The Journey To Motherhood Or, You Know, Not...

Deciding not to have kids is easy when you're a hyper-rational, commitment phobic, genetically screwed girl whose mother thought she should get one of the pricey seats at her brother's birth.  More than ten years later, deciding to question that decision is a lot harder.

I don't know how or when it all started, because, up to now, I never had a problem with facing a life without giving birth to someone who leaves legos on the floor and smokes pot in my bathroom but at some point, that baby smell and the prospect of stitching up a dinosaur costume for halloween - even being the bake sale mom - it all started to sound a lot less bad than it did once upon a time.  Sure, I still have my reservations.  I'm nothing if not a realist, so it's not that I don't expect to beg for death after 72 hours of no sleep or the first time I find a condom in the dresser drawer - it's just that all of that stuff seems, somehow, less important. 

I figured that this feeling - this ridiculous, non-sensical, masochistic feeling - would fade.  I certainly thought it would never stand up a night with my idiot kid brother and yet the impulse doesn't seem to be fading.

Fortunately, I'm far too stubborn to be caught up in a rip-tide of what could be no more than hormones so, frighteningly real though the longing for tiny blankets, strollers, itsy btsy bottles and adorable onesies is, I'm only dealing with it now because I know I'm going to need every second of the two and a half years between now and twenty-seven to prepare. 

I know - I know - "no one is ever prepared," but, ya know what, there's no reason to be less prepared than you absolutely have to be and me, I try never to be unprepared for anything.

Naturally, I was completely unprepared for any of this so what did I do but the only thing I do whenever anything happens or changes or catches my attention - I turned to the internet.  Normally, I just look for someone to talk to but since there are at least a dozen or so words I can't type or say and they're all fairly relevant to having that-the-most-tragic-of-all-conversations, I opted for Plan B (Freud would be proud) and started searching through the thousands of Mommy-Blogs for something different - not a dozen websites about women who struggled with IVF or who always wanted kids but ended up with them a little bit sooner than they'd planned but, instead, for the loan former baby-phobe among them.

It's taken ages and I'm still not sure I've found what I'm looking for - the absolution, the reassurance, the approval - whatever.... Knowing that there's some truth behind the "you'll like your kid," advice people are so ready to dispense, even when you aren't looking for it.... It's comforting.  I'm a long ways off from being anywhere near ready to make that choice, but I'm open to the question, I guess.