Someone Else's Children

I spent a couple days last week braiding 2 of my little cousins' hair. My cousin has four children, and her brother and his wife were visiting with their two children. Over the course of the couple of days I teased the adults about all of their kids that filled the 2 bedroom apartment. Most of the time I was tired of the noise. But other times, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to go home to my husband and make babies. If only it were that simple. Don't get me wrong, we have the act of making babies down to a pleasurable, magnificent science. But it's the conceiving that hasn't worked for us over the last 6 years. We fluctuate between wanting and not wanting to have children. The wanting is what came first, but after some years, we realized that not having children is also working pretty well for us. We get to spend a lot of time together and do a lot of things people with children either do not have the opportunity to do, or can not do without a lot of planning. But I know we're missing out something, too. Even through all the screaming and turned over cups of red Kool-Aid, there was a sense of family that is a little harder to grasp when there are only two of us. So I sat there, feeling lonely despite the fact that I was surrounded by family and feeling a little empty for not being a part of the "mommy club." But then my father called, and I remembered...