This essay is part of How to Live With Regret, a series exploring the nature of regret and the role it plays in all our lives. Read more about this project here.

When friends ask me how I’m feeling 18 months after having a baby, I usually tell them that it has been wonderful. Sometimes, though, if I’m feeling particularly confessional, I will smile coyly and say: “Well, this is not the life I wanted. But the life I had before was not the life I wanted, either.” I say it in a cheeky, half-joking way, hoping the gravity of the comment will go unnoticed. But it’s not a joke.

Since my daughter, Olivia, was born, I have cycled through a huge range of emotions. I expect many of them would be familiar to any parent: joy, exhaustion, deep love, confusion, wonder, exasperation, happiness, sadness. But there is another, quieter, emotion that comes up every now and then. It’s a feeling that’s so difficult to talk about, so universally taboo, that I feel nervous expressing it even to the people closest to me: regret.

Since I was a teenager, I knew that I did not want to have kids. I did not budge for decades, and I had quite the battery of reasons for feeling this way, from the emotional to the practical. The biggest one being that there were simply too many things I wanted to accomplish in life, and a baby would surely get in the way.

When I was young I dreamed of becoming a famous filmmaker, traveling the world making documentaries. It hardly seemed like a good way to raise a kid. But I also just never had any interest in babies or kids. Rather, I felt resolved, ironclad in my conviction that I would never be a father.

But things change. I settled down. And at 47, my life didn’t look like the one I had once envisioned for myself. To be clear, I have a lot to be proud of. I do work that I care about as a radio producer and reporter, and I’ve been fairly successful. But I didn’t set the world on fire. I am not traveling the globe chasing major stories and winning Oscars. And over time the reasons I’d held onto for why I did not want to have children slowly faded.