I always said I didn't want kids but I didn't fully believe myself until I was holding my nephew for the first time
I'm 29, been saying since my early twenties that I don't want children. My family always treated it as a phase. My mom would say things like "you'll change your mind" and "you just haven't met the right person yet" and I had said it so many times without anyone taking it seriously that I started to wonder if maybe they were right and I just didn't know myself yet.
My brother had his first kid last year. A boy, healthy, everyone was thrilled. I was happy for them genuinely. At the baby shower people kept making comments at me, you're next, your turn soon, watching me like they were waiting for some switch to flip.
At the hospital when I met him for the first time my mom handed him to me pretty much immediately. And I held him and he was tiny and he smelled like a baby and everyone in the room was looking at me with this expectant energy like this was going to be the moment.
And I just. didn't feel the thing they were waiting for me to feel. And that was it.
Not in a cold way, I wasn't repulsed or uncomfortable, he was genuinely sweet. I just felt like I was holding someone else's baby, which I was, and that was completely fine, and in about ten minutes I was going to hand him back and go home and that also felt completely fine.
I drove home and sat in my quiet apartment and I just felt fine. Normal. Like I'd made the right call on where to eat dinner. No big moment, no tears, nothing cinematic. Just a Tuesday feeling about a pretty major thing.
I haven't second guessed it since. That was eight months ago. My nephew is very cute and I am a great aunt who visits and then goes home to her silent appartment and sleeps nine hours and honestly? Same.