To baby or not to be?

Women's night. The evening is slowly winding down. A few of us are sitting in the kitchen while another handful of ladies are talking in the living room. Two women come in from the living room and crack up laughing as they hear our conversation.

We are all in our early or late thirties. We are mostly all climbers. We are all wondering if having babies is a must. None of us feels the urge; the clock ticking; the intense desire for "that" kind of responsabilities. Yet, we all wonder. We are all nagged by what, at our age, we are expected to do: having babies.

We live in a time of choice, where we can have kids or not, we can be women with a job - or not, we can become president of jobs who were men only jobs just yesterday, we can be married or single or divorced and it's no longer stigmatized, we can be gay, straight, bisexual, we can live anywhere we want.

But with choices come questions, existentialism, a loss of social status that we need to reinvent on our own. We now need to define who we are, who we want to be, on our own, because we no longer have to obay social structures. But defining oneself is no easy task. What is my role as a women in the world? what is the role of a man in the modern world?

At 32, I wonder. Deeply. I went to law school, knowing that law "wasn't my thing", but I decided to push through and finish. I did. Later, I started going through the mountain guide certification . I love the mountains. I love people. I will finish my certification. Yet, I need to be fulfilled both physically - my guiding and climbing life - and intellectually. I need the latter to be motivated in the physical realm. I need to find a balance between the two to be fulfilled. Yet, at 32, I wonder what it is going to take to satisfy my intellect: going back to school is stimulating, yet, how much sense does it make, when I am at the age when women should be thinking about having children. Shouldn't I be just having kids? but to have kids I need to be making money, and to make money I need to be going back to school. And all the while, I want to climb, climb and climb. And I still feel no urge to have kids. But I feel like I should be wanting to have them. And sometimes, I feel that I want them, because I feel it would bring an easy answer to the turmoil of life questions.

As Emery said tonight, you can't have kids to find fulfilment in your life. You need to find fulfillment within you first. But what is fulfillment: is it being where you are socially expected to be at? is it being successful in your job? is it having babies? or is it having defined what you expect yourself to be and being just that? or maybe, it's just being satisfied with what you have right now...

I wonder....