What Will Happen To My Ambition After Children?

To someone without children, the world of parenthood seems like a walled garden that contains knowledge of the very best and worst experiences of humanity.

But will you love it or hate it?

Are you still yourself on the other side?

Will you regret it?

The only way to know for sure is to do it, but you can't know for sure how it'll go until you commit to it.

That's a level of ambiguity I find intolerable, and yet there is no other way.

I always imagined I would maybe, probably, most likely have children ... someday.

But I was too transient and my career always took priority, so I just put off the decision.

I crossed into my 30s and started to stare down the barrel of "advanced maternal age" and knew that even though I still felt like a teenager who is woefully unprepared to be a parent, it was time to make a decision.

It still felt like I didn't have enough information.

When I was booking guests for the new season of Try Hard, I asked Anna Sale, the creator and host of the podcast https://slate.com/podcasts/death-sex-money">Death, Sex & Money, if she had any major transformational moments that she wanted to talk about, and I was thrilled when she suggested the moment she became a parent.