Maybe because I never had kids, I’m fascinated by the lives of families. I observe them out in the world, hear about them from friends, and as I sit quietly in my house of one — usually on the sofa with a couple of cats trying to balance on my lap at the same time — I wonder about the pros and cons of being a parent.

I asked someone recently, after her child’s birthday, what it was like having a six-year-old. She took a drink of her iced tea, and said: “It’s kind like having your own personal house fly.” I didn’t spit my latte onto the café’s white table cloth, but it was a near thing. “What?!?!” I said.

“She’s wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but every 30 seconds she comes over to ask me another unrelated question, and by lunch I’m a complete wreck.”

I’ve met this child, she’s great. I love the phase when you can see kids start learning to think, to make sense of language and the world around them. But I never spend more than an hour at a time with one, and often their parents are around. Three weeks of questions would have me robbing a bank so I could hire a nanny or afford to send them to boarding school.

I’ve seen many phases of child-rearing, from pregnancy and newborns to great grandchildren. I’ve watched adoptions, fostering, only children, great big families, blended step-households, and orphans. I always imagined, without thinking much about it, that I’d have kids of my own. But when the relevant years were passing, my attention was on my own survival and I missed the boat. I also didn’t want to raise a kid alone because I was so angry — I didn’t think I’d be a good risk without someone else in the house to steady me.

I’ve had a pretty good life without them, including the love of a fabulous niece and lots of fun with other people’s children. Now that I’m in my 60s, there’s talk about what will happen to Baby Boomers with no families to take care of them at the end of life. This is a bit crazy-making, reinforcing the cultural myth that we should have had children in the first place. Now we’re going to be shown up again as outcasts by having to pay strangers to change our adult diapers.

My friend Ellen has asked her three kids to push her off a steep hiking trail when the time comes, and said she’s sure they’d be happy to do that for me, too. Volunteering one’s progeny for manslaughter is a sign of a true friend, but I have my doubts… I don’t even think they’re going to do it for her. And getting to the hiking trail might be a problem.

I’ll have to think about this aspect of childlessness and get back to you. You can’t really plan to trip over a cat at the salient moment. Cats are notoriously unreliable.

Stay tuned.