As I write this column, my son is about to leave for college, his childhood ostensibly over and my job as a parent done. Phew. In some ways, it’s a relief because of that parenting thing? It’s hard. Now that it’s “over,” I can confess there was a point in my life when I wasn’t simply scared of what it would be like to be a parent—I wasn’t sure I was able or even wanted to take on the task at all. I’d never been the kind of girl who played with dolls and dreamed of being a mommy. My dream was to play a mother on TV, not be an actual mother.

Mostly, the thought of being responsible for another human being filled me with dread. For me, the scariest horror movies have always been the ones that involve angelic babies and/or small blonde children who wreak havoc on the unsuspecting adults. I assumed my baby would be “Pamela’s Baby.”

After we got married at the ridiculously young ages of 22 and 23, everyone assumed we’d procreate instantly. It took us 11 years. Thankfully it wasn’t because we couldn’t; we just couldn’t figure out the right time. Eventually, we became known as the youngest of our friends to get married and the oldest to not have any kids.

As our friends started having kids, I never squealed with delight at their baby shower gifts of towers of diapers or tiny little booties. I never looked at other people’s children with envy. I didn’t sniff their heads and ooh and ahh. I didn’t want to hold their babies. And I surely didn’t want to change their diapers. Watching my friends with their little bundles of joy exhausted me because they all looked so tired.

The little creatures they had made became the center of their universe. I was still under the impression that I was the center of my universe. At the time, I felt too selfish to take on the selflessness required of parenting.

And as a couple, when he was ready, I wasn’t. And when I was ready, it was usually because I was miserable being a lawyer. While working on a particularly heinous project, I’ll never forget sitting in a vast hotel ballroom in Philadelphia—looking through 15 years’ worth of documents from a failed bank—then taking a train home bleary-eyed and screaming at my husband, “You will get me pregnant now!” Thank goodness he didn’t listen, because in retrospect, it just didn’t feel right to have a baby to get out of doing a legal document review.

And then my law firm went out of business, which meant I now had the time. But parenting was a deeply personal responsibility, not a career choice. I thought I needed to follow my own dreams before I brought a person into the world whose dreams were my responsibility.

I wanted to explore what my dream of being an actor was all about. Not just the fantasy of it, but the gritty truth of it. I wanted late nights and leather jackets, not late nights and spit-up.

So while our friends were giving birth, I was taking classes in Alexander Technique, a movement class for actors, from a teacher who led us in a process of being “re-birthed” to be effective. I’ll never forget telling my friend Randi that my acting teacher had given birth to me. She thought I was a nut, which I was.

Randi had the opposite experience. While I was choosing to follow my dream to become an actor over motherhood, she was trying to follow her dream to become a mother. But it wasn’t working. She and her husband tried for years. And through those years, I felt the pain of her wanting a baby, and I felt guilty for making the choice to wait.

She was searching for meaning in the quest to become a parent, and I was searching for meaning in Shakespeare's monologues. I was in New York with very skinny, young actors who all wanted to be the next big thing. I was having my own second childhood instead of having a child.

Eventually, Randi and her husband adopted a baby, who ended up weighing less than three pounds and started out life in the NICU. Randi spent months in that hospital with her newborn. When they finally brought their daughter home, Randi would sleep on the floor in her room to make sure she was breathing all night. Her dedication both terrified and inspired me.

The mounting pressure to have a baby came from all fronts, including my husband’s grandmother, who would call us up and ask us to have a baby so she could die. I would joke with her that wasn’t a good enough reason. She was so worried we couldn’t have children, she called my father the OB/GYN and gave the medical history of the Sherman side of the family. She explained that Fanny Sherman never had children, so maybe it was her fault.

Finally, I told her, “Nana, I don’t really like children.”

Boy, did that set her off. “You don’t have to like them to be their parents,” she said.“Who told you that?”

But that was my worry. I felt that I would really mess this one up. You don’t get a “do over.” It’s an “over and done” and—ready or not—you send them off into a big wide world.

But after 10 years of marriage, the husband was certain he did want children. He said we’d figure out the whole parenting thing together. He knew that there was never going to be a right time.

Ultimately, it was the acting philosophy of one of my great acting teachers, Richard Pinter from the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, that got me over the hump. He said, “There’s scared and you do, and scared and you don’t; so you might as well do.” So we did.

The day our son was born, I stared at our little (big) bundle, and I cried and wondered out loud if they could put him back in.

But despite the fear, there was also an overwhelming sense of peace and joy. We’d waited for all the right reasons so that this one, this baby, would be our baby.

While we chose parenthood, I always had a feeling our son chose us, too. When my son was little, I used to kiss him goodnight and say, “Thank you for picking us to be your parents.” He was such a surprise to us—quiet, happy, and always smiling. We used to call him our Buddha baby and joke we couldn’t understand how two intense people could have made someone so calm. It was like he canceled us out, in a good way.

In the end, by choosing motherhood, I’ve learned so much more about love, dedication, and values than I ever could have imagined without the existence of my son and, later, his sister.

Now that he’s leaving his childhood behind, I know he’ll do what he was born to do and what we have taught him to do as parents: to just choose. Choose to love, choose to make a difference, choose to become his own person. And eventually (a long time from now), choose to become a parent. That way, we can finally get the big payoff for our choice: becoming grandparents.