Day 335 – Happy New Year!

I used to love New Year's celebrations. Now I don't care. It's sad not to be excited about such a festive holiday. Of course, I love good food and good company, and all of this is present and very enjoyable at our traditional New Year's celebrations, but now it's just another great gathering, another dinner, nothing extraordinary. That magical excitement, that skip in your heartbeat is missing, and that is what provokes my New Year's melancholy. I guess you need to be a child to experience the mysterious spirit of New Year's. Or maybe you need to have a child, so that you can see this overwhelming mystery reflected in their eyes and hope that a drop of it spills over to end up in your heart.

Lately, I've been thinking that I am finally ready and willing to have a child (of course, now that I'm 36, the good question is whether I'm able to or not, but that doesn't really concern me too much – I am up for adoption). Ironically, this became clear to me several months after I had decided that I didn't want to have any children at all. I remember this moment very well.

Almost same time last year, I was enjoying a starry Cozumel night in a hammock, not thinking about anything in particular. I've learnt that it is very easy to dissolve your hectic thoughts in the roaring sea. It has this repellent effect on all your little annoying thought flies: they simply disappear giving way to that one real thought that lives at the bottom of your heart but which you can't usually hear behind this constant buzz. So suddenly it came to me. I don't want to have children. When I was growing up, I was always embarrassed by my mom's age. She was old. And that was uncool. At that time in Russia women normally started having children at the age of 19-20, and my mom was 34 (!) when she had me. Do the math. I remember promising myself to be a cool "young mom", and specifically, to give birth at 19. When I was 18, I raised the bar a bit and said to myself, "Well, I should really graduate first. 24 sounds like a good age". At 23, I thought, "30! 30 is the perfect age. You get a bit wiser (hopefully), you are still healthy and energetic, and you have already 'had enough fun' to dedicate your life to new responsibilities". That's it, 30 it is!" At 30, however, something came up. And then something else. And something else. And here I was a year ago, childless at the age of 35, finally realizing that I had never before actually asked myself if I really wanted to have a child. I was stunned. All my life I took it for granted that I should have one. But if I really wanted a child, I would have made it happen by now. I had plenty of opportunities (as well as heated discussions on the subject with my exes). Wow. Unexpected, but very, very clear. Up to that moment of hammock truth I actually had never wanted to have children. If I had only ever asked the right question! The answer had always been there, it's just that I had never been around the roaring sea that would make all the hectic insect thoughts crowding my mind shut up.

This realization made me feel so liberated back then! And look at me now, watching the Christmas tree lights blink, imagining myself in a house full of happy noise of wrapping paper being ripped by little hands in a hurry to get to the bottom of all the boxes at once... Go figure.