I have heard this tale before. In fact, I have lived this tale, to a point. I, too, was a child who had stuffed animals but few dolls and who pretended to be a rock star during playtime, never, ever a mom. I baby-sat -- once. There was a blackout that night, and the children cried, and I vowed not to try that again. When my friends began producing newborns, I held them awkwardly, and only when I couldn't find a way out. Four years into my marriage I was still waiting for my maternal urge to kick in, and when it didn't, I closed my eyes and took a leap of faith. Not until my son's first smile did I catch the fever and become a besotted parent.

It might be easy to find a moral here, but those who call themselves child free warn the rest of us to stop assuming that they will somehow see the light. ''No one goes up to the goo-goo-eyed mother of a baby and says, 'I'm sure you'll change your mind,' ''Gill says. In fact, he would argue that my life is an example of how society pressures people to have children against their better judgment. There would be fewer neglected children, he says, and fewer stressed and miserable adults, if more people felt free not to reproduce. ''This isn't some cute stage that I'll grow out of,'' he says. ''It's a legitimate life choice.''

Monica Lightner, a 25-year-old newlywed in California, fought to prove exactly that late last year when she asked a doctor at her H.M.O. to perform a tubal ligation. First he tried to talk her out of it, she says, ''insisting that I would change my mind one day.'' Then she was told that she would have to undergo a psychiatric exam, which she refused, because the suggestion that she was crazy to want a life without children was ''absurd and insulting.'' Eventually she was referred to a second doctor, who told her that the last tubal ligation he performed was on a woman who later regretted having it and, as a result, took her life.

Finally, six months after her initial request, she found a doctor willing to do as she asked, and her surgery was done on April 26. She is outraged that she had to fight so hard. ''Have you ever heard of a woman being told to take a psychiatric exam before she was permitted to have a baby?'' she says. ''They kept telling me this was a permanent choice, as if that hadn't occurred to me. Having a child is an even more permanent choice, but no one would have dreamed of talking me out of that.''

Pressure also comes from closer to home. Gail G. (who works with adoptive parents for a living and asked to remain anonymous because they might resent her decision never to have children) began to dread conversations with her mother, who could not believe she would never give her a grandchild. ''If I said or did something that made her proud she would sigh and then get this pitiful look and say, 'Too bad you'll never have kids to share this with.' And then when I did or said something she didn't like, she would say, 'Well it's a good thing you're never having kids, you're too selfish.' ''

In self-defense, Gail ''made a deal with Mom.'' She set up ''appointments'' -- every few months -- and declared that these were the only times she would answer questions about being child free. ''If she brings it up between appointments,'' Gail says, ''I am justified in hanging up on her or walking out of the room, neither of which I have had to do since we set up the arrangement.''

Anne Noble, a graphics artist in New Jersey, has tried in vain to find a similar way to silence her co-workers. One recent lunch hour, tired out by a late-night party (people without children get to go to those, she points out), she took a long nap in her car. Returning to the office she was ribbed by colleagues who had seen her feet jutting out of her rear window. They wondered if she needed the nap because she was pregnant.