Happy Mother’s Day A series of posts honoring wilted flowers, handmade cards and breakfast in bed.

This is one of two essays contributed to the Motherlode blog by performers in the first New York City production of Listen to Your Mother, an national series of live readings by local writers in celebration of Mother’s Day.

Somewhere between the French toast and pancakes, my sister offered me some eggs. With her D.N.A., that is, because I’ve found myself in my mid-40s, minus a partner, and with seven billion people on the planet furiously chanting, “Bay-bee, bay-bee…” Not because I want a child, and not because I don’t. It’s more that I don’t not want one, and performing in New York’s “Listen to Your Mother” show as the only woman without a child who’s suddenly too old to have one in a traditional way feels like falling onto a cactus. Naked. On Queens Boulevard.

Listen to Your Mother

Even more mystifying than the question over whether to become a mother: “How could I not know?” How could I lack an answer for such a fundamental choice? There are things I’ve wanted with certainty, even ferocity: a French-blue velvet couch, a carefree life as a free-lancer; sex on the Coney Island Ferris wheel (we happened to be stuck at the top). The inner voice that loudly commands me to buy those extravagant shoes is stunningly silent on this life decision.

I’m reminded of Kathy Martin, the world-class runner who “didn’t discover this glorious secret hidden away in her body” until her late 40s. At 60, she runs nearly a 5-minute mile. Yet how could she not know about the greatness lurking in her legs until midlife? Couldn’t she feel that power aching to explode? There must have been a hint of it when she chased her child on the lawn or sprinted across the street at a yellow light. Might it be the same for me, that the propensity to be a great mother is hiding somewhere deep, and that we just don’t know until…we know?

I thought my biological clock might manifest as an annoying tick of a metronome, a drone that I could silence with a long run or a good book; instead it’s more like an army fervently pounding down my door. Surrounded by women celebrating motherhood sharpens the sorrow and heightens the sense of not belonging. Wait, stop the show…I didn’t get to tuck away a letter of life lessons, send a daughter off to college or clean up a kid’s vomit like the other women who read and kvell.

Yet why do I feel like I don’t belong — in this performance, with my siblings’ families, even on this planet — when 18 percent of American women are childless through age 44? Perhaps because childbearing feels inextricably linked to womanhood and self worth, and I would argue that you can’t separate your head and heart from your hormones, any more than border collies can stop herding or salmon can swim downstream.

Last week a friend who had her first child called from her car …a muddled rant of rushing to day care, traffic on the bridge and missing her networking event. I could barely hear horns honking over her maniacal screaming, and then she very clearly shrieked, “WHAT KIND OF LIFE IS THIS?” In my most soothing “don’t drive off the bridge” voice, I vowed we’d visit weekly and maybe I could take two trains and a bus to her place in Jersey to help out (words no Manhattan resident has ever uttered). The next day she Skyped me, everyone was cooing and gurgling, momma beaming as her daughter bounced on her knee, babbling to my dog.

It’s hard to imagine how motherhood could be so simultaneously triumphant and dreadful. Do the highs transform the lows, not unlike the pains of labor, into a distant, gauzy past? Sort of like when my dog chewed my glasses and the flash of anger was replaced by the sudden realization that they were the wrong shape for my face, so I should really thank her? Is it that kind of invincible love?

I’m afraid of undertaking motherhood alone, in a tiny apartment with a three-flight walk up and little savings. I’m equally scared of the drone of doing so with a husband and a good job in a nice home. And what I fear the most is missing the indescribably deep connection with a child that yields a lifetime of stories.

I can’t take my sister’s egg. It’s a wonderfully loving and ridiculously complex gesture and while I applaud nontraditional families, I can’t imagine explaining to a child that “your momma is your aunt, your auntie is really your mother, your cousins are your siblings, and your daddy — well, we bought a vial of him off the Internet…”

Paralyzed by uncertainty, I nearly want to flip a coin to end the wrenching lack of knowing. But as T.S. Eliot said, “Things don’t go away. They become you. There is no end, but addition.” So undecided and waiting for my soul to speak, I’ll wait on, for the choice to become me.

This post originally misstated the number of women who remain childless at age 44 as 46 percent. 18 percent of American women between 40 and 44 have never given birth.