My father was distant, uninvolved, mild enough for long stretches, only to explode into violent verbal rages if milk was spilled, or we asked for spending money, or, heaven forbid, he found coins on the floor. We neither knew nor cared about money, he’d yell, and how hard he had to work to support us, and how expensive we were.

They did not know how to play with us, or be close, or converse amicably, without criticism. But they did want us to be well educated, and they exposed us to a wide range of experience. We had music lessons, swimming lessons; my sister learned to ride. There was never any question but that the two of us would go to college. From the outside, our family looked adventurous, fun-loving. Were we more convivial, happier, in those tents, cars, campers and cabins? Rarely. In close quarters, our mother and her moods still dominated, and we girls withdrew, each into her own solitude.

I have friends from families long ridden with addiction, abuse and poverty who have become loving, responsible, sober parents and made safe, calm homes for their children. So why did neither my sister nor I ever want to “do it right” and live in a family of our own making? Even as I learned that not all families were like this, I didn’t trust myself not to recreate what I had known.

I believe it was no coincidence that I waited to marry until it was biologically impossible for me to have a family. Again and again, I fell hard for remote, often unavailable men and tried, unsuccessfully, to make them love me. My drinking slowly slid into excess, until, at 34, I had a moment of clarity: I realized that I could improve neither my writing nor myself if I was getting drunk every night.

That year I went into therapy, got sober and landed steady work, which together set me firmly on the long, twisting ascent to my present contentment. En route, I abandoned my efforts to make the uninterested love me, and I learned to recognize and appreciate the genuinely interested. With years of therapy, I did outgrow my resentment toward and impatience with kids, and I got a handle on that driving need for parental attention and love. I understood more about my parents, too, about diabetes and mood swings, and about how my father grew up in a home where bruising beatings and potentially mortal combat took place.

I became more able and even somewhat willing to be a parent, but by the time that happened, and by the time I met a man who might be a wonderful father, I was 50. We were too old and, as he likes to say, too set in our ways.

The fortuneteller I saw at 25 proved correct in all her predictions. I was poor for decades, finally getting comfortable in my 40s. In my 20s and early 30s, I grappled with alcoholism, a serious but not necessarily fatal disease; I have been sober now for 27 years. I know, too, how the fortuneteller’s cosmic source did its calculation. The one chance at motherhood fate allotted me, I chose not to take.

I can live with that.