Even now, I'm not a mother. I enjoy aunthood and couplehood, and one day may enjoy motherhood, too. Though toys fill our house, and I am fascinated by baby anythings, I'm still on the waiting list for that role, and I find that all in all waiting is better than rushing. We all need good beginnings: the best possible beginnings, though even bad beginnings can be overcome. Fine dives can be made from flimsy springboards.

I remember crying for a short but intense period after I'd written the piece . I wrote it in one sitting more or less as it appears here. It allowed all kinds of feelings to surface when I typed it out on a big IBM Selectric set up on a table in my brother's room. I went outside feeling that the story that had been inside me now had gotten out.

Why did that feel so good? Was it because I'd wanted to say those things once and for all, or add them to the other keepsakes of the experience? Was it that I wanted to say pretty things about something that hadn't been pretty at all?

Now I'm married and am in the time of life where I could imagine starting a family. My husband and I talk about whether parenthood would suit us occasionally— no, more than that. We've chatted in restaurants, bookstores, public parks and private gardens, airports, airplanes, elevators, grocery stores and driving up and down the 101. One question has occurred to us: will this baby be born in the 20th or 21st Century? What's that old expression... timing is everything.

Some days, having offspring isn't a good topic to discuss at the bar or the breakfast table. Some days, I think constantly "what a fine idea it would be to have little ones." And some days I think: it's now or never whereas other days, I think: whatever. Isn't it amazing how the lyrical mind can take over and paint the world all pink and blue? Or, black and white (you know all those toys that babies suppsedly can zero-in on due to the development of sight receptors in their visual cortex.)

My two sisters have shown me the example of later motherhood. It's very 90s, it's very now. Modern medicine is fine-tuning its toolkit to enable me and many other women to feed our careers first and then feed our urges once it's "time." Society tells me that yes, I have quite a few birthing years ahead of me. But that classic thing they say about the clock ticking applies—and how. The media splash headlines about septuplets, fertility drugs that combat infertility and bring you not one baby, but an entire village's worth. Such a micro-trend as this has even penetrated the minds of toy company marketeers, who are selling dolls in threes.

Certain songs can transport me to the imagined land of motherhood. This is what seems to happen when a song's emotional imagery strikes me just so. As the first rains fell on Silicon Valley, a few months ago I was driving around a lot listening to songs off Sinead O'Connor's Universal Mother CD. Was it the rain? Was it the new car? The words of the song? Somehow, all three contrived to give me that "let's start a family feeling." Just add "car seats" and arrange a night at home. Hmmm...maybe next year, seemed to be a better tune to hum.

No one need remind me that familyhood takes a bit more than cozy sentimentality. A blanket-soft feeling is part of it, but certainly not all. It's just that sometimes life throws up something to weaken my defenses. I forget it takes two, baby, it takes two. But one and even three can do.

I was struck by something I read earlier this year, which medical science has found and perhaps known for dozens of years. Some of the cells of a child carried inside the womb never leave the mother's body; they float out and become part of her. I like this image that we are forever remembered in our mothers' bodies, mementos of a sort. I guess it would be hard to find these cells without the aid of precision laboratory equipment. Small as they are, with the naked eye, they would be hard to pinpoint. Where are you, oh little bits of you and me? Shall we leave such ineffable things to science to dissect? Or are these things better seen with the heart and the mind's eye?