This morning my husband told me he’d woken in the night with a terrible dread: with his death comes the end of his family name. I could relate, I said. With my death comes the end of thousands of pages of writing. There are no children to potentially read and be amused by, horrified at, or indifferent to, my carefully crafted chronicles about absolutely everything, including what I ate, hour by hour, from age nineteen to age twenty-six, specifically, my thoughts about bread; how I acquired (and lost) each of my dogs; and my evolving thoughts about death (in a nutshell, I was against it and still am).

After a moment of shared sadness, I reflected on the possibility that people don’t have children solely out of a desire to perpetuate the family name, or to bear witness to their parents’ journey from birth to banality via written documents and unwanted dinner monologues. Perhaps, I mused, they have children out of an unselfish desire to steward them through the world.

“After all, this isn’t the prairie days when people had children so they could help harvest the crops,” I said. “That would be like you having a child to help you navigate Photoshop.”

At which point having a child actually seemed like it would have been useful.

My husband and I are no strangers to late-night dread attacks. His usually take the form of being thrust into sudden, unforeseen poverty. In his ill-timed fantasies, we become paupers for reasons that are never clear, but are irreversible.

My late-night dread attacks are almost always centered around my dogs: do they truly love me, or are they faking it to get dinner? Also, I have a recurring dream that I still have the horse I had when I was twelve, and have neglected to visit her over the last fifty years. I always wake from this dream with a mix of guilt (how could I have forgotten about her for so long!) and curiosity (who has been feeding her? How has she outlived the average horse by decades? What has she been doing with herself since I wandered off?).

Interestingly, the older I get the less I tend to catastrophize. I think when I was younger, the prospect of bad things happening was raw and scary. Now that I’m older and I’ve survived some of those bad things, I’m find I’m not as afraid. I will either be ok or I won’t. It’s a relinquishing of control that has allowed me to focus on what is and is not actually happening. It’s my own personal Eastern philosophy moment, and if Buddhism weren’t already invented, I’d totally be down to invent it. It’s quite calming.

Had I listened to a therapist years ago, who asked how successful I’d been at predicting the future, I might have gotten to this point sooner. I had to admit that my track record was pretty abysmal. When I was young I believed I would grow up and marry a Jewish man named Israel Goldstein. (I didn’t.) I thought I would live on a big farm with two horses and five dogs, and that I would bake pies and leave them cooling in the window (this came close to being true except there were just three dogs and I never baked a pie). Lastly, I thought my parents and my first dog would live forever. 

In fact there have been just two predictions I have gotten right so far: that I would always have long hair, and that I would never steward children through the world. But life isn’t over yet, so it’s anyone’s guess what could still happen.

“It is what it is,” I hear a lot, but the reverse is also true: it is not what it is not. Making terrible predictions that may or may not come to pass (I might drown; my house might burn down; my horse might be alive and pining for me in a pasture near Atlanta) and obsessing over what I can never know (DO the dogs love me? IS it really just a ploy to get dinner?) is a colossal waste of time.

Maybe the dogs do love me, maybe they don’t; either way, their fur is soft, they are snuggly, and I am happy being with them. Maybe I’ll meet Mr. Goldstein down the road, or end up raising someone else’s child who will cut off my hair in the night because I don’t bake pies. My point is, I don’t have to know the future, or what, exactly, drives the dog to sleep against my back, in order to relax and live my life.

If I could put that in a pie, I’d happily bake it and serve it to all the anxious people I know.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, and the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].