The Queer Biological Clock and the Geography of Guilt
I have eleven tabs open. One is a forum thread about the ethical arguments against commercial surrogacy. One is an adoption agency's informational page, which I have read four times and still don't fully understand. One is a spreadsheet I made myself, unprompted, at 11 pm, trying to price out a future I'm not sure I want. And underneath all of it, a text from my mamma: when are you giving me grandbabies lol.”
I am 29 years old, in between jobs, in between flat rentals, mourning the end of a 3-year-long relationship, and half a world and several oceans from the family that raised me, trying to figure out if the ache I feel reading that text is grief, desire, guilt, or some fourth thing nobody's given a name to yet.
The want that won't sit still
I want to be honest about the tender part first, because it's real and I don't want the complicated parts of this essay to bury it: I want a family. I love the idea of raising a kid(s) with a partner — watching someone encounter the world for the first time, getting to be the person who explains it to them, screws it up sometimes, and shows up anyway. I have, I think, a genuine surplus of the kind of love that wants somewhere to go. That part isn't in question for me.
What's in question is everything underneath it. I can't have a child with a partner in the same way others can — an accident of biology that, for them, requires no research, no spreadsheet, no ethics seminar. For me, the two roads are surrogacy and adoption, and both of them come with walls that many of my cishet peers never have to look at, let alone scale.
Surrogacy sits uneasily with me — the ethical questions about compensation, autonomy, and the commodification of another person's body aren't abstract; they're why I keep closing that tab and reopening it a week later, no closer to resolved.
Adoption, meanwhile, is something I'd want in theory and can't count on in practice — the process where I live is long, expensive, and far from guaranteed, and "want to adopt" and "will be approved to adopt" are two very different sentences.
So I sit with both doors half-open and both of them heavier than they should be, and there's no clean choice waiting behind either one.
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Twenty-nine, the age my parents were
Here's the thing that knocked the wind out of me recently, more than the spreadsheets or the forums: I am now the age my parents were when they had me. I try to picture myself, right now, as a parent to an infant, and I genuinely cannot get the image to hold. I don't know how they did it. I also can't stop feeling, underneath that disbelief, the quiet and sometimes not-so-quiet pressure from my family to be further along a path I haven't even fully agreed to walk.
Like at the moment I am worried enough for my cat to make sure he has a happy and healthy life, one that feels fulfilling and not depressing. If that responsibility alone comes with the occasional anxiety, then a whole human child I cannot even put it into perspective.
I grew up in a Catholic, Italian-Polish-American family in the US South, low-income, where tradition wasn't a suggestion — it was an expectation, the thing that held the whole structure of our culture together. Marriage, then children, in that order, on a timeline nobody had to state out loud because everyone already knew it. I've since studied, worked and lived in the UK, in Italy, and now in New Zealand, which means I'm not just negotiating one cultural expectation — I'm negotiating a half dozen overlapping ones, none of which quite fit the person I've actually become, all of which still have a vote in my head whether I invited them or not.
And here is the exhausting, recursive part: I genuinely don't always know if the want for a family is mine or if it's the ghost of everyone else's expectation wearing my voice. Some days I'm certain it's mine — I feel the wanting in my chest like something physical. Other days I wonder if I only question it because the logistical, financial, and ethical walls are so high that doubting the want is easier than grieving a want I can't act on. And then there's a third day, worse than the other two, where I wonder if I've just been trained to distrust my own desires so thoroughly that I can't take any of them at face value anymore, including this one.
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No playbook, double the work
I think about my cishet friends and family sometimes with something between envy and grief — not because their path is easy, it isn't, but because it's legible. A version of life is laid out for them, and even when they deviate from it, the deviation is understood against a backdrop everyone recognises. I don't get that backdrop. When you sit at the intersection of queer, gender-diverse, working-class-raised, multiple-countries-lived-in, and Catholic-family-shaped, you're not deviating from a playbook. You're writing one from a blank page, in a language you're still learning, while people who love you keep asking when you'll follow the one they already know.
That's a specific kind of exhausting that doesn't get talked about enough — not the exhaustion of the choice itself, but the exhaustion of having to build the entire framework for choosing before you can even start making it. Cishet couples often get to argue about whether they want kids. I have first to construct an entire ethical and logistical map of whether it's even possible, and only then find out if I want to walk it.
The liminal space and making peace with it
I'm turning 30 next year. I am nowhere near a settled answer on any of this, and for a long time I treated that as a personal failing — like everyone else had figured out their thirties and I'd shown up without the manual. But I don't actually know what my thirties are supposed to hold. I know I want to keep building this business. I know I want to focus on love, real and specific, not a rehearsal for someone else's version of it. I know my cat needs to stay fed, smug, and unbothered. I know I want to finish my master's and work toward starting a PhD. Somewhere in that list, kids might fit. They might fit in my thirties, or my forties, or not at all, and I'm trying — actively, imperfectly — to let all three of those be acceptable answers rather than only one of them being the "successful" one.
There's a specific grief in accepting you might not hit a milestone your family, your ancestors, your culture assumed was non-negotiable. There's also, quietly, right next to that grief, something that feels like liberation — the recognition that "I don't know yet" is allowed to be a complete sentence, not a placeholder for an answer I owe someone.
I don't have the ending where I tell you I've figured out whether I'll have kids, or how, or when. I have a spreadsheet, a half-read adoption eligibility page, a text from my mamma I still haven't answered, and a cat asleep on my feet while I write this at midnight in a country my grandparents couldn't have located on a map. That's not nothing. Some days it's enough to sit in the not-knowing without treating it like a problem to solve by morning…but who knows, it's just how I’m feeling now.
If any of this resonated with your own version of the liminal space, I'd love for you to share it or stay for what's next.
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