It happened again. I’m at Farmstand in El Segundo for dinner with Drew and after a nail-biting five minutes with the menu, I order the Pomegranate Walnut Stew with authority. But no sooner is the waitress’s backed turned than I want, I NEED, to change it to Mama’s Herbed Ground Chicken.

This is nothing new. I imagine my photo is looming in the back of my favorite haunts as a warning to freshman waitstaff to run like the wind once they’ve taken my order. A minor symptom of a raging case of decidophobia (real word).  So imagine my dread of turning thirty this year and realizing I had to make a whopper: whether or not have kids. There are no easy answers – this mythical “biological clock” has eluded me. After years of waiting for it to start ticking in my ear, I’ve determined it’s gone digital. Does that mean I’m not meant to have kids? It’s a scary thought. Questions arise:

• What reasonable excuse will I have for keeping Pop-Tarts in the house?
• Will I never see a return on the 37,000 hours I’ve logged identifying various melted candy bars in diapers at baby showers?
• Who will agree to pay $18 to see the Lion King with me in theatres?
• Where will I pick up colloquialisms like Bieber Fever?

These are enough to keep a girl up at night, and unfortunately, I seem to be one of a very select group my age, left behind at the Baby Bandwagon Station, sipping a very, very dry martini. It might seem easier just to hop on with the other mommies. But dangerous things happen when people follow the pack:

• Widespread fashion chaos (see Hammer pants)
• Katy Perry
• Jonestown kool-aide guzzling

You get my drift. So here’s the goal of this blog: I take a year, two, five – whatever it takes to hash this decision out in writing with your help (or lose my reproductive abilities). We’ll tackle the tough issues, like:

• distressing increases in ex-boyfriends’ babies’ photos on Facebook (and their eerie resemblances to said ex-boyfriends)
• most effective repellants for womb-obsessed mother-in-laws (not you, M)
• determining just how many cats make a Crazy Cat Lady

I’ll need input from all of you as we go along: the Childed, the Childfree, and the Clueless. This is too big for me and Drew (Mr. Maybe!) to be allowed to screw up on our own.

So. You might be wondering if I’ll stick to whatever decision I make when this blog runs its course. Who knows? I may turn 35 and get a violent case of Baby Rabies. Or maybe I’ll sit there in my Ferrari (or some other wildly impractical baby-free mode of transportation), happily slurping my original Pomegranate Walnut Stew to-go. Or would it be the Mama’s Herbed Ground Chicken?!

Damn you, Farmstand!