Not everyone emerges in a gleeful whirl after positive test results make themselves known.  I, for example, felt uneasy, shocked, uncertain, terrified, hesitant, unready, apprehensive, guilty for not jigging, and terrible that my instinctive tears dominated the moment.

Through all of that emotional mud, though, I felt honest.  This was my true reaction, and this was no time to fake it.  I needed to be real with myself about this.

Five months ago I was having dinner with eight girlfriends, two of whom announced that they were expecting.  When these proclamations are made (they started a couple years ago and have been like dominos ever since), I just get out of the way.  I feel genuine excitement for my friends and look forward to seeing them becomes moms.  But simultaneously, the few stragglers of us who’ve purposely yet to conceive, reach for wine glasses and drink deep to try to drown out the obnoxious buzz of our own biological clock alarms, for which there seems to be no snooze button.  Our arms extend to the glasses like the Rockets’ legs, in unison, with purpose.  Maybe our smiles look a little rehearsed like those of the ladies on the stage at the Christmas Spectacular.

My procrastination comes from what I think is a legitimate place.  On my 28th birthday, I quit my stable, well-paying corporate American job to go to culinary school and embark on a new career.  Reinvention takes some time, and I couldn’t imagine inventing someone else, while trying to figure myself out.  So Topher and I made the conscious decision to concentrate on getting the new me off the ground before a new us came on the scene.

I spent many nights on the couches of friends while working in New York City as a freelancer, taking trains, buses, boats and cars between home and work for weeks and months at a time.  I dropped everything, including any pay worth calculating, to co-author my first cookbook.  I spent countless hours writing and developing recipes at odd times. I crawled inside my head to find words to pitch to editors at magazines and newspapers. I begged and borrowed to start a blog, go to conferences all over the country, work on other books and projects.  Career-building can be all-consuming. So is parenthood.  It seemed that I couldn’t pull off both at once.

There were other sources of my feelings of iffyness on the baby front.  I read status updates of Facebook friends with kids, lamenting their jam-packed days and how they have to hide in the laundry room for a stolen moment of respite and a gulp of wine out of a sippy cup.  I don’t blame them for venting, I just wasn’t sure I wanted to join them.

Worse, I’ve observed married couples with kids start to regard each other in such a way that makes John and Kate Gosselin look like the model couple of the year.  I’m in a pretty awesome marriage. We have fun together and enjoy the same things in life. We laugh a lot.  We eat dinner together almost every night. We balance our individual quirks on each other’s and we try our best to always be a united front. “We’re a team,”, as we like to say.  I shutter to think of exchanging the looks I see tossed between husbands and wives over the heads of their children. They range from disgust to exhaustion and annoyance to disdain.  They are ugly expressions and they make me want to avoid their source.

I set baby talk on the back burner and found comfort in trends that point to women starting families a little later in the name of work or other aspects of life.  I’d be lying if I said I never wished I was still 26, when there was little to no pressure to move on to mommyhood.  I’d also be lying if I said I never envied friends who have known since age six that their calling in life was to be an exuberant mother of an ever-expanding brood.

But I’m being honest in admitting my reservations about parenthood.

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