Emily, thank you so much for your post. I'm 37 and I am in a pretty bad transition stage ... a year ago my husband didn't want kids but had a fairly open mind about the subject, then I got accidentally pregnant and had a miscarriage in May, then we were ambivalent and not really trying but I had a couple of chemical pregnancies, then he said he didn't want to try, now he's back to being open to the possibilities, but I just had my first half-hearted appointment with the doctor and there is apparently some concern that I am not ovulating properly and might need assistance to get pregnant again. And I think my husband's ambivalence, plus my absolute terror of having another miscarriage, is enough that we probably won't go that route.

Throughout all of this, I have tried really hard to make a life in which I am happy without kids. I've been trying to do that since I was in my 20s, since he was absolutely not ready for kids then, and I have seen enough people have their lives truly ruined by fertility struggles that I just wanted to make sure it did not happen to me.

But at some point I realized that I was lacking good role models for living a happy life without children. For various professional reasons, most of my female colleagues are older than I am, and about half of them don't have children. At some point I noticed that that was definitely the unhappy half. They weren't taking advantage of their freedoms to do anything but work a lot of unpaid overtime, they were just a pretty unhappy group. I don't know if the unhappiness is a cause or effect or totally unrelated to not having kids, but I have been looking for some happy role models for a while, pretty unsuccessfully.

That is one reason I started spending more time here at TE, honestly ... I noticed a lot woman about five to ten years older than I am, without kids, who seemed to be having pretty fulfilling lives. It breaks my heart to find out how many of you got to the point after going through fertility struggles, but it is good to know that there is an other side out there.