It has become increasingly apparent that my friends are getting old and that they are dragging me down with them.

When you are an undergraduate, you are able to deny the aging process.

You are relatively young, the graduate students look like thirty-something chain-smoking professional socialists, few of your friends are married or have children, and you honestly think alcohol makes an efficient preservative.

Then you approach graduation. This is when you must either enter the real world or take out another $40,000 in student loans to escape it.

While you face the realization of your impending adulthood, you start receiving invitations to participate in the rite of passage known as the dreaded wedding ceremony.

If your friends are really serious about this adulthood thing, they go so far as to have children. At this point, your friends have become their parents and life as they know it is over.

I have reached this point in my life. I have attended three weddings in the last year and a half, and I was invited to two others.

One of my married friends is with child and another one had a close call recently — I say “close call” because she is still in school.

For the last few years, I have been able to escape the children issue because I was working on my degrees.

As the end of my graduate career creeps closer, however, I begin to feel the pressure associated with being a twenty-something female: the pressure to have children.

I have no desire to have children. I never have. I have known women who can see a baby in a restaurant and be transfixed by it, even though it has fluid exuding from every bodily orifice above the neck.

I just can’t do it.

Many people think children, especially babies, are cute.

My theory is that nature made children this way so parents would think twice about throwing them out on the street after the 30th temper tantrum.

The child’s future earning potential may also be involved, especially if the child is going to go to law school. But this factor is not as determinative as cuteness.

For me, the issue has little to do with economics or my career. I simply look at children and know I really have no interest in them.

I cannot place all the blame for my maternal apathy on the children I see, because their behaviors are simply a result of their parents’ attempts at child rearing.

Unfortunately, parental responsibility seems to be a dying tradition in this country.

The boyfriend and I went to a restaurant in South Dakota a while back. We sat on opposite sides of a booth, and a young couple with a small child sat in a booth across the aisle from us.

The boyfriend and I were minding our own business, arguing as to whether South Dakota State University’s administration is more moronic than Iowa State’s (it is), when I heard a noise next to me.

I looked down. The couple’s two-year-old daughter had walked across the aisle to our booth and slapped her hands down on the edge of my seat.

The couple was amused by their child’s apparent social graces.

I was amused by the idea of requesting they keep their little angel on a leash.

Recognizing this is not a socially acceptable way of dealing with children, however, I simply gave the couple the infamous look of a very annoyed restaurant patron — the look normally reserved for the parents of screaming children.

My parents share the same philosophy about children as I do. If you are going to take them out in public, teach them how to behave in public. I think a few parents need a refresher course on this one.

Although I have no desire to have children, this does not mean I would not know how to take care of them.

Maternal instinct is not the same as maternal tendencies.

While the distinction might seem clear, it is one that has confused the boyfriend.

I made the mistake of attending the boyfriend’s high school reunion softball game with him.

It was a dangerously hot day, with a temperature of more than 100 degrees under a blinding sun.

Despite the heat, one young couple brought their baby out to the game for an hour or two.

I remarked to the boyfriend that I didn’t think it was safe to bring a baby into such heat and sun.

To me, it was simply an issue of placing more importance on the child’s safety than the parents’ pride.

To him, it was a sign of my softening on the children issue.

Our relationship is weird in this respect. I know I don’t want children. He knows he wants children. Neither one of us truly understands the reasoning behind the other’s stance.

He has said that if I don’t want children then he does not know why he is dating me.

I love feeling like my only worth as a human being is as a baby factory.

Perhaps I will change my mind in the next 10 years. I’m open to the possibility.

After all, it gets harder and harder to advocate no-children sections in restaurants when all of my friends have kids.

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Theresa Wilson is a graduate student in political science at Iowa State and a law student at Drake University.