The Love That Reveals Itself
A note not about children, but about timing, trajectory, and the quiet shape of adulthood
I grew up in a world where the shape of a life was pre-drawn.
You got married young—usually to your high school sweetheart. You saved sex for marriage. You had children early. You didn’t drift. You didn’t doubt. And God was at the center of everything.
My dad was a pastor.
The community I grew up in was conservative, evangelical, and totalizing. Family formation wasn’t just expected—it was morally mandated, the only righteous path. So by the time I reached my twenties, my response wasn’t clarity. It was resistance.
I didn’t know what I wanted, exactly. But I knew what I didn’t want: a script. I didn’t want to mimic my upbringing just because it was familiar. So I delayed. My partner and I stayed together for over a decade unmarried—not out of ambivalence, but because I couldn’t quite face the emotional tangle of what marriage meant in the world I’d left. I couldn’t imagine asking my father to officiate a ceremony stripped of God. It felt like a betrayal. So instead, I made the bigger mistake: I waited too long. I didn’t get married until months after he died.
He knew we were legally married before he passed. He met our daughter.
But I still regret the delay. Not because we needed the ceremony, but because he did. Because I couldn’t find the words—or the courage—to tell him the truth in a way that also honored him.
That’s the background.
And it matters. Because when I say that I wasn’t sure about having kids, it wasn’t that I quietly longed for it but resisted. The truth is I genuinely didn’t know. I felt ambivalent—not because I lacked feeling, but because I lacked clarity about how to trust what I felt. My reaction to the world I came from was so strong, so early, that it formed the architecture of my adult life. But reaction isn’t resolution. A pendulum doesn’t stop at its furthest point—it swings until it finds center. And the tension is, while that pendulum is swinging, another clock is ticking. You don’t get infinite time to sort it out.
I think I sensed, intuitively, that my vision was distorted. That I couldn’t yet separate my own instincts from what I was pushing against. I saw family weaponized, used as a symbol of righteousness rather than a living reality. That made me suspicious. But suspicion doesn’t create clarity. It just delays it.
So I waited.
And as I built a life mostly separate from that world—through school, through design, through the slow construction of a worldview that felt earned—I found myself surrounded by people who also hadn’t chosen that path. Most of my friends didn’t have children. Many still don’t. Some are younger than me now, which explains part of it. But the truth is: the environment around me subtly affirmed my delay. Children were rarely the norm. Freedom was. Optionality was.
But now, something has shifted.
Not in ideology, but in sensation. I see people my age—and older—still living like they did in their twenties. Same structures. Same rhythms. Just lightly reskinned with wellness or moderation. And for the first time, that life doesn’t seem expansive. It seems… stuck. Like a beautiful house with no foundation beneath it.
And I’ve come to realize something hard to say:
What once looked like conformity—starting a family young—now sometimes looks like courage. And what once felt like rebellion—prolonged autonomy—can start to resemble avoidance dressed up as freedom.
I don’t mean that universally. Not everyone should have children. Some shouldn’t. Some can’t. And knowing that is its own form of grace. But I am speaking to the version of myself that could have kept drifting—not because I was unsure, but because I had built a life whose only safety came from non-commitment.
That version of me would have confused openness with growth, and risked missing the one thing that actually deepens a life: being bound to something you can’t easily leave.
I’ve come to realize something else too:
The decision to have children young, especially in your early twenties, isn’t necessarily more virtuous—or more reckless. It’s just made under different conditions. When you’re young, life is already unknown. Choosing parenthood then is stepping into one unknown from inside another. You don’t yet know the life you’re giving up, because you haven’t lived it. In that sense, it’s both a leap of faith and a form of unknowing momentum.
But later in life, that decision is different. It’s not leaping from the unknown. It’s stepping out of a known world you’ve built—a structure of autonomy, rhythm, and identity. To have a child later is to reverse course in some ways. And that takes its own kind of courage.
There’s benefit to that: maturity, financial stability, emotional clarity. That’s certainly been true in my case. If we’d had a child much earlier, we might’ve missed the window to build the foundation we now stand on—not just materially, but mentally. The comfort we’ve created isn’t just about money. It’s about peace of mind.
So no, I don’t regret the path we took.
If anything, I feel like we timed it right—maybe a couple years late, but not so late that I lost the thread.
It’s hard to describe love for a child without flattening it. It’s too large, too strange, too lopsided in its shape. But I can name this: early on, I sometimes found myself resisting the bedtime routine—trading off with my partner, peeling away from guests to tend to a baby who, for all her wonder, couldn’t yet offer much back. It was work.
But somewhere in the last year, that resistance faded. Not just because the routine got easier, but because she did. Her personhood came into view—her humor, her rhythms, her tiny philosophies—and I realized that I was no longer leaving the interesting part of the night. I was walking toward it.
These days, I don’t mind stepping away from a conversation to be with her. In fact, I often prefer it. Because now she talks. She thinks out loud. She says something strange or beautiful as she’s falling asleep, and I find myself more filled by those moments than by almost any adult gathering.
And maybe that’s the deepest truth I can name: when you’re raising a child, you don’t yet know who they are. You’re committed to someone who hasn’t fully revealed themselves. It’s not like any other relationship. It begins with love, yes—but also with mystery. And what unfolds over time—the emergence of a self, the revealing of a mind—is the most astonishing experience I’ve ever known.
What I do feel, though, is a kind of retrospective horror when I imagine what might have happened had I listened too closely to the voices that made me question whether it was ever the right step. The ones that spoke of lost freedom, or diminished selfhood, or the permanent burden of children. Had I let those fears shape my path—had I postponed it into oblivion—I would have missed the most overwhelming, unimaginable thing: the love I have for my daughter.
It is a love I didn’t know was possible.
And when I picture a life without her in it, it’s not regret I feel.
It’s dread.
The dread of an alternate life I almost chose.
A life that might have been peaceful, productive, even fulfilling on paper—but which, compared to this one, now feels hollow. A beautiful room without warmth. A structure without a center.
So no, I’m not offering conclusions. I’m not advocating a model. I’m just describing the view from here. A point on the map I might have never reached. And I’m leaving a mark for anyone else who might be navigating by intuition, mistrust, or fear.
Because some paths look like freedom until you walk them long enough to realize they were just circles.
And some paths look like sacrifice, until you take the first step—and discover they’re the way out of yourself, and into something you never could have built alone