It's Friday afternoon and she has dropped off her seven-year-old daughter, Mary, at soccer practice. Ten-year-old Sarah is set for a sleepover with friends and won't have to be picked up until the following morning, which will give them just enough time to get her ready for a birthday party at 12:00 PM. It has been a tiring week, projects due at school, Brownie meetings to get to, piano lessons, and the car pool twice this week because Thursday's mother was dealing with a daughter with chickenpox.

But a hurried dash to the supermarket freezes her in her tracks. Right in the middle of aisle 12, between the cookies and the coffee, a young mother stops next to her, holding a tiny, pink baby propped up in its baby carrier, its eyes (still that unchanged cobalt blue) staring out at the world.

She leans over the baby making cooing noises, and is rewarded with a smile that could be genuine, or could be gas, but still causes an ache deep in her heart. With a smile, the new mother moves on down the aisle, leaving the older, more experienced mother of two, standing alone and wishing for her own baby carrier and a new blue-eyed baby of her own.

It's called, for better or worse, "Baby lust," and it can hit any woman anytime, anywhere. But maybe it hits a little harder once a woman passes the thirty-five year mark. Why would a woman, whose children are almost to the point of taking care of themselves, want to return to the time of midnight feedings, dirty diapers and the scratchy electronic sounds of a baby monitor? Or why would a woman whose whole life has been geared toward a career and independence suddenly find herself longing for responsibility of a child?

Well, for one thing, the biological clock is still ticking. As a woman ages she begins to realize that the time is growing closer when she will no longer have a choice as to whether or not she can have another child, and that can be a powerful incentive to have another. Or, it may be that as she watches her children racing toward independence, she finds that she longs for feeling of being needed that can only come from filling the needs of a small baby. Still other researchers theorize that women are conditioned to want children through television, advertisements, and women's magazines that glorify parenthood. And some women claim that they are looking for that special closeness they themselves had with their mothers -- that, in essence, they are looking to recreate their own childhood.

Whether it's hormonal, cultural, or conditional, the urge to reproduce is one of the strongest urges a woman, or man, can experience. The good news is that people today have many more options than their counterparts of even ten years ago. Women today, with the proper pre-natal care (and sometimes nudges from cutting edge fertility treatments), can, and do, have children safely well into their forties. Other women who, for whatever reason, can't conceive a child on their own, turn to adoption to fulfill their desire for a baby.

Whatever the reason, the need for babies and children will always be something that pulls at some people's heartstrings. For them the late night feedings, the dirty diapers and the constant feeling of exhaustion are balanced out by that surprisingly strong little grip, the endless games of peek-a-boo and the infectious giggles of a child.

-- Richard J. Brewer