield. At the hospital, I lay under a light while a nurse with tweezers picked glass out of my forehead. They called my father. He did not come. I had spent too many years as a feral animal in his house, wild and uncontrollable. He had lost the barometer for when my behavior was merely terrible, and when I was truly in trouble.

The hospital asked who else they should call. I told them my best friend, Cindy. She came and took me home to the apartment where I’d rented a room from a violent alcoholic and his girlfriend. During his rages, his girlfriend and I would lock ourselves in the bedrooms while he threw the furniture like a bear. Once, he broke his own hand on a kitchen cupboard. I knew he would kill me. I was less than the girlfriend. At least he had some love for her, some remorse the next morning. I was just a rent check. He would threaten to call the police if I did something he didn’t like. I didn’t realize that I wasn’t breaking the law, that it was my father and stepmother who would have been in trouble if the police had been called.

Cindy said that when she walked me into the apartment after the accident, I called her “Mom.”

I have no memory of this.

My mother died when I was 8, and it was sad and hard, but what I couldn’t know was how much of the world would remain a mystery to me because of it. I did not know the difference between shampoo and conditioner. I did not know how to comb tangles from my hair, or that washing my face required soap. Entire branches of family were lost because she was no longer there to keep in touch with them. I did not know what a period was. Or what sex was. I did not know how to say no. I did not know how to say stop. I did not know how to say help.

My father was a mist, everywhere and nowhere. Once, at 15, I’d sat in front of him sawing at my wrists with his dull fishing knife, because I also did not know this either, the right way to do it. He had just picked me up from a foster home where I had spent a few weeks after being caught with pot. But I was sleeping with the boys there and snorting lines of coke.

Three years after I left my father’s house, I talked my way into a small college. My sophomore year I got the flu and strep throat at once. I was keeling over in the chair. Trying to hold my feverish body upright. The nurse called my stepmother to come collect me. The nurse hung up the phone. She’s not coming, she told me, and looked stricken. She asked who else she should call. I thought and thought. And then I knew: This was what it meant to be alone in the world.

My daughter made me less alone in the world. Which feels like the most selfish thought I have ever had. I imagine myself alone in ways other people are not. People who don’t search real estate listings in places where they lack any connection: Buenos Aires, Hanoi, Perth. People who know where they’ll go on holidays and with whom and for how long. People with plans. With extended family they complain about, but then spend the most important days of the year with.

I’m grown now. My daughter is 7. Her father makes her not alone in the world, and I also make her not alone in the world. I push my closest friends toward her, hoping they make adequate stand-ins for the extended family I cannot offer her. I am a journalist and for 20 years I’ve written stories of genocide, homicide, domestic violence, natural disasters. People with terrible histories in which they should, by any account, no longer be alive. The stories are not about tragedy, but about survival. I spend hours listening. I search their eyes for clues as to how they made it when so many others did not, their secrets of survival, of endurance, of tenacity. I see myself reflected there.

Rachel Louise Snyder is the author of “What We’ve Lost Is Nothing” and of “Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade.”