It was a dinner with four of my closest friends. These were women I have known and loved for years, all of them stood beside me at my wedding. We were at a restaurant, the kind of happy hour / dinner situation where you settle in, order too much food, and stay longer than you planned. And at some point, maybe halfway through the meal, I became aware of something that left me feeling uncomfortable.

There were five of us total. Two on one side, two on another, and me sitting at what might be considered the head of the table.

To my left: two married friends. One had a newborn and the other had a toddler and was visibly pregnant. Every once in a while, when I leaned in to listen to their conversation, I picked up on the fact that they were connecting on their shared experience in this current stage of life. They were talking about motherhood, caring for infants, caring for toddlers, the experience of pregnancy again, and all that comes with that. All I could do was listen and demonstrate non-verbal support.

To my right: two friends who were single and content in the freedom and joy that comes with this current stage of their lives. Their conversation was spontaneous and lively, reflecting the freedom of independent decision-making. They threw out ideas — “Do you want to go to Costa Rica this summer? How about Brazil? What about a different country altogether?” There was a carefree spirit that I missed about the opportunity to make spur-of-the-moment, long-term plans, and financial commitments without consideration or discussion with another person.

And there I was. Sitting at the head of the table. Between two groups and two life stages, while belonging fully to neither.

“I found myself feeling like I didn’t fit into either group.”

I’m no longer single, because circumstantially I found my person, and because I chose to get married. I was less than a year into my marriage and was genuinely excited about the path ahead of me as a wife. So, I didn’t fit on the right side of the table, even if part of me appreciated and thought fondly of that lightness.

But I also didn’t fit on the left side of the table. That was a group of women who had chosen motherhood and were living it. And that was a path I was actively considering not going down.

What I later came to realize is that what was causing me so much emotional distress during that dinner is that life is framed around progression. You go from being single to finding your person. You go from finding your person to getting married. You go from getting married to having children. There is a direction society assumes and expects you are moving in, and it only goes one way. So, I was sitting at this juncture where the logic of that progression said I shouldn’t choose to go “backward”, and truthfully, I didn’t want to. The right side of the table was behind me. But the left side of the table was the next step, and I was choosing not to move in the assumed direction. Which meant I wasn’t going backward, but I was also not moving forward. And in a world that only knows how to read forward motion, stopping can look a lot like failure. So yes, I was at dinner with four of my closest friends feeling like a failure.

I came home from this dinner and cried in my husband’s arms because I felt so alone. It was like the seating chart during that dinner felt like a visual demonstration of so much of what I had been dealing with and experiencing at the time. Specifically, feeling alone in my journey by not having other close women in my life who were also actively choosing a child-free life.

And truthfully, I do know a few other women in my life who are child-free, but there’s something unique about this group of women, and just feeling like I was losing connection with them. I know intellectually that friendships survive different paths. I know this isn’t the end of anything, but it is a kind of quiet loss and unglamorous reality of choosing this that doesn’t always get talked about.

The table had two sides, and I didn’t belong to either one. What I’m still learning is how to stop trying to belong on either side of the table, and start getting comfortable being on my side of the table. Doing this would mean owning the clarity and the grief, the relief and the loneliness, the conviction and the days when that conviction wavers. It can be hard to accept that the life I’m choosing may sometimes mean I am the only person sitting on my side of the table, no longer walking an identical path with my friends, and learning to find comfort in that reality.

After everything I laid out in the last post I expected to be confident in my decision. I thought that naming my why and all the details of it would feel like an exhale.

It didn’t quite work out that way.

What I arrived at instead was something more complicated, and honestly more unsettling: the realization that my Big Why isn’t moral or some deep fundamental truth about who I am at my core. Instead, it’s systemic, and circumstantial, and situational. Which means it’s malleable.

What I mean by that is I am not choosing a child-free life because I believe motherhood is wrong, or because I have no capacity for that kind of love, or because children don’t belong in my vision of a meaningful life. I’m choosing it because of the specific conditions under which motherhood currently exists. The standards are impossible, there is a structural absence of support, and the whole thing is set up to slowly hollow you out while calling it devotion.

Which means that under different circumstances such as a different system, in a more supported environment, in a world that was actually built to hold mothers without consuming them, I might choose differently.

I’m not gonna lie. That realization sat… sits uncomfortably with me still.

Because it means the door isn’t fully closed and that my why has an asterisk. It also means I’m not making a declaration so much as a very considered and very clear-eyed assessment of the world I actually live in and what I am and am not willing to do inside of it. And for someone who wanted an airtight answer that’s a frustrating place to land.

But here’s the other side of it — the relief part.

Finding out that my why is systemic also meant I wasn’t broken. It meant there was nothing fundamentally wrong with me for not wanting motherhood. It wasn’t some deep character flaw or a failure of love or an inability to imagine beyond myself. It was a rational, researched, emotionally honest response to a system that is genuinely asking too much; or maybe just more than I am willing to give.

That realization was quieter than I expected. Not a revelation so much as a slow exhale.

I’m not weird, cold, selfish, or missing something that everyone else has. I simply looked at what’s being asked, I weighed it honestly against who I am and what I need to stay whole, and I said: I can’t do motherhood like this.

I won’t pretend I’ve arrived anywhere final. The questions still come up during therapy, in quiet moments, in conversations with my husband, my friends, strangers. The “what ifs” still surface sometimes. And I think that’s okay, and actually part of what it means to make a decision that matters.

And if you’re somewhere in the middle of holding the tension and sitting with the question, I hope something in this series offered you a little company. It’s unlikely it offered answers, but I hope the reassurance that the complexity you’re feeling isn’t a sign that you’re doing it wrong, but simply that you’re doing it honestly and authentically.

In the previous post, I shared my Big Why, my answer to the question “why don’t you want to have children?”

I don’t want to lose myself inside the current model of motherhood that is under-supported by every system it exists in, asks everything of me culturally, and genuinely conflicts with the person I’m trying to be.

But a statement like that deserves to be unpacked. Because when I actually started imagining myself as a mother, and really sitting with what that would look like for my life — not the beautiful parts (I could easily see those) — there were things I kept coming back to that I couldn’t get comfortable with. Not in a “motherhood is bad” way, but in a “I don’t think I could do this” way.

The contradiction nobody resolves

Here’s something that doesn’t get said plainly enough: the expectations placed on working mothers are not just demanding, they are structurally and logically incompatible with each other.

On one side, there’s the workforce. Forty hours a week, minimum. Full presence. Full availability. Hit the KPIs, deliver the presentation, and strive for the promotion. There is an implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation that my employer has first claim on my energy and attention during the hours between 8-5pm and truly long before and after that.

On the other side, there’s intensive mothering; the dominant cultural norm that defines what “good” motherhood looks like right now. A good mother is deeply present, emotionally attuned, and developmentally intentional. She is consistently prioritizing her child’s growth, stimulation, and wellbeing. Not just keeping kids alive and loved, but actively, thoughtfully, constantly investing in who they’re becoming.

These two things are not in tension the way that two demanding jobs are in tension. They are in direct competition for the same resource: me. My time, my attention, my emotional bandwidth, my nervous system, my everything. I cannot be fully available to my employer and simultaneously be 100% emotionally immersed in my child. That’s not a personal failing, that’s just math.

And yet, rather than resolving that contradiction at a systemic level, through policy, through workplace culture, or through a genuine redistribution of domestic labor, we have collectively decided that women should just… figure it out privately, quietly, by themselves, and with a smile. So much so that to be considered a good mother is to absorb that tension, stretch yourself across work and home, and treat the stretch itself as proof of devotion to motherhood.

And no matter how hard I tried to imagine it, I couldn’t find a version of the future where the math worked. One where I was showing up fully at work, fully as a mother, and still somehow remaining a whole, sane person in the process.

The statistic that stopped me cold

At some point in my process, I did what I always do when I’m trying to make sense of something big: I read — well actually I listened to some podcasts. And one thing I came across really gave me pause: modern working mothers actually spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did in previous generations.

I had to sit with that for a minute.

Because if women are now working full-time outside the home, and spending more time with their kids than previous generations who weren’t, where is that time coming from? It’s not appearing from nowhere, something is being given up. And when I thought honestly about what that something must be, the list wasn’t pretty: sleep, and rest, and leisure, and hobbies, and the quiet space required for your own inner life, and the time to just be a person, and, and…

Now, I want to be fair here. I think there’s something genuinely worth celebrating in how our understanding of child development has evolved. We now understand that presence and attunement matters. The research on early attachment is real and it’s important. But that statistic isn’t just a sign of progress, it’s also a signal that parenting has intensified in ways we don’t always name out loud. And that the version of motherhood being sold to us is not the same one our mothers or grandmothers were actually navigating.

The gap between the romanticized version and the actual version is doing a lot of quiet damage. And again, when I tried to imagine myself as a mother navigating that gap, I kept asking: where would the time come from? Sure, I could watch less TV, read fewer articles, scale back on hobbies, and give up slow Sunday mornings. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough, because it’s never enough.

The part that gets me most

But here’s where it gets really personal for me. Because the work contradiction is logistical, and the time statistic is eye-opening, but what actually sits heavy in my chest is something harder to name and harder to escape, it’s the all-encompassing-ness of it.

Are they sleeping enough? Hitting the right milestones? Reading early enough? Are we spending enough quality time? Are we teaching them the right values? Are we making sure we’re not raising assholes? Is every experience enriching? And if it’s not, does that mean we’re doing something wrong?

I can’t speak for every mother, but I know how I’m wired. And for me, that monologue wouldn’t turn off. It would run underneath everything: every decision, every outing, every moment that should have been restful but wouldn’t be because I would turn it into another opportunity to ask: am I doing enough?

I cannot imagine carrying that kind of mental weight day after day. Because I know what it looks like when I’m running on empty. I know how I get when my inner world has no room to breathe. And if that becomes my baseline, I wouldn’t just struggle, I would be depleted. And a depleted me isn’t someone who has anything left to give. Not to a child. Not to anyone.

The standards of intensive parenting are also, not coincidentally, structured in a way that ensures you are always falling short because there is no finish line. There is no moment where you’ve done enough. And I think there’s something insanely cruel about that, about a culture of motherhood that demands everything and still leaves you wondering if it was sufficient.

I don’t want to live inside that.

When I imagined myself as a mother, like really imagined it without the romanticized version with newborn snuggles, it just didn’t fit. The cost was too high, the burden too heavy, and the version of me that would emerge on the other side wasn’t someone I recognized. It felt incongruent with the life I want, the woman I’m becoming, and the peace of mind I’m not willing to give up.

For a long time, I put a lot of pressure on myself to find my “Big Why.”

Because here’s the thing about being a woman in her 30s quietly questioning whether you want children, and considering stepping off the path everyone assumed you’d take — people who love you want to know why, and strangers have a way of making you feel like you owe them an explanation. And I wanted to be ready for that. I wanted a short, simple, and universally acceptable reason that would hold up under pressure.

And I’m not gonna lie, what I actually wanted wasn’t clarity, it was armor. I wanted a justification, a reason so airtight, so universally resonating, for whenever someone asked why I wasn’t having children. Something that would make people nod and move on. Something that would protect me from having to defend a deeply personal decision to people who, honestly, had no business asking in the first place.

As I worked — let’s be real, as I’m still working with my therapist — to release myself from the pressure to organize my life around other people’s comfort, something shifted. I stopped trying to craft an explanation for others and started searching for something for myself.

Because that’s what the Big Why actually is.

The Big Why is not the explanation you offer to satisfy other people. It’s the quiet truth you return to when doubt and uncertainty about your decision creep in.

It’s for the hard moments. When a friend announces a pregnancy and I feel something complicated move through me (and a little guilty for feeling it). The well-meaning relative who asks, again, if I’m sure. When I ask if I’m sure. The Big Why isn’t for anyone else. It’s for me, for the moments when the doubt creeps in loud and when I spiral into “am I sure?” and “was I ever sure?” and “what if I’m getting this completely wrong?” It’s the thing I return to when I need to quiet the noise and come back to myself.

When I finally gave myself permission to find my Big Why, my answer to the question “why don’t you want to have children?” this is where I landed:

I don’t want to lose myself inside the current model of motherhood that is under-supported by every system it exists in, asks everything of me culturally, and genuinely conflicts with the person I’m trying to be.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. (For now.)

But as I reflected on my Big Why, here’s what I realized: my Big Why isn’t actually one thing in the way I assumed it should be. It’s several interconnected realities, each one part of a bigger, more honest picture of what motherhood actually looks like right now, and why I’m choosing not to step into it.

My single sentence “why” didn’t feel sufficient, and so I wrote more, specifically for myself as a way to think it all the way through. So, there are two additional posts that dive deeper into why I’m choosing not to have children. Again, they are for me, but if you’re curious, they’re here for you too.

I met my husband when I was 28 years old on an online dating app. And truthfully, without the context of having met my husband, if you would have asked me if I wanted to have kids at 28 I probably would’ve said yes. But the truth of the matter is, I chose my husband in part because I knew that he did not 100% want to be a father. When we met, I was going on dates with two other men, and while I can’t say for certain whether or not those two men wanted children, I can say for certain that I knew that my husband was on the fence, or was still weighing his decision, but definitely was not someone who was really excited and eager to be a father.

And so while I wasn’t thinking too seriously about marrying this man and planning what our life would be like eight years down the road, it does say a lot that I wanted to move forward with someone for whom making him a father was not a condition to him loving me forever.

The point that I am attempting to make is that even when I hadn’t made a decision, and it wasn’t a decision that I believed to be anywhere near the forefront of my brain, and not something I was consciously thinking about, I still knew deep down that I wanted to protect myself from partnering with someone who would desire that or require that from me as their wife. And I knew that it was more important for me to find someone who was aligned with the direction that I subconsciously knew I would move towards, or at the very least someone for whom the decision was genuinely open for discussion.

And while I recognize that people are allowed to change their minds on this topic at any stage of life, and many people do, I think it’s important that if you are still deciding whether or not you want to have children that you choose a partner for whom the decision can be made together rather than feeling forced into their narrative of family.

And again, eight years later, I would say that he is much more firmly rooted in his child-free decision than I am. It has still been tremendously beneficial to be going through my still-deciding journey with someone who is not in a fixed position on one side or the other, but someone who can meet me in the ambiguous middle as I wrestle and move back and forth between both sides.

I love when my close friends share that they’re expecting. It’s exciting news that should be met with celebration and genuine happiness. And more often than not, that news comes from friends who have long expressed a deep desire to be a parent. Their joy aligns with what they’ve wanted for years, and that makes sense to me.

But lately I’ve noticed that when other people share their pregnancy news — not friends, not acquaintances, but people online whose work I follow — I feel something sharp and emotional that I’m still trying to understand. Sometimes it feels like shock. Sometimes disappointment. Sometimes something deeper in my body that I can’t immediately name.

The first time I noticed this was when I opened a weekly newsletter from a brand I adore. One section announced that one of its contributors was expecting. I had misread the author of that section and assumed it was written by the contributor who has always been vocally, unapologetically child-free by choice.

My immediate reaction was to feel sad, upset, and genuinely thrown off. Which is so wild, because I don’t know this person personally, and their decision to have a child does not impact me at all.

In hindsight, my response wasn’t really about this writer having a baby. It was about what she had represented to me: someone who championed women’s autonomy, questioned tradition, rejected patriarchal expectations, and openly claimed the identity of “child-free by choice.” She felt like a model of a life that I was actively entertaining. So when I thought she was choosing motherhood, it felt like whiplash. Like someone flipping the script without warning. Like a familiar injury being poked again.

Because I still hold small-t trauma from the two times in my life when I believed I was aligned with friends about the child-free path, only to learn we weren’t actually on the same page. Maybe the same book. Definitely not the same page.

So even though I don’t know this writer in real life, the feeling of abandonment was real. It felt like someone I had quietly relied on as evidence that my choice wasn’t unusual, or selfish, or misguided, had suddenly switched up on me.

It’s kind of weird and fucked up, but it has made me wonder: when my friends announce pregnancies, am I truly only feeling happiness for them? Or, beneath that happiness, are there other emotions I haven’t fully admitted? And maybe less so when they’ve shown clear conviction for always wanting children, but more so when someone has ever hinted at uncertainty — or at the possibility of choosing the child-free path.

Right now, I have two close friends and my sister who have hinted at a possible child-free future. They’re all in their mid-30s to early 40s, and single. I feel a kind of identity kinship with them. But I’m also aware that I keep a little distance in that kinship. Not emotionally, but protectively. Part of me is careful not to assume we’re walking the exact same path, or staying in the same chapter, or even reading the same page. Because I’ve learned, painfully and repeatedly, that people can stand beside me in uncertainty while facing an entirely different direction.

I’m learning that when someone I relate to chooses a different path, it stirs up old feelings I haven’t fully processed and reminds me that some fears and disappointments are still unresolved.

For the record, even as I write this, I still struggle to say out loud that I don’t want to have children, or don’t want to be a parent, or I’ve decided not to have children. Each of those statements feels final in a way I’m not ready for — even if, internally, they feel truer with each passing year.

I can’t place the exact moment, but sometime around that walk by the lake, when the seed was first planted that motherhood wasn’t inevitable, I casually mentioned to my mother, “I don’t think I want to have kids.” Her response is likely what has now made it so hard for me to utter those words, even if I feel them very strongly with more conviction than I did 8 to 10 years ago.

So for a little bit of background, I come from a West African immigrant family, for which children are a blessing from God and a woman’s life purpose. My parents are still married, and I watched my mother be a very traditional homemaker — despite also working two jobs for most of my life.

Growing up, one of the things she would say to my sister and I, loosely translates to “meat and potatoes don’t get a Will.” Her meaning was clear: marriage offers no guarantees and entitles you to nothing, but a child is your security. The advice is rooted in love and protection, reminding her daughters that as women, no matter how much cooking and cleaning you do, you were not protected or entitled to anything should the marriage fail, or when your husband comes to pass, and so having a child is the only way for you to protect your future.

Keep in mind that my mother was born in the 50s, in a developing nation, and has limited post-secondary education.

Furthermore, if you ask my mother, you have children so you have someone to care for you in your later years. It is a binding social and moral contract where you sacrifice yourself and pour into your children and when the time comes, they will do the same for you.

So as you can imagine, when I casually shared that I might not be interested in having children, the response was an immediate and direct, “do not say that! Children are a blessing and you should be grateful to have them.”

Needless to say, I did not push back, I did not argue, but I simply internalized that my decision was countercultural, it was not to be accepted, and I should really never utter those words again.

So as you can imagine, I still struggle to say the words out loud. Partly because I’m not always certain how fully true they are, and partly because the first time I said them, they were met with shame. Even now, I share this possible truth with only a small and trusted circle: my husband, my sister, my closest friends, and my therapist.

I’ve realized I can only share this truth with people who make space for it, so I pay close attention to who I trust and who responds with care rather than criticism.

The next five years were mostly uneventful. I was single, dating casually, trying to finish my PhD, thinking about my career, and figuring out my next steps. Having a baby always felt years ahead of me because there were so many steps before that even becomes relevant.

I would need to meet someone, we would need to spend time together, we would need to fall in love, we would need to move in together, we would need to plan a wedding, we would need to get married.

Parenthood lived far, far down the line. It wasn’t on my mind.

My friends felt the same — or so I thought. Anytime kids came up, the response was some version of “eww, hard pass.” We’d laugh about how we couldn’t imagine being parents at that time. It felt like we were all aligned, all making the same choice. Until we weren’t.

Soon, one close friend from my PhD program got married and had a baby. I was blindsided — not because she shouldn’t have a baby, but because this was someone I had regularly talked with about not imagining ourselves as parents. But okay. Life evolves. No big deal.

Then another friend got married and announced she was pregnant. And again, I felt that jolt of confusion, because wait “I thought we didn’t want to do this.”

And what I had to realize is that while I was (unintentionally) making matter-of-fact statements, they were making circumstantial ones. They were saying,

• “I can’t imagine being a mother right now.”
• “I can’t imagine having a baby while in a PhD program.”
• “I can’t imagine being a mother before 30.”
• “I can’t imagine being a mother before I’m married.”

And I was saying “I don’t know if I want to be a mother at all.”

And so very quickly I realized more of my friends were moving toward motherhood — and I was the outlier.

This repeated itself for me again in my mid-30s, with new friends who were a little bit older, often times between 37 and 40. We’d talk about uncertainty, share podcasts, weigh pros and cons. It felt like familiar terrain: thoughtful, reflective, honest conversations with women who seemed to be in the same place as me.

But again, one by one, as these friends inched closer to 40, many of them chose parenthood. And again, I felt that familiar flicker of abandonment — not because they were choosing something wrong, but because I assumed we were standing in the same place. I didn’t realize that, although we were all standing in the middle of the road, I was looking in the child-free direction and seeing it as the desirable option for my life. They were choosing the direction towards parenting, as the desirable option for their life.

The uncertainty we shared was not the same uncertainty. Their hesitation was practical. Mine was existential.

So when they moved, I was shocked. But really, I just hadn’t realized we were never looking at the same future.

A little bit of context leading up to the day the music stopped…

Prior to starting graduate school, I was not someone who would identify themselves as a feminist. And I don’t mean that I was anti-feminist, just that I was juvenile and ignorant in the understanding of feminism, along with a host of other things.

In undergrad, when girls proudly called themselves feminists, I’d look at one of my close guy friends, roll my eyes, and we’d laugh together. Not my proudest moment, but also not my most shameful — that story is for another day.

Years later, I sat this same friend down and said, “Hey, I think I’m a feminist now, and I need to let you know.” He smiled and said, “Finally, girl. I’ve been waiting for you to get here.”

Good friends give you space and trust you to find your own way!

At the same time, in my early twenties, I was dating — and I use that term loosely — a man five years older, traditional and conservative in his beliefs.

And who, unbeknownst to me at the time, was impressing on me his ideals for a wife. I will admit that this man never said to me ‘I want you to be my wife.’ But he didn’t have to. I was an observant loyalist in search for love. I paid attention, I listened, and I made inferences based on who he was, and the things he said to me. I used his words to craft a persona of the woman who might be worthy of his love, and I slowly began auditioning for the role.

Wife (noun); Adjectives: Submissive. Subservient. Educated. A mother.

Over the years, something started to shift. The immature undergrad doing cringeworthy shit, wrestling with the ghosts of an inner child she didn’t yet know existed, slowly became a curious young woman eager to grow into herself.

I can’t name a single turning-point moment, but I can say without doubt that what contributed to that shift was exposure to feminist theory, critical thought, and the “thinking-about-thinking” work of graduate school.

And thankfully,

• the 20-year-old became a more grounded 22-year-old,
• the 22-year-old became a more curious 24-year-old,
• and the 24-year-old became a more self-aware 26-year-old.

During that time, I earned a Master’s degree and was working toward a PhD, being trained as a qualitative researcher. Unlike fields with licenses or clear expertise (MD, DDS, JD), my PhD was preparing me for a life of not knowing for sure.

Graduate school taught me not to accept things simply as they were. Instead, I learned to press on ideas, ask why they existed, trace where they came from, and examine what held them in place. I learned to ask harder questions — not to challenge for the sake of rebellion, but to understand, to get to the root, to find clarity.

And, almost without realizing it, I started applying those same skills to myself. The curiosity I was cultivating in my coursework began to turn inward in small, ordinary ways. I became the subject of my own inquiry, and slowly I started questioning the beliefs I had long treated as fact about who I was and the roles I assumed I would take on.

If you’re anything like me, you grew up assuming you would have children. This belief came from cultural upbringing, unquestioned ideology, and plain ol’ gendered expectations — because of course all women want to have babies.

• As a child I spent many hours in mother-child role playing.
• As a teenager, I talked with friends about getting married, having two or three kids, and living a fabulous, grown-up life.
• In my 20s, those same friends and I discussed what it would mean to “juggle it all” — the husband, the career, the kids, and somehow getting our bodies back.

Simply put, for the first nearly 25 years of my life, the belief that I would become a mother played like a familiar song on constant repeat in the background of my life.

And then, almost without noticing it, the volume of the song lowered.

I was somewhere between 25 and 27 years old, working on my PhD when I realized that somewhere along the way, the volume shifted. Not off — just down. Quiet enough for me to finally hear myself think, and to realize that this wasn’t the only song available to me.

I don’t remember the exact date, but I remember it being a shoulder-season afternoon, perfect sweatshirt weather. I drove to a nearby lake for a walk and realized I had forgotten my headphones. So instead of music, it would just be me and my thoughts.

And while I have very limited recollection of how I occupied my mind during that walk, what I remember vividly is that it was the first time in my entire life that I considered the possibility of not becoming a mother.

In an instant, my belief shifted from “I will be a mother” to “Do I want to be a mother?”

The soundtrack of motherhood didn’t disappear; it simply softened. And in that softness, I understood for the first time that I could choose what music I wanted to play next.