I’m having a really hard day today.

When you lose the most important person in your life, it forces you to reexamine everything you thought you knew. It also makes you think about the other losses, and potential losses, in your life.

I had a really deep conversation with one of my best friends last night, and we talked about love and loss and everything in between. My ex-boyfriend came up and I finally had to face some really hard truths.

For one, I’m still in love with him. I haven’t seen him in a year and a half and haven’t talked to him in a little over a year. He’s made it clear he wants nothing to do with me, and try as I might, I just can’t get over him. And honestly, it’s made me really cynical about love.

I loved my ex with my entire heart. I thought he was my soulmate. I wanted to marry him and have children with him and that still wasn’t enough to make our relationship work. Once you realize loving someone more than you’ve ever loved anyone isn’t enough to ensure you end up together, this whole pursuit of love thing seems pointless.

Also, my ex was the love of my life. Do you get more than one of those?

Furthermore, when my grandmother died, it broke. my. heart. And I don’t think my heart will ever be whole again. If my heart isn’t whole, will I ever be able to love someone, romantically, as fully as I once did?

Moving on to potential losses, one of the things I want most in this world is to have a daughter. I know I could have a daughter on my own but I don’t want to. I don’t believe children need two parents but I know raising a child is a lot easier when two people are doing it instead of one. At this point, I don’t know that I’m ever going to meet someone else I want to have a child with.

I could just get pregnant. But I want my daughter to be brought into this world in a certain way. I want to bring her to a house, not an apartment, when she leaves the hospital so I’d have to move. The problem with that is this is the only reason I want to own a home. I know renting is throwing money away and blah, blah, blah but the benefits I get from renting outweigh the downsides. For instance, my refrigerator recently stopped working. Because I live in an apartment, my complex replaced it. If I owned a home, I’d have to replace it myself, which would be a significant unexpected expense.

I also feel like I don’t have enough money to have a child. I want my daughter to have the best of everything: nice clothes, that nice tub that weighs her, a beautiful crib and the list goes on. I know there are plenty of people who aren’t wealthy who have children but I just don’t feel comfortable having a child with the amount of money I have right now.

In addition, I’m a contractor, meaning I work on projects until they’re finished then move onto another project and so on. Therefore, I don’t have the benefit of maternity leave. So I would have to save up enough money to support me for the three months I want to spend at home with my child. It also means if I’m not working, I don’t get paid. So another thing to consider is I’d lose a lot of money as a result of missing work for doctor’s appointments.

Also, I love my freedom. It’s almost 4:30pm on a Saturday and all I’ve done today is sleep, eat and watch TV (and write this blog post). Once I have a child, I’ll never be able to sleep all day long if I want to. I won’t be able to go to that late night movie, make plans on the fly or decide to go to dinner with a friend after work unless I find a sitter.

I know that if I unexpectedly became pregnant, I could find a way around all of these obstacles but for now, it just seems like the chances of me having a child are very slim. For now, I think I can live with that. In a few years, maybe not so much.