I Found Love in My Forties—it Was Too Late For Kids

At 40, single, and working as a communications professor at a conservative Christian college in Chicago, I moved in with the Mennonites, a community of liberal Christians, for some company.

One spring, my five housemates and I ordered a Community Supported Agriculture box from a local farm in Illinois. From May to September, our CSA box arrived weekly with eggs of many different sizes, shapes, and colors like a Pottery Barn palette of paints—China White, Cotton White, Halcyon Green, and my favorite, Alpaca.

At first, we had so many eggs our household couldn't keep up in our production of quiches, scrambles, and frittatas. When we'd finally exhausted Mark Bittman's egg recipes, we began cooking and freezing them.

Then, suddenly, mid-summer we got word from the local farmers: The chickens were done laying eggs.

They couldn't explain it. They simply stated unapologetically that given the many factors involved in egg production, the farm chickens were slowing down. We were not to expect as many—if any—eggs in our box the following weeks. It felt like Egg Armageddon around our house.

Eggs had been the point of a recent probe by my grandmother during my last visit home to California. "Those sure are pretty legs," Nana thus began.

"Thanks Nana. They haven't helped me find a husband though."

"No, they sure haven't. You just can't seem to get a man to stay, can you?"

I stared.

"How's your period?"

"Fine."

"How many days is it?"

"Five." I lied. It was more like three. Nana, a former chief emergency room nurse, was clearly trying to assess the situation.

"That's good. That means your eggs are still good. I want great-grandbabies, you know."

How were my eggs? I had no idea, but I certainly felt them beating their little drums in my fallopian tubes as they made their monthly travels.

Nana turned 95 that year—her silver-blue crown like fire, her eyes clear as sapphires. "A book a day and my garden," Nana liked to say, "that's what keeps me alive." But loving Henry also kept her alive.

At 80, Nana married Henry, a former co-worker, years after Grandpa died. This miracle occurred when I was 25, and, per my usual, not dating anyone. "I attended my Nana's second wedding before I've even had my first!" I roared, half-delighted.

Over time, Nana stitched five pastel-patched baby quilts, one for each of her five grandchildren's children. Throughout the decades, while the other grandchildren and I suffered break-ups, smartphones, commitment phobia, internet dating, abortions, stillborns, and miscarriages, Nana quietly unstitched her hope.

One year, Aunt Madeline informed my mom: "Mom is giving away the baby quilts. She just gave one to Charlene's teen granddaughter who just had a baby out of wedlock."

"Damn it," I told mom. "Tell her not to give mine away."

Beginning in my mid-twenties, while studying the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity, I began to feel a fire to work among orphans and vulnerable children in sub-Saharan Africa. This fire consumed all other desires, particularly the desire to wife and mother. I became a missionary instead.

When I was 30, I began working for a Kenyan organization that rescued abandoned and HIV-positive babies. On the surface, it seemed I was all about the babies.

My eggs, and what to do with them, had been a subject of contemplation for years ever since my high school friend, Remi, while hiking together in the Santa Monica Mountains, had dropped "freezing" her eggs into casual conversation.

My eggs—of which I had millions at birth—would soon decline in quality, Remi informed me. They would age. "If you want to freeze them," she evangelized, "you need to do it before you're forty."

This was all headline news to me. I was 35 at the time.

My mind raced. These were the years in which I'd been saving money to adopt because I'd not yet found the right partner. I began to ponder everyone I had liked, dated, and/or rejected since I was five.

I began in kindergarten chasing Landon on the tricycles. I pondered my parents' moniker for me in college: The One Date Wonder. "Are you going to give this one a second chance?" my dad would ask.

And finally, I pondered the man I was recently dating in seminary who offered to be my "home," then promptly ran off to make a purple van in the woods his home—the man who my friend Nicole had pointed out "probably sh**s in the woods."

However devastated I felt at the time, this man's offering was doomed from the outset. For I was the sparrow who had found a home in the courts of the Lord, as the ancient Hebrew psalmist had written. I did not need, or want, a man to be my home.

But at Moody Bible Institute where I worked, gender roles seemed stuck in the 1950s. My undergraduate female students shamelessly pursuing "rings before Spring" and "M.R.S. degrees"— two phrases I'd newly encountered.

I felt pressure, for I'd not taken Remi's advice. I'd not frozen my eggs. I found myself praying quite regularly for my eggs: "God, keep things working down there. All's I need is one good egg that splits. (I wanted twins). Oh, and a man."

I watched professor's wives pushing strollers through Moody's hallways, or handing neon sippy cups to toddlers while I dashed to Intelligentsia for a cup of coffee and thought to myself: "That looks so boring!" But sometimes I thought, "That kid is cute," or other times, if I was honest, I found myself hating this woman I didn't even know.

Most of the time I wondered about the woman's level of discontent, and I allowed myself to finally admit: I want babies, but not the life it would bring. And also: Who could be more interesting than Jesus as a companion? How would I find time to write—to take the broadax to my life, as Annie Dillard says I must?

I wanted a husband, but he needed to give my stack of books a good run for their money. I wanted babies, but I didn't want to raise them, at least not full-time for 18 years.

Was this heretical? Was I allowed to think such things?

I feared this wife-mother-stranger-sister. I feared becoming her and not becoming her. Ultimately, I feared becoming the woman who, Sandra Cisneros writes, "sits her sadness on an elbow" and gazes out the window. I feared my own regret.

Ambivalence. A complex set of human emotions. A paradoxical tension-net of feeling. Yes and no. I want and I don't want or wishy-washy, as my family likes to say.

There may have been marriageable men along the way, or the opportunity to adopt, but I didn't see it. I had wanderlust. I wanted to write. To write stories and grants for wells in the desert and schools in the slums. I wanted to fund the rescue of vulnerable children with my words.

I wanted to sit in silence and contemplation. Today I wonder if this was marriage and motherhood ambivalence all along. Ambivalence revealing itself in half-hearted, online dating and an adoption savings account I would never use.

At the age of 42, after a dozen years of erratic dating, I saw my now-husband, David, on OkCupid standing on top of a fourteener in Colorado, holding a rock in his hand and grinning. He'd uploaded the classic holding-a-child-while-flexing photo. Arms. So noted. And he loved God.

I hit on him immediately and fell in love with him just as quickly. My ambivalence vanished. I told him I'd always wanted twins. He readily agreed as people high on the oxytocin and vasopressin of dating do.

After our first year of marriage, David and I embraced the "Que sera, sera" approach to family planning. How did we mentally solve the tradeoffs potential children would require? We didn't. We simply deployed the adage: "Let God, let go." Sans birth control, we did nothing to increase our chances of getting pregnant.

Once we had cycled through some months of not becoming pregnant, my desire for twins faded. A defense mechanism? A contented acceptance? Perhaps both. We watched friends crying through the same journey while we shed few tears. We considered how many nannies we could reasonably afford, how many hours we could work, how close we needed to live to my mother. A series of epiphanies ensued.

What keeps us alive? How do we want to spend our days?

At my last telehealth appointment, my gynecologist had balled up her fist, holding it to the video camera—a white-knuckled zero. "These are your chances of getting pregnant without fertility treatment. Do you want to pursue it?"

"No. We don't." We wanted quiet.

I felt peace in saying no and at the same time a final grief pang in the small hollow in the center of my body—perhaps in my womb, like a wind moving through an empty space, rustling. Turns out Mom had guarded my baby quilt all these years.

When David and I moved into our first home, she brought it over. As we lifted it from the box she burst into tears. I hugged her, feeling terrible for what my choices cost her. I have broken the family tree.

David's general dislike for the idea of children certainly factored into our decision to neither foster nor adopt nor seek fertility treatments. But placing it on his shoulders feels like a cop-out.

Think about it. I somehow managed to not choose a partner until the age of 42. I never put the pursuit of marriage and children in the foreground of my life. Once I was happily married, the decades of what I now identify as maternal ambivalence became a contented no.

The year prior to meeting David, my religious zeal had shifted from the vulnerable overseas to those in my own backyard: My female students suffering gender-based exclusion and violence. These were my chickadees.

I sounded the maternal alarm—the rising trill of a mother hen, got fired, filed a gender discrimination lawsuit, and returned to school for an M.F.A. in creative writing.

Now in my late forties, I am reaping my harvest. I have sown, all these years, into the lives of other women's children, into the lives of children not my own. In the end, this is what I did with my eggs.

Janay Garrick is a California-based writer and advocate for women's rights who is currently working on her first book, a memoir.

All views expressed in this article are the author's own.

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