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Molly and I made it through our 30s without children, and our circle of friends included couples with kids and couples without. We never thought much about the difference. But after Larkin was born, suddenly it loomed large.

On the one hand, I was amazed by all the baby-lovers who came out of the woodwork -- a cadre of women who just wanted to be around babies, the way some men want to be around athletes. Like Elizabeth, a colleague of Molly's and mother of four teenaged boys. Elizabeth was the first to visit us, bringing a swaddling blanket she'd made herself. Beaming, she cradled Larkin in her arms. "I want some serious time with this baby," she said, and volunteered to babysit, anytime, gratis. I marveled. Here was this 45-year-old woman, with a full-time job, who moreover had just finished raising four boys, and...she wanted more?

Later on I understood. Elizabeth did want more -- more babies. She missed holding them and singing to them; missed dressing them up in their little outfits; even missed changing their diapers and touching their silken skin. She missed being the person she'd been with her own babies. The tenderness of it, the fun.

On the other side were the Babyphobes, couples who embrace the "child-free lifestyle." I knew it well, having lived it for more than two decades. The lifestyle's axioms are: "My work is of paramount importance to my identity"; "Civilization depends on dinner parties with scintillating conversation late into the evening"; "I am avid about sex and intend to remain so"; and "There is nothing more tedious than discussing someone's child." What it all really boils down to is this: "Kids will never be my raison d'être."

Prime among our child-free friends were two couples we'd meet for dinner parties. Arnold and Nadine, and Glen and Viviane all have corporate jobs and sit on various boards. They take exotic vacations and drive pricey cars. Their outlook is cosmopolitan, their houses are the kind of graciously appointed, immaculately maintained residences that you would shudder to bring a toddler into.

After Larkin was born, Nadine confessed she and Viviane had been a bit shocked to hear Molly was pregnant. "Our first reaction was 'Wow, so they really aren't like us ... you know, the non-parent types.' " But after getting an email from me describing Larkin's birth and our experiences on the maternity ward, Nadine wrote back expressing "relief." My email had convinced her that Molly and I "will continue to be interesting people even after becoming parents."

To many parents, a remark like that constitutes fighting words. But the truth is, sensibilities divide pretty starkly around the meaning of parenthood. The Babyphobe suspects that at some deep level the Babyphile wants to dissolve into his or her child -- not to read the newspaper and engage with the big world, but rather to abdicate all that, sinking back into the cozy confines of domesticity.

To a Babyphile, on the other hand, when you decide to have children, you become a lot more interesting. You have joined the human race, by agreeing to perpetuate it. What the Babyphile suspects about the Babyphobe is coldness -- and selfishness. A few years ago I traveled to the Orkney Islands of Scotland for a Bon Appétit article, and stayed at a castle whose 50-year-old owner lived there with his wife and children, his elderly mother, his siblings, and their children. We sipped whiskey together in the castle library, and Richard talked about a couple he knew who had decided not to have kids.

"I don't understand it," he said in bafflement. "They're both wealthy enough. But they've decided to live for themselves." He threw up his hands, literally. "It just doesn't seem like enough."

I sat there, a travel journalist, married yet child free, and asked myself whether it seemed like enough. It did, and I recall answering Richard's criticism inwardly, point by point. Life without children, I knew, could be very full indeed.

But now flash-forward five years. Molly and I are sitting in the living room at Arnold and Nadine's -- our first evening out after Larkin's birth -- when someone tells a joke, and Arnold, who has a voice as deep as James Earl Jones, unleashes one of his trademark basso profundo laughs. And to my surprise I find myself asking him, in a ringing non sequitur, "Come on, Arnold, wouldn't you love being a dad?" It was his laugh that got me. I could so easily imagine him with his little son or daughter, finding things to chuckle over, and implanting in that child a lifelong memory of dad's magical, booming laughter. Who wouldn't want that?, I thought. It's just too sweet!

And bingo, there I was, suddenly a practicing Babyphile, gushing about fatherhood in an overbearing way I had always resented. No longer able, it seemed, to believe in the World Without Children.

When Larkin was born, friends with kids would smile and say, "You watch -- you'll have trouble remembering what life was like before her." I always winced to hear that, because I wanted to remember. I liked life before Larkin -- loved it, in fact. Was all that going to be wiped away? Our friends were just trying to emphasize the transformative nature of parenthood. But to me it made parenthood sound like being lobotomized.

OK, that's a bit extreme. But the truth is that we go through our lives in phases, and whenever we negotiate a major life change, it proves surprisingly hard to recall our former way of being -- to experience its vividness, to see it as more than something we have moved beyond. Having a child is wonderful, yes, and like many wonderful and transformative experiences it tends to make you evangelical. Let me share the good news of my child! The scales will fall from your eyes, and you will see!

As a former Babyphobe, I'm going to try to keep in mind how grating I once found that good news, and restrict myself to preaching to the choir.