Katie and I were having an early lunch at a friend’s when a diminutive peach blur shot past the table, rustling our napkins and startling the cat. “Turds, turds, turds!” it screeched.

“Hunter, Hunter!” our host Emily shouted, rising halfway before thinking better of it. “We’re having a little trouble keeping his underwear on these days,” she said between gulps of red wine. “He’s going through a phase.” She was mumbling now, her voice trailing off. “That’s our boy, our little naked…”

The child stopped long enough to approach the table, one hand tugging excitedly at his tiny, uncircumcised penis while the other explored his asshole in minute detail, like a blind man discovering braille printed on the walls of his colon. Hunter smiled briefly before itching his face with the ass hand and snatching a fried banana from Emily’s plate with the other, giggling maniacally on another tear around the room.

“So, when are you guys going to take the plunge and start a family?” Emily asked, and out of respect I tried not to laugh in her face.

Katie and I have been having the conversation since our early twenties. “When are we going to have kids?” But as we’ve slid into our thirties and started to enjoy life a little more, the tone has evolved to, “Why the fucking hell would we want to?”

Katie tends toward lengthy, self-involved debates. Should we or shouldn’t we? When’s the right time? What do I really want? As a ciswoman in her mid-thirties, it’s a pressing matter. She’s got a built-in shelf life, after all, and not much time to make up her mind. “Make the decision quick or it’s made for you,” her worry lines seem to say.

For me it’s a little simpler, less immediate, and more about wondering whether I’ll look back someday wishing we’d “taken the plunge,” which sounds to me more like the means of creating a child than the act of raising it.

I’ve yet to look a tiny human in the face and think, Yes, I want one of those! But would I someday regret not taking that chance? Would I be overcome with remorse as the candle flickers on my final days? It’s not an easy question to answer. It’s tough enough just accepting that I might someday die, that neither science nor vampires will get their shit together and make me immortal while I’m still young enough to enjoy it.

It’s easy for TV shows and movies to flip the switch on Katie’s emotions, as anyone can love a photogenic, charismatic child actor for two hours, especially when it’s tormenting hapless burglars or winning Hogwarts. But that’s two hours. You get twelve of those and every day in the real world, and there’s no pausing for Reese’s and Cherry Pepsi when your perfect little angel rubs a fistful of diaper chocolate on the living room wall.

Two hours with real children invariably has the opposite effect on us. Like Hunter, who I’m sure is adorable on camera, where I’m not compelled to ninja-block his anus fingers all morning. But face to face, ass to lunch? Quite literally, forget that shit.

The only movies that make me consider having children are of the Family Stone variety, where a loving clan of grown, well-adjusted spawn spends time together once a year and somehow manages to enjoy it. If we could just give birth to a group of thirty-somethings with steady jobs and a Tuscan villa between them, then hell yes, bring on the babies. But trading my next three decades and several hundred thousand dollars to maybe, someday reach a point where I don’t have to worry whether they’ll be okay on their own? No gambler on the planet would take those odds.

It’s in America’s cultural DNA to have kids, however. We’re expected to procreate, and to not have children implies something is very, very wrong with you. And to openly choose not to have them? It’s downright fucked up, the very soul of selfishness. Even the Pope recently piled on, making headlines by painting the childless as self-centered snobs. But that’s Catholicism for you, where if I understand it correctly your chances for going to heaven rely on being voted in by human beings you’ve created personally.

Life gives you lots of second chances, but not where making a child is concerned. Once that kid is out of the uterus there are no take backs, no do-overs. That scares the shit out of me. I mean, I get crippling buyer’s remorse from ordering mini sliders over the bacon cheeseburger. What about a human being? What then?

I can’t let myself resent a child, which is exactly what I’m afraid would happen. I have too much kid-incompatible stuff to live for, and my resentment toward any person whose existence necessitates that I give these things up would have to go somewhere. It’s not like I can just launch the emotions into space to magically dissipate on their own. I’ve seen enough primetime dramas to know they would shoot straight back to me, to the source, defying all attempts at repression. I would hate myself for feeling angry at the screaming, shitting monster flailing helplessly in the crib. Especially if, like one of its mothers, it comes into this world fixated on an ill-advised music career.

“Yeah, yeah,” people like to say, “no one’s ever ready.” But if that’s true, how does anyone ever have children? Why upend your entire existence, literally everything you are or have ever been, if you aren’t prepared? What kind of irresponsible bullshit is that? You’re playing God for fuck’s sake, creating life with a capital L.

Say what you want about how wonderful they are, but kids can be pure hell. When my dad moved his girlfriend and her daughter into the house while I was in elementary school, I shared a bedroom with a toddler for a year. That thing was a wild fucking animal. Feral. She bit liberally, destroyed literally every toy I owned, and not once, but twice took a shit in my bed while I slept in it. While I slept in it. For the record, the term rude awakening does not accurately convey the horror and confusion of waking up covered in another person’s feces.

Unless having children is the thing you want most in the world, how can anyone choose that kind of torment? It’s not like childhood is a short-term condition — we’re talking some eighteen to thirty years of raising the thing, and that’s if you only have one. What if you have five, spread apart over ten years? Or Jesus, if you’re the Duggars, the sex fiends from that television show? They have, like, a hundred and forty kids, give or take. That poor woman’s vagina must hang like an old shower curtain, all floppy and damp.

If you’re going to have children, you’d better really, really want them. More than any other thing in the goddamn universe, real or imagined. What do I want more than anything? I don’t know, but it’s not that.

Now, I understand that people love their children. Love them more than anything else. I get it. I’m just not sure I can love anyone that much. I’m scared that I can’t, to be honest. I’ll look just about any furry animal in the eye and know I can give ten or fifteen years to meet its every need and then some, but such a feeling has yet to present itself with any human not named Katie, much less a tiny oozing, manipulative ape creature who gives me pink eye and grows up hating me for its job at the Taco Bell drive-thru.

In the U.S., Katie and I are taken to be merely selfish, but in India, where citizenship isn’t conferred until the birth of your eleventh child, our lack of progeny was assumed to be medically related. “I will pray for you,” said numerous taxi and tuk-tuk drivers, hoteliers, a nineteen-year-old mobile phone salesman, and the owner of an Udaipur fine art shop who convinced Katie he possessed spiritual powers.

“You are a wise and influential woman, and I will pray for your children,” he told her, shoving another pile of hand-painted postcards in her face. Some featured gods and goddesses, others illustrated scenes of everyday Indian life. Several had peacocks. “You will surely want this one,” he said, motioning to a seated, brightly colored elephant raising a great number of arms in the air. “Ganesh is the god of luck. And of fertility,” he winked. “You should hang this over your bed tonight.”

Then the man wondered if, perhaps, we would like to see his special collection? “Do you prefer boy with boy, or girl with girl?” he whispered before leaning in, his mustache twitching salaciously. “Or girl with Ganesh?”

For a short time, we worried the elephant postcard might have done the trick. I’d hoped Ganesh’s luck wouldn’t be limited to baby-making, but extend to the roulette or Powerball kind of good fortune instead. Anything other than the Procreational Sweepstakes. Elephants are beautiful, sensitive creatures, and I’d jump at the chance at having one around the house for washing the car Flintstone’s-style, but my love for them ends where their capacity to impregnate my life partner begins.

To say Katie was late might be putting it strongly, as there’s no such thing as on time where her uterus is concerned. Although I’d be lying if her monthly visitor’s lack of punctuality hadn’t caught our attention. But then it arrived, nearly six weeks after returning from India. A reappearing menstrual cycle isn’t something most couples celebrate, particularly not childless queer women in their thirties, but to us it was the spring equinox, Halley’s Comet, and a new Star Trek reboot rolled into one. After all, it’s not every day that life sends a red carpet invite for another month of world travel and uninterrupted sleep.

Yes, our feelings toward the unscheduled menstrual delay were many-layered and complex, the general tone of which Katie summed up beautifully the night before her Red River’s return.

“I better not be having a fucking baby.”

With unlimited time to live and grow, I suspect we would eventually get to a point of desiring children in our lives. But seeing that neither of us are yet immortal, sparkly vampires, we realistically have another four or five years left on the baby clock, tops. Maybe it’ll happen in time or maybe it won’t, I can’t say. But if not, there’s always adoption. Or pets.

For now we have Chloe, our ten-year-old labradoodle. And while she might not be a child in the traditional sense, she at least knows not to take food off our plates, or insert an entire fist into her anus. Admittedly, that argument folds once you see her eating shit directly from a cat’s defecating rectum without letting it touch the ground, but nobody’s perfect. Deservedly or not, we think of her as a person. A stinking, bearded child, one with an unquenchable hunger to taste the poop of all God’s creatures, be it cat, rodent, or owl. But not humans, strangely, which tells you she’s smarter than she looks.

A dog’s life isn’t as easy as it sounds, however. Her daily responsibilities are numerous and varied, and include such bothers as going to sleep in a sunbeam, then waking some time later slightly outside of the sunbeam. Depending on the hour, she may or may not have muffled bird songs to contend with. It’s got to be hell.

But then again, all things change. It’s Christmastime now, and the other night Katie and I settled in to rewatch the Family Stone, as we do most years. And what do you know, I found myself entertaining a strange and terrifying thought. Maybe kids wouldn’t be so bad.

“What would you think about triplets?” I asked Katie, and after a few minutes she stopped laughing.

“What, you’re serious?”

“We could do IVF. Get it all over with at once.”

She was incredulous. “Have you seen a picture of someone carrying triplets? It’s insane. Look,” she commanded, dialing up a photo on her phone. “See? She’s like a beach ball. A beach ball nobody wants to play with.”

Whatever happens, we’re still at least a few years away from children. We’d like to be back in the States, for starters, and we’re planning a year or two in Europe before moving home to California even enters the conversation. But that hasn’t stopped hope from blooming.

It’s Saturday night, and it’s late. Chloe notices my arm around her mother, and her tail begins to move. She’s always been a bit of a pervert, this dog, and she watches us for signs of affection like nerds pining for the new Joss Whedon flick. Encouraged, she rushes in for a better view, eyes flicking between us, riveted, like she’s seated mid-court at the Ping-Pong World Cup. By the time we actually make it to the bedroom she’ll have rustled up a toy, a lifelike squirrel perhaps, or a raccoon with the polystyrene intestines forcibly removed through a seam in its hip, and begin enthusiastically cheering us from her favorite spot by the nightstand.

“Nice effort, Yael,” she seems to say. “Katie, need any help with that strap-on?”

Things aren’t always as clear as they seem, and you have to wonder exactly what goes through her mind as she sits there, panting. During the act, I sometimes glimpse her eager expression, tongue lolling from the side of her mouth, beard glistening with dribble. What is she thinking? What does she see? Are we just playing in her mind, rolling around on a fluffy, down wrestling mat, or could it be something deeper?

There’s a certain sparkle of those strangely human eyes, the same honeyed orbs we saw staring from the cover of Life magazine so many years ago, inspiring us to drive to Fort Meyers and give twelve hundred dollars to a woman in a trailer. Is it hope squished in there with all those rods and cones? Optimism we might make that choice again, might devote another ten years to something new, to someone else?

She’s a smarty, that dog. I bet she knows exactly what’s going on.

One of these nights, when the time is right and the stars align, we’re going to take that step. Change the game, she thinks. We’ll finally grow up and stop being selfish. At long last, do what people and dogs and fish and bacteria have done for hundreds of millions of years. Do what comes naturally. It’s going to happen. She feels it in her canine marrow, knows without a doubt in the entire fucking world.

Tonight’s the night. They’re taking the plunge, she whispers to herself, giddy with anticipation. They’re going to have puppies.