I won?t have children. I made this decision about three years ago, 30,000 feet in the air on a flight home from Orlando. I was thumbing through an issue of Glamour left behind in the seat pocket in front of me, and I came across an article by the comedian Sarah Silverman. My eye caught on the word ?depression.? In the article, Silverman referred to an interview she?d previously done in which she talked about not wanting to have children for fear she might pass her depression on to them. Suddenly I felt as if the air was being sucked out of the plane. I was just about ready for the oxygen mask to drop from the overhead compartment when the flight attendant announced that we were landing.
I wandered through the Toronto airport in a daze, the magazine tucked under my arm. When I climbed into my parents? car and they asked how everything was, I said, ?Fine.? But was it really" As we sped through the city, my mind sped even faster. I had always pictured myself with a family; I even had baby names picked out. I had just come back from visiting a friend and her new baby. When I?d first arrived, her father had led me to her room in the hospital, and the way he looked at his granddaughter cradled on her mother?s chest made me long to see the same look on my father?s face one day.
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