• My mom had me when she was 32, and I'm an only child.
• My dad died when I was 19, and it was just the two of us with my mom.
• I'm 32 now and don't have kids, but I have two cats that my mom calls grandcats.

Last month, I turned 32.

My mom gave birth to her only child at 32, and my grandma had my mom, the last of her seven children, at 32.

As an only child, I'm confronting pressure to bring a child into our increasingly thorny world.

When I was 19, on a rare vacation without my dad, my mom and I got a call. My dad had died of a brain aneurysm. Losing a parent prematurely sends you reeling. The missing parent, the remaining parent, your family, and genetics all become more precious.

Before that, I'd lived in an insulated, attended world. Both parents were the proverbial "helicopters" that circle many only children. In our little unit, my mom (then a nurse practitioner) was the breadwinner. My dad, a writer, was able and willing to handle childcare.

Because of rising costs and maternal health risks in the US, I probably won't have children. My parents never overtly pressured me to do anything I didn't want to do. Still, as their only child, I feel guilty for depriving them.

My parents encouraged me to achieve my goals

By definition, my family structure (with a breadwinner mom and stay-at-home dad) was quietly defiant, leaving me pretty unfazed by social gender norms.

But societal norms aren't the only source of pressure to reproduce. My parents' priorities were selfless: They prioritized my happiness and career and supported me far beyond the legally required 18 years. Neither demanded that I start my own family or carry on theirs.

Falling short of my parents' deepest inner hopes, though, or depriving my mom of some fulfillment she'd never ask of me — that's a different form of guilt altogether.

Being an only child means I bear sole responsibility for our family's grandchildren. It's dizzying when my only childhood fostered high expectations about parenthood's depth and lifespan.

It's all the more melancholy when I see how my mom delights in her two "grand-cats." Over Thanksgiving, as we devised food combinations and presentations they'd find palatable, I could feel the joy a grandchild would bring.

My parents elevated my wants for decades. Am I failing them by not reciprocating with my own child?

My mom has helped me financially

As I've transitioned out of law practice, I've taken only reproductive justice cases in Arizona. I've seen the costs and crises parents must navigate, from health and safety to education and employment. When systems fail or children fall through the cracks, it's hard not to imagine my potential kids in that position.

My mom has supported me as I've started a new career in media. Both public interest law and media are career paths equated with austerity. I worry that I'll never be able to afford the same financial support for my own child. As my mom nears retirement, would we have to choose between elder care and childcare? Neither my parent nor my child would deserve that existential threat.

I can't afford to be the only parent either

My parents' roles sheltered me from the reality of many heterosexual parents. My dad was often the only male parent in sight after school or supervising playdates. He was reliable and attentive to non-verbal communication. He even French-braided my hair.

I knew then that we were unusual (and frankly, I heard my dad get disproportionate praise for parenting his own child), but I didn't realize the extent until I began dating. My male partners — across states, schools, families of origin, and on-paper beliefs — brought baffling paradigms into our relationships.

My experiences represent a larger trend of labor division for heterosexual couples. Many women like me aren't seeking partnership with any man who's tacitly accepted this culture.

That's a challenge. Without a partner and without a large network of siblings and grandparents, I can't afford parental costs of living on one income.

It's me and my cats

I want to honor the family that reared (only) me with children, but looking at 32 and 2025, it's unrealistic.

My parents are the main reason I feel guilty for not having my own child. Ironically, it's also their intentionality and support that made me reticent to parent if I can't offer the same.

When Mom and I wrangle her grand cats to an annual check-up — one carrier each — our hearts break at their anxiety, and we ask the vet excessive questions. We laugh about how my dad would delight in these fuzzy freaks. I'm grateful for what we have and what we could give if cost were no object.

Beyond guilt as a childless only child, I lament timing. Ultimately, this moment's political greed took this from my parents, who put all their love and time into one basket.

Mackenzie Joy Brennan is a writer, commentator, and lawyer. Find her work at MkzJoyBrennan.com or @MkzJoyBrennan on social media.

• After a decade of going back and forth, I now know that I'm not going to have kids.
• I'm happy with my decision, but worry that I'll be letting my mother down.
• I'm not ready to break the news to my mom, and the secret is hurting our relationship.

When I was in my early 30s, my mom would frequently mention a neighbor of ours, who didn't have kids. In my mom's eyes, she was always in a bad mood. Despite not knowing the circumstances of her childless life, my mum 'knew' that this was the root of all of her problems. Needless to say, I felt uncomfortable whenever my mum talked about this woman — possibly hinting at my future — and it made me not want to bring up my own choices when it came to having children.

At that point, I was still unsure whether I'd have kids one day. I was past the common delusion of 'I'll get pregnant when I'm 35' I once had thanks to a breakup with a long-term boyfriend. Honestly, having a child was the furthest thing from my mind.

I eventually met my now-husband who was the one that gave me the most clarity on the internal kids-or-no-kids dilemma I'd been struggling with for about a decade. He made me see that having kids wasn't something I had to fit into my life at any cost. Our life together could be complete with just the two of us. My mum, on the other hand, possibly saw my new relationship as a fresh chance to become a grandmother. We were on very different pages.

My mother always assumed I'd give her grandchildren

In my early 20s, I moved to Spain for my studies. My mum encouraged this move, saying she wanted me to travel and see the world before settling down and starting a family.

During an emotional mother-daughter moment over Spanish wine and tapas we had while she was visiting, she told me that she was planning to gift me her birthing diary one day. She'd been keeping it safe for me until the time I'd be expecting my first child. As her first-born and only girl, I just nodded along, teary-eyed, feeling a little overwhelmed but thinking that future me would certainly appreciate this gesture when the timing was right.

My kid-free life is fulfilling

Fast forward almost 20 years, and I'm living a life I couldn't have dreamed of back then. I've settled down on the coast of Portugal with a house looking out over the ocean and I have a loving husband and two gorgeous rescue cats to keep me company. I know my mum is content knowing that I'm happy, but it's the unspoken words lingering between us that have cooled our relationship over the years, which means I'm not racing back to Austria to see her all that much.

Ignoring the issue is keeping us apart

Is it too late to bring up this topic with her? Does she still share the same strong opinion about childless women she had a decade ago? The longer I wait to have 'the talk' with her, the more uncomfortable I feel about it. I know I shouldn't feel guilty for my life choices, but for some reason it feels like I'm letting my mum down and I don't want to deal with that right now

I'm very grateful that my brother has two beautiful kids, which I hope softens the blow to my mom a little bit for me and my situation. After all, she is a grandmother.

As for now, I'm just sitting out holidays and birthdays until I reach one where she certainly must feel that I'm too old to start a family. I'm 43 now, maybe that time will come in four or five years? However, when my mum was 50, she confided in me that she was briefly thinking about having another child. She might actually never give up hope.

It's not like she doesn't suspect that I don't want to have kids — I assume — but picturing myself saying it out loud to her sends me down an anxiety rabbit hole. Maybe it's just the tension between us accumulating over the years, and once we clear the air, we can both move on with a new outlook that can bring us closer together again. Here's hoping, but for now, I'm not ready to have that conversation

• When I first met my now-wife in 2012, she told me she never wanted to be pregnant.
• In our 30s, we talked about adoption, not wanting to have a newborn and sleepless nights.
• I don't want to be a parent and I would like to spend my time doing other things.

When we first met in 2012, my wife said that, due to health concerns, she never wanted to bear children.

Perhaps, like a lot of young people in their early 20s, we still left open the possibility that, years down the road, when we were versions of ourselves that we could not yet imagine being, we might develop a desire — a need, an instinct, a calling, whatever it is that makes one want to be a parent — that we did not then possess.

In 2015, years down that proverbial road, we were driving 300 miles from Alabama to New Orleans for a couples' weekend when my wife realized halfway through the journey that she'd forgotten her birth control at home, so we pulled over on the side of the highway, searched her luggage, and briefly but intensely revisited the question of whether we wanted to have kids. Or rather, whether we wanted to risk a pregnancy that could derail whatever kind of life it was that we were hoping to live. Our answer was to turn the car around and pick up the pills.

We are child-free by choice

With another decade in the rearview mirror, I'm tempted to say that nothing has changed. After all, we are still, by choice, childless. However, one thing that is decidedly different now is my ability to articulate why that is: I don't want to be a parent.

As a young newlywed, the tension of not wanting kids lay not in the decision itself but in the feeling that I would inevitably have to justify it whenever the topic arose with family, coworkers, acquaintances, or friends. You come to find out after getting married is that people, even strangers, tend to ask about that kind of thing.

In my bolder moments, I tended to fall back on things like the climate crisis and the impending collapse of civilization as reasons for why I did not want to bring a child into this world. The rationale seemed unassailable. Perhaps, I reasoned, if the world were somehow different — somehow better, more equitable, more of a sure thing — then I, too, would feel differently.

We talked about adoption in our 30s

As our 20s came to a close and we entered the era of our 30s, it became a settled matter of fact that there would be no biological children in our future. Even so, the possibility of adoption occasionally popped up. In theory, it removed the physical risk of either having to carry or give birth to a child, two things that understandably terrified my wife.

We even reasoned that adopting a kid would allow us to entirely skip the sleepless newborn stage and the terrible twos, which our friends with kids had recounted with something resembling shellshock.

However, our conversations about adoption were never really about wanting children. Instead, I think they were echoes of the same conversations we'd been having since we first met, in which we attempted to reconcile the possibility of our future selves against who we were and who we had become and, perhaps, who we had always been.

If there is any meaningful distinction to be found between having kids and being a parent, it is perhaps wholly semantic. Whereas having kids connotes the act of giving birth and perhaps raising children as some sort of finite endeavor with a finish line stretched across the path into adulthood, being a parent emphasizes that the commitment is a lifelong one. It's not that I'm especially afraid, though that is part of it; it has more to do with the fact that time is limited and precious, and I would like to spend mine another way.

The realization that I don't want to be a parent has been clarifying, if only because figuring out what we don't want often sharpens our earnest desires.

I don't want to be a parent, but I want to be a supportive husband. I want to spend the rest of my life with my wife. I want us to grow old together. I want us to feel in the everyday rhythms of our relationship the evidence of the love that brought us together and made visible the possibility of the life we now share.

• Natalia Buia is a 36-year-old publicist in Toronto who has never wanted to have kids.
• When she was in her 20s, being childfree didn't have a big impact on dating.
• She finds dating apps are irritating as a woman who doesn't want children.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Natalia Buia. It has been edited for length and clarity.

From childhood, I recall not wanting to have children. I never had that desire to be pregnant, or a maternal instinct to take care of children. It just never appealed to me.

Growing up as an only child could have contributed to this. Although my parents loved me and we had a good relationship, we weren't the kind of family you'd see in movies. I suppose it showed me that family isn't a one-size-fits-all. I didn't need to have the "traditional" family set up to be happy.

I also learned to enjoy my own company as a child, which would follow me into adulthood. I'm perfectly content being alone for a lot of the time, and didn't feel I needed children to complete me.

Dating in my 20s and 30s is different

As I headed into my mid to late 20s, girlfriends started to settle down and have kids. This was a hard time for me. We used to go out late at night for food, drinks, and dancing, thinking we'd be best friends forever. But then they all started having children and moving into the suburbs. Their days became birthday parties and sports games.

I started to realize my friendships just weren't going to look the same as they always had.

Dating in my 20s was so much fun. I found that the men I dated weren't desperate to have kids yet. Even then, if I was considering dating someone exclusively, I would ask early on if he wanted kids. If he did, I usually got out of the way as soon as possible. It wouldn't be fair on either of us to continue if we wanted different things. In my 20s, men weren't sure about kids anyway so dating was pretty straightforward and easy.

In my 30s, dating looked different. I hit the age that men were looking to have children, so this limited my pool of people to date. In Toronto especially, I feel like men in their 30s are looking to settle down with a family. Or they already have kids from previous relationships. At times, it can feel discouraging when I consider how few options I have.

However, because I don't want kids, there isn't the same pressure to quickly find someone because I don't have this "body clock" deadline running.

I wish dating apps would let me filter people who do want kids

I also started using dating apps regularly. I'm on several apps but like Hinge the most. There is this world of men on these apps, but I have to be careful about who I start to talk to because lots of them do want children, or are open to having children in the future.

I make sure that when I'm looking at guys' profiles, I don't just swipe right if they look good. I spend time reading their profile to find out what they think about having children. A lot of the men who swipe right on me clearly don't do this, because once I start messaging them, I quickly find out they do want kids.

I also wish the apps didn't suggest profiles of men who want kids. It wastes my time having to filter out who does and doesn't want kids.

Not too long ago, I matched with someone who I thought was really cute and started talking to him. He had so much potential, and I was really excited about the prospect. But after a few hours of back and forth, I brought up the dealbreaker question and he said he did want kids. He made the decision to cut me off, which I totally understood, but was disappointed by.

Certain apps allow you to pay extra if you want to filter out profiles that wouldn't match with yours, but it can cost up to $25 a week. I can't afford that.

I'll continue using the apps for now, even though I find them irritating as a childfree woman, but I'm content and not taking dating seriously right now. There are moments I feel I'd love to have a romantic partner to live life with, but overall, I'm happy working, hanging out with friends, and enjoying my own company.