Anne Lamott

...not one part of me thinks you need to have children in order to be whole, or that there are parts of yourself that cannot be revealed in any other way. Some people with children like to believe this. Having a child legitimizes them somehow, completes them, validates their psychic parking tickets. They tell pregnant women and couples and one another that those who have chosen not to breed can never know what real love is, what selflessness really means. They like to say that having a child taught them about authenticity. 

This is total crock. Many of the most shut-down, narcissistic, selfish frauds on earth have children. Many of the most evolved--the richest in spirit, and the most giving--choose not to. For parents to imply a deeper realm of living is pure arrogance.

Anne Lamott, Maybe Baby

Novelist Anne Lamott wrote what is perhaps one of my favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird. She had her child at 34, with no partner to help her and a couple of abortions behind her.  She says in her foreword that the reason she became a parent was first of all, her body said, Do It.

Was she worried that she couldn't hack it? Maybe, but she writes further on, "My faith told me that my child and I would be covered, that God's love as expressed in the love of my friends and family and chosen family, would provide for us, and this turned out to be true.