Area 151

I am unexpectedly and uncomfortably on tenterhooks with Matt this week.

Yesterday morning, he asked me if I really truly didn’t ever want to have kids.  I guess something I said during the weekend made him aware of that in a way he hadn’t been before.  “I knew you didn’t want to physically have children,” he said. “But I thought that adopting or doing something like that was okay with you.”*

I cleared up this confusion with a more definitive statement.  It’s not the issue of physically birthing a child or not.  I have no desire to be a parent.

And with that clarification, he and I have run up against an unexpected impasse.**  Matt has always assumed that he’d have a family and children eventually.  He’s never really thought through when he wants that to occur or what he thinks parenting will be like.  He’s pretty sure he has a romanticized idea about what being a Dad would be like.

So it’s entirely possible  that further reflection will reveal that he doesn’t actually want to have kids and it was just an expectation he drifted into because he was raised to believe “it’s what people do.”  On the other hand, it’s also entirely possible that further reflection will reveal that he does sincerely and consciously want to be a father.

Which would be a dealbreaker for our future together.

I’ve asked him to do a gut check and figure out what he honestly, consciously wants from his life—as far as this question of parenting goes.  ‘Cos if he really and sincerely wants to have children, then he needs to be with a woman who wants that too.

And that’s not me.

I have no idea how long it’ll take him to decide where he stands.  I can’t imagine it’s a quick thing to figure out.  So here I stay in limbo for an uncomfortably intederminate length of time.

Meanwhile, I can already feel myself trying to prepare for the hurt that would come if he realizes he wants to be a father.  When he moved to kiss me good-bye today before leaving for work, I could feel my instinct to pull away, to not be too affectionate, to shield myself against a parting of the ways.

* I’ll admit I’m puzzled by that interpretation on his part.  I think I’ve been quite unambiguous about this issue for quite some time—certainly for as long as we’ve known each other.

** At the very least, it’s unexpected to me.  Like I said above, I had sincerely thought I’d been perfectly clear about my desire to remain childless.  And so I’d assumed that Matt’s willingness to move in with me signalled an understanding and an acceptance of that status quo.