I’m 41, and I thought I’d always be child-free. I decided to have kids so my parents could be grandparents.

Courtney Kocak and her husband recently decided they want to have kids. 

I’m 41, and until very recently, I thought I would remain child-free. I’m the oldest of four, but we’ve all held off on kids for various reasons. For my part, I’ve spent my adulthood chasing my dreams as a writer and performer in Los Angeles. After decades of trying not to get pregnant, I still have a lingering fear that I would be a teen mom, as one of my standup bits goes.

My parents live in rural Minnesota, where most of their peers have had grandkids for ages. During a visit home last September, my mom — unable to hold back her tears — told me how sad she was not to have grandkids, especially now that she’s retired. “It’s not what I thought it would look like,” she said, her voice breaking.

My conversation with my mom made me start to rethink things

I was gutted by her confession. My parents, lifelong teachers and coaches, have centered their entire existence around family and kids. They deserve grandkids, if anyone does. Unfortunately, my brother who seems most likely to procreate at this point lives in Sweden with his wife, and they plan to stay there. Even if and when they do have children, they won’t be living down the street or even a short plane ride away; a whole ocean will separate my parents from their grandkids.

Around the same time that my mom shared her yearning for grandkids, suddenly, it seemed like everyone I came up with in the LA creative scene — actors, writers, comedians — was pregnant or navigating new parenthood.

I went down the rabbit hole on a fellow writer’s Instagram account. She’d been a single mom long before this baby boom, and I scrolled down through a decade of her daughter growing up in reverse. Even through the highlight reel of social media, it was clear there had been hard times, but also immense joy and fulfillment. I surprised myself with the thought, “I might want that someday.”

Earlier that summer, my parents and I met in Phoenix for an extended family get-together. For years, it had felt like time stood still — that I was 30-something, and they were 50-something, and we would all remain frozen in time together forever. But on that trip, I felt that era coming to an end. We were having so much fun, but there was an invisible hourglass slowly emptying alongside us, whether I wanted to acknowledge it or not. My 40th birthday was just a few months away. Gray hairs were coming for us all, one strand at a time.

For the first time, I felt my fertility fleeting. Was I really going to forgo the chance to create a relationship as profound as the one I shared with them — a relationship that was now morphing into its next stage?

During another recent visit home, my parents cut out an article about the “Active Grandparent Hypothesis,” a theory that suggests being active helped hunter-gatherers live long enough to care for their grandchildren, and left it on the dining room table. My dad gestured to it, “Hey, give this a read… Interesting article!” My parents are eternal realists, stoic with a dash of optimism. They’re runners, walkers, and bikers, always exercising. Maybe evolution would keep them around long enough to spend time with the kids of their own late-blooming kids after all.

My husband and I started to seriously consider having kids

They were doing their research, and I was doing mine. I started Googling everything I could about pregnancy (geriatric, in my case), childbirth (daunting), and parenthood (manageable? fun, even?). I read lots of articles and began interviewing moms and other experts for my podcast. My husband and I had honest conversations about how we wanted our future to look. We waffled back and forth — sometimes having a kid seemed like the most obvious life-affirming choice, while other times, we couldn’t imagine sacrificing our freedom to travel or the time to immerse ourselves in our work.

We’d both been ambivalent about having kids, at best. But that wrenching conversation with my mom, along with our Arizona trip, opened my mind to a possibility I hadn’t seriously considered before. Soon after, my husband’s brother and his wife went from adamantly child-free to pursuing fertility treatments, and my husband fell in love with the idea of our future kids being cousins. Now, we’re planning to do an egg retrieval of our own. Our shared vision now looks quite different than it did 18 months ago, I’m starting to get excited about this change of plans.

My mom has said, “Don’t have a kid for me.” But the truth is, I sort of am — and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I see how having kids can deepen one’s relationship with their parents and the rest of their family, and I want that for all of us. And considering how my decisions affect the other people in my family? That makes me think I might be good at this motherhood thing after all.