The morning I woke up next to him, I still had my clothes on and my virtue intact. We lay in bed staring up at the ceiling, talking about this and that. For some reason, I jokingly asked how many children he had, not thinking there was any answer. He told me five hundred, which he then modified to three, and then told me their ages. Twenty-one. Eighteen. Two. I lay there shocked for a few seconds, but adjusted quickly and looked up at the ceiling some more. Then he mentioned Claudia and her age, again, and asked if this was scary for me. At that point he could have told me that he was married and it wouldn't have shocked me and so, when he told me he was still married, it was par for the course. Claudia was born after they'd separated. They didn't want to stay together, but they didn't want to leave her behind.

Tim and I have now been dating for a year. His divorce papers have finally been signed and Tim is ready to ease me into the role of Daddy's special friend. I've only seen Claudia twice, for a few moments in passing. Today is the third time. Our day started with her nap — her sleepy, soft self and blond braid, lying still on my bed where he'd arranged her on top of a towel over a sheet of plastic because she is learning to do without diapers. After the nap, and some playtime, we head out for a picnic at Gasworks Park, and watch the boats sliding back and forth on their tacks. The wind is warm, the sun carries the scent of blackberries. Claudia, after her short coloring session on the floor of my kitchen, is curious about everything, especially me.

We head over to the swings and the slides. I am surrounded by the normal, non-inquiring glances of children and parents. Here we are, just another family on the playground: Tim, a marked baby boomer dad with his silver and dark hair, taut legs in khaki shorts and no inhibitions, paired with me, a twenty-something version of Claudia. And Claudia, running free, easy, wild, and independent, rosy as an apricot, a gypsy child whose hair must be taken out of barrettes at her own insistence so that she can feel it in the wind. She knows the sensuality of this feeling at age three. I hold back, having never spent a full day with her, and I'm still sensitive of making my mark and upsetting the fragile ecosystem of it all. I like the two of them together, and I know that he should have this kind of carefree activity every day but doesn't. I watch how free he is with her and how every interaction is a subtle lesson. "How many geese are over there by the stone wall?" he asks her. "Count them for me!" And she does.

At the playground I see the happy babies and parents and I wonder why I'm so ill at ease. There are so many reasons that could answer it, but they aren't my reasons exactly, they are the reasons someone else would think of. I try them on for size. One is that I loved this when I was little and that my father was every bit as loving and attentive as Tim. Am I pining for my childhood? Next is the baby I haven't had. This man, my lover, would love my child just as much as he loves Claudia. This idea feels tempting but in a slightly queasy way. I'm not eager to give birth. Perhaps, I think, it is because I love to watch her love him, and depend upon him with perfect confidence. Maybe it is the fact that they're part of a family that's breaking up but because of this little girl will still be ironclad, even if they are divorcing. Claudia gives me little looks and questioning glances, shy smiles and bold grins. She's a tiny chameleon with flowing blond hair, wearing nothing but a shirt and panties.

Our next stop is Murphy's restaurant, where Claudia is in a touching mood. She is all over Tim. We eat French fries together and Tim and I drink beer. Across the table, they are in another world from me — sitting next to each other and loving each other. I listen to Tim say that she is his baby, that she is so pretty. He lets her put his glasses on him backwards and upside down. I see him run his finger in a straight line from the top of her forehead to the end of her nose. It is a familiar gesture, an absentminded caress that he performs on my face as well. I see the gestures, hear the cadences of his voice with her, the same ones he uses on me, and wonder if he treats everyone like a child or does he love me because I am childlike?

And we sit in Murphy's, a group of three that is broken up into two and one. I think that Tim really must be okay with everything ending if he's bringing the three of us to a public place, a bar where his friends go. Is this his first rebellious act of freedom after signing away his home to his ex-wife? I am thinking all sorts of things, and watching a boxing show on the twin TVs, when Tim prompts Claudia to come sit on my lap. This would have been nice if she'd thought of it herself, but I don't believe she did. Soft and warm, the baby is on my lap for a mere second or two before she reaches out for the man whose duty she has done. Not a good way to teach a child to be true to herself, even if he thought it would please me.

Tim called immediately after dropping me off at home. When I answered the phone, he said, "I worry about you when you're quiet." I told him I wished he hadn't prompted her to sit on me. He swore that she did it all on her own, and that she had total trust in me. I lay back on my couch. Was I ready to have a child in my life?

Ultimately, I made the leap. Falling in love with a man means embracing his world. My sense of unease disappeared. Claudia and I developed a mutual adoration for each other, and for the following two years Tim and I stayed together, she and I spent a great deal of time together on our own. The problem was that I eventually fell out of love with Tim. When I left him, he disallowed all contact between me and his daughter, which was his right, but truly painful. I heard from a mutual friend that finally, after a year, Claudia stopped asking for me, but I still think about her. Perhaps the root of the unease I sensed upon meeting her was that leaving Claudia would be a thousand times more painful than leaving Tim.

"Nothing like that happened to me," she says, wrinkling her face. "I loved having babies."

But her June Cleaver facade can't fool me! Once again, I've been indulging in my newest guilty habit — reading parenting websites and "mom blogs" — despite being twenty-six years old, unmarried, and having no immediate plans for children. And now that I know the dark truths about pregnancy and parenthood, I've come to wonder if I might be better off raising guinea pigs than joining in this whole "cycle of life" thing.

Because I've got to say, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun.

A brief summary of what I've learned about procreation from reading magazines and websites:

First you get pregnant, after months or years of costly fertility treatments that involve needles the circumference of ballpoint pens but are necessary because you've dragged your (expensive, office-appropriate) heels past the peak fertility age of twenty-four. Once properly inseminated, you develop hyperemesis gravidarum and puke up every ounce of (caffeine-free) herbal tea you ingest until you need an IV, by which point you've lost your job and your will to live. And that's before the sudden appearance of stretch marks, which you affectionately call "tiger stripes" because it looks like an enormous cat tried to claw its way up your torso to reach that Dorito you're shoving in your mouth (Doritos, or grilled cheese sandwiches, or Chunky Monkey are the only food you can keep down; as a result you've gained eighty-nine pounds and kids on the street say, "Mommy, what is that thing?").

Then comes the birth. If it's in a hospital, it's overmedicalized and impersonal and you're pumped full of pitocin until the baby comes shooting out into the hand of a twenty-six-year-old resident who's using the other hand to text on his iPhone. If it's a homebirth, you discover while squatting in your birthing pool that contractions feel like being disemboweled with a hunting knife, but your Baba Yaga-like midwife won't let you go to the hospital for an epidural, because epidurals cause autism and malaria. In either scenario, labor lasts at least ninety-four hours.

Once the baby's here, you must spend between six months and eighteen years feeling like a terrible, horrible mother because you A) Can't/don't want to breastfeed (and formula is an UNNATURAL ARTIFICIAL CHEMICAL POISON!!!), B) Find changing diapers less fun than backpacking through Honduras and sleeping with Irish scuba instructors, or C) Occasionally consider popping your baby in the free alt-weekly box outside Whole Foods so you can get some sleep and so your baby will be raised by the next person who comes for a newspaper, who probably has organic carrots in her shopping bag and would be a much better mother than you.

To save what's left of your sanity, you write about your experiences on your new mommy blog. And oh, your blog commenters can sure relate! In fact, their stories are much worse than yours. They gained 237 pounds while pregnant and had to be taken to the birthing center on a flatbed truck. Their feet got so swollen they actually exploded, taking out the eye of their OB-GYN. They too planned a natural birth — ha! — but wound up screaming for not only an epidural but a dram of chloroform. Their baby once cried for seventy-seven hours straight, until their family was not only evicted but deported. Now they live in exile in France, where child-raising is much, much more evolved; every mother there is guaranteed by law a free nanny who'll makes boeuf bourguignon for your enfants while you get your government-sponsored pedicure.

So here are your choices: 1) Move to France, 2) Get your tubes tied, or 3) Prepare to spend the rest of your life wiping diarrhea off your forehead and listening to something called "The Wiggles" on infinite repeat . . .

You might ask why I, a childless twenty-something, need to read these mommy confessionals — what the blog Jezebel delicately terms "torn-vag tell-alls." Shouldn't I be reading Cosmopolitan and focusing on Skill #3 on the "57 Ways to Drive Him Wild" list?

Well, as someone who hopes to have kids within the next, oh, decade or so, I'm curious for the glance into my own potential future that magazines provide. And beyond that, I like the candor and biting wit of mommy lit, a kind of dark honesty about everyday life that's hard to find in mainstream non-motherhood-related publications. Even in this day and age, most women's magazines are still all about how to be, or at least appear, perfect: "11 Perfect Swimsuits to Minimize Your Trouble Spots," "701 Tips for the Perfect Summer Wedding," ad nauseum. Blechh!

I appreciate that the current tell-it-like-it-is movement is a reaction to the kind of repressive feminine ideals that have dogged women since long before magazines were even invented. Still, sometimes all this honesty freaks me out. Did I really need to know what an umbilical hernia looks like, or hear about how mastitis feels like your breast is being chewed by a vole? Frankly, the whole motherhood thing seemed a lot more appealing back when all I saw was the US Weekly version — you know, the one in which Angelina Jolie totes a cherub straight out of a Renaissance painting on her slender, Versace-clad hip before handing it off to an adoring Brad so she can jet to Cambodia to shoot Tomb Raider 17.

I could just stop reading this stuff and stick to US Weekly instead. But I won't. Yeah, it might scare me off having kids, at least for a few years. But when I do, I'll be confident that I've already heard the worst, that there will be no ugly surprises around the bend, that my experience can't possibly be as terrifying as hers, or hers, or hers. Right? Right?