Please be kind. I'm panicking. I'm 46 (f). What if I'm wrong? What if once it's too late I change my mind? I'm questioning everything. Advice please?

Every path you dont take could potentially lead you to the place where youd wish youd taken the one you did. I sometimes imagined some good things about having a child and whether i would miss that special imaginary relationship - the thing is the mental child was a very specific person, and we had a very specific relationship. So odds are I either keep the life I actually always wanted (aside from the fact the message about the importance of procreation is force fed to us to the point where we just have to consider it), or i take a lottery where out of infinite possibilities I somehow end up getting my imagined child (who also has to defeat the odds of being physically born by me.) So what, I can foster or adopt - but personally i even shrugged that off because i realized I would be doing it for some selfish reason and practically run a personality contest. In the end i realized how convoluted the terms under which id have a child are, how impossible to manage, unfair to that child, and finally that I am not even doing this mental gymnastic exercise because i actually want a child but because i was trying to find a solution and a safety net to avoid the social stereotype of being old and regretful one day.

I dont know what old age will bring, if i will even experience it. But to compromise the decades of my life for selfish (yet self harming) and utterly unrealistic odds is completely irrational. Every action can potentially lead to regret, that is life. There are so many variables outside our control that can change the desired outcomes of things. Only thing we can do is keep making choices to the best of our ability that make sense for us and what we want to achieve in the moment.

/r/childfree Thread