Microsoft-owned GitHub announced on Wednesday a free version of its popular Copilot code completion/AI pair programming tool, which will also now ship by default with Microsoft’s popular VS Code editor. Until now, most developers had to pay a monthly fee, starting at $10 per month, with only verified students, teachers, and open source maintainers getting […]
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A few years ago, when I was in my late 30s, my dad sent me two birthday cards with the identical message — "Have a child. It's the best investment you can make in your life!"
My dad's wishes for grandchildren weren't new. Over my adult years, I've received subtle — and maybe not-so-subtle — proddings of having progeny from both my parents. That said, they didn't stir any newfound desire in me to have children. Maybe it's the simple fact that I love having plenty of alone time and pursuing my passions, but having a family has never really been a bucket list item for me.
And while I appreciate, love, and respect my friends and cousins who have decided to have children, I've found that asking whether I want kids is like asking whether I want a peanut butter and sardine sandwich — not on my radar, and doesn't stir up any interest or intrigue.
As a proud childless cat lady, I've found that I have a greater capacity for different types of friendships.
I can say that being child-free has likely allowed me to have the time, space, and energy to make friends of all ages and backgrounds.
For example, I am friends with folks in their late 50s through 80s from my morning water fitness class. My good friends Sally and Melanie and I have co-hosted nature healing parties and other gatherings at their house, and we go out to eat when we can.
I've also developed close relationships with fellow stationery and sticker lovers. We're a gaggle of folks in our 20s to 50s who are single, married with kids, divorced, or recently separated from their partners. We try to get together in person every few months to exchange "happy mail" and engage in sticker chatter and snobbery.
For a while, I was able to trek across Los Angeles County to see my friend Marie, which would often take an hour each way and back.
When I first got to know Marie, she was newly widowed. We met at a meditation sangha when I lived in West LA. In her 80s, she had acquired a new friend: a then-late 20-something-year-old me. What started as short conversations after meditation blossomed into a decadeslong friendship. Despite our over 40-year age difference, we were kindred spirits. Over the years, we enjoyed many happy hours, meditation retreats, and camping trips together.
Despite moving from West Los Angeles to Pasadena, which meant hourlong drives to see one another, our friendship endured. And when she passed at 88 several years ago, it hit me hard.
Since I am not busy raising a family, I've had more free time to contribute to community efforts that are important to me. I'm an active participant in my Buy Nothing group, where I've been deemed "The Sicker Fairy" for delivering happy mail to the neighborhood kids during holidays throughout the year.
My mom and I also volunteer at a local botanical garden. We get to dig in the dirt and spend time in nature, and we've both made new friends through the program.
On occasion, I help out on an on-call basis at a food pantry. On a given day, 200 people wait several hours to receive their weekly allotment of groceries. In the coming months, I'll be putting together a money workshop for women in transition. Giving back to the community in different capacities has been greatly rewarding, and I hope to continue volunteering as much as possible.
Not having kids has afforded me greater space to be present for others — as a friend, daughter, partner, cousin, and "auntie." Growing up in a single-parent household where my mom worked two full-time jobs, time could be scarce. I can practice the tenets of compassionate presence and deep listening and cultivate relationships with the potential for an authentic connection.
When an updated, remastered, or otherwise spiffed-up version of a game is released, nobody—not long-time fans, not archivists, not anybody, really—ever asks for the original version of that game to be taken down. Does this seem to stop game studios from committing this unforced public relations error? Absolutely not.
Blizzard, a company that has recently released remastered versions of Warcraft and Warcraft II for $10 and $15, respectively (or in a bundle with III for $40) on its Battle.net storefront, has asked GOG to remove its non-remastered, DRM-free $15 bundle of those games from its store on December 13.
GOG (aka Good Old Games), which recently included Warcraft I and II in its Preservation Program, with a "Make Games Live Forever" tagline, suddenly finds itself with a new policy to figure out. So GOG is putting the Warcraft I & II Bundle on sale (discount code "MakeWarcraftLiveForever" for $2 off) and is letting folks know that if they buy it before December 13, they will keep access to it after the delisting, complete with offline installers.
© GOG/Blizzard
Courtesy of Courtney Kocak
I'm 41, and until very recently, I thought I would remain child-free. I'm the oldest of four, but we've all held off on kids for various reasons. For my part, I've spent my adulthood chasing my dreams as a writer and performer in Los Angeles. After decades of trying not to get pregnant, I still have a lingering fear that I would be a teen mom, as one of my standup bits goes.
My parents live in rural Minnesota, where most of their peers have had grandkids for ages. During a visit home last September, my mom — unable to hold back her tears — told me how sad she was not to have grandkids, especially now that she's retired. "It's not what I thought it would look like," she said, her voice breaking.
I was gutted by her confession. My parents, lifelong teachers and coaches, have centered their entire existence around family and kids. They deserve grandkids, if anyone does. Unfortunately, my brother who seems most likely to procreate at this point lives in Sweden with his wife, and they plan to stay there. Even if and when they do have children, they won't be living down the street or even a short plane ride away; a whole ocean will separate my parents from their grandkids.
Around the same time that my mom shared her yearning for grandkids, suddenly, it seemed like everyone I came up with in the LA creative scene — actors, writers, comedians — was pregnant or navigating new parenthood.
I went down the rabbit hole on a fellow writer's Instagram account. She'd been a single mom long before this baby boom, and I scrolled down through a decade of her daughter growing up in reverse. Even through the highlight reel of social media, it was clear there had been hard times, but also immense joy and fulfillment. I surprised myself with the thought, "I might want that someday."
Earlier that summer, my parents and I met in Phoenix for an extended family get-together. For years, it had felt like time stood still — that I was 30-something, and they were 50-something, and we would all remain frozen in time together forever. But on that trip, I felt that era coming to an end. We were having so much fun, but there was an invisible hourglass slowly emptying alongside us, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. My 40th birthday was just a few months away. Gray hairs were coming for us all, one strand at a time.
For the first time, I felt my fertility fleeting. Was I really going to forgo the chance to create a relationship as profound as the one I shared with them — a relationship that was now morphing into its next stage?
During another recent visit home, my parents cut out an article about the "Active Grandparent Hypothesis," a theory that suggests being active helped hunter-gatherers live long enough to care for their grandchildren, and left it on the dining room table. My dad gestured to it, "Hey, give this a read... Interesting article!" My parents are eternal realists, stoic with a dash of optimism. They're runners, walkers, and bikers, always exercising. Maybe evolution would keep them around long enough to spend time with the kids of their own late-blooming kids after all.
They were doing their research, and I was doing mine. I started Googling everything I could about pregnancy (geriatric, in my case), childbirth (daunting), and parenthood (manageable? fun, even?). I read lots of articles and began interviewing moms and other experts for my podcast. My husband and I had honest conversations about how we wanted our future to look. We waffled back and forth — sometimes having a kid seemed like the most obvious life-affirming choice, while other times, we couldn't imagine sacrificing our freedom to travel or the time to immerse ourselves in our work.
We'd both been ambivalent about having kids, at best. But that wrenching conversation with my mom, along with our Arizona trip, opened my mind to a possibility I hadn't seriously considered before. Soon after, my husband's brother and his wife went from adamantly child-free to pursuing fertility treatments, and my husband fell in love with the idea of our future kids being cousins. Now, we're planning to do an egg retrieval of our own. Our shared vision now looks quite different than it did 18 months ago, I'm starting to get excited about this change of plans.
My mom has said, "Don't have a kid for me." But the truth is, I sort of am — and I don't think that's a bad thing. I see how having kids can deepen one's relationship with their parents and the rest of their family, and I want that for all of us. And considering how my decisions affect the other people in my family? That makes me think I might be good at this motherhood thing after all.
