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Saturday, June 5, 2010
Baby Mania
I seem to have slightly erratic baby mania lately. I’m young – I’m not even 25 yet, and I know there is absolutely no rush at this point. I mean, heck, Kelly Preston is pregnant at 47, surely I can chill out a few more years until I’m a little older, until we’re both really ready, until we have our own place, etc. But it seems like everywhere I turn lately, someone’s newly pregnant, someone’s just had a baby, someone’s worrying (or hoping) they might be pregnant. Everywhere around me is babies and pregnancy and kids and “family” (in the sense of more than just husband and wife… or wife and wife, or husband and husband or husband and husband and wife… etc).
The thing is, I know, in my head, that what I want is the inclusion in that world. I want all the cute. I want the experience. I want the excuse to knit itty bitty things – and then actually see them used. But I don’t have the patience right now for a child. It would not be a good time for us to intentionally bring a small person into the world. I would prefer to live in a house, first. I would prefer to be out of debt and well on our way funding our retirement funds. I want to be closer to a normal BMI before I put my body through all of that. So there’s a lot that needs to change before I feel like we’ll be ready for that step in life.
Additionally, I struggle with feelings that maybe I don’t want kids after all. Those temper the mania at times – until the mania pushes them completely out of my head. I mean, truly, most of the time, I find other peoples’ kids really annoying. There are well-behaved kids, and there are badly behaved parents who don’t properly teach their kids, thereby creating badly behaved kids. I know that. But the latter category seems to put me off having kids more than anything else. It was our biggest annoyance when we were at Walt Disney World last fall. Not the children who stayed with their parents and played normally, but the ones who roughhoused and kicked and kneed me, the ones who kept pseudo-accidentally spitting on our heads before Spectromagic, the ones who would scream and shout because they couldn’t have yet another expensive souvenir… those are the ones that really ruin it for me.
What if I have kids like that? What if I’m one of those parents? I would hate to walk around in a public place with little monsters for children, knowing full well that everyone around me thought the same of my spawn. I would like to say, I know that not all parents are like that, and not all kids are like that. But the ones that most people have to notice are like that. And those are the ones that stand out in my memory from our trip at WDW. Those are the ones that get all the attention at the store because their child is pitching a category 4 hissyfit over some toy that mom and dad has said they can’t have. Or, worse, the kid is wreaking havoc over a section and the parents are nowhere to be found. Those are the parents that make me worried about becoming one myself.
Then there’s also the responsibility factor. There are times when I feel like I can barely keep up with myself, let alone care for another human being. There are days when I have to argue with myself to get into the shower. I mean, really, if I can’t even take a shower in peace, how am I going to convince a small human being that they’re going to be alright in my care? I just have a feeling that reproducing is not in the cards for us for a while.
Or maybe never. We have talked extensively about social responsibility when it comes to having a family. I feel like there are so many children out there who don’t have homes or families for one reason or another, and for us to bring another person into the world, knowing full well there are kids out there who are victims of a system overburdened and underfunded, who will never experience the same kind of family love that we have had in our lives. (It isn’t perfect, but it’s still love!) So, why would we, then, willingly strive to bring into the world another human being to tax our natural resources, and shun those children who have had circumstances which threw them into a system that can’t really handle them as well as it should be able to? It just feels socially irresponsible. I struggle with that, too. There is no way that we’d be able to adopt at our age, from what I’ve heard about requirements for adoption. We don’t make enough money, and living in an apartment certainly doesn’t help. It’s just one of those things that I feel like it’s important for us to consider when it comes to parenthood.
Thinking about adoption certainly sobers up the baby mania to some extent, but then I still occasionally get those physical urges to be pregnant and have a natural child, one made up of our DNA. I am sure that, no matter what we decide, I will struggle with this for a very long time, whether we have children or not. I know it is not a decision to be made lightly – having children cannot be undone! You don’t just get to ‘give them back’ at the end of the day if you don’t feel like having kids after all. So I know it’s something that I have to be sure about before I do it, or I may end up regretting that, and I think that would be far, far worse than regretting not having children.
But, oh man, could someone please hand me a screaming child? I need to quell this urge before something inside me explodes.
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