Maternal Me

What do you want?  Question of my life.  I want to live in a castle but like one with good insulation and a giant library full of first editions and velvet couches.  I want old maps that hold secrets of treasures unknown.  I want a lazy river moat full of mermaids and waterfalls and potions that keep me young.   I want success and I want love – so much of it.  I want my house to burst with it and I want massages – daily – and fireworks – nightly.  And I want time to stop whenever I want it to so I can truly savor moments.  I want music to follow me around wherever I go and I want to wear a fresh flower crown every single day of my life.  Above all, I want to be happy.  Sublimely, totally and permanently happy.  But that’s not the answer anyone is looking for when they ask you what you want is it?

When you’re a single woman in your thirties, people want to know what your plans are to remedy that.  Don’t you want kids?  My immediate response has always been yes.  No hesitation.  I already have names picked out.  Of course I do.  It’s how girls are raised.  It’s literally what our bodies were made to do.  We grew up in a world that tells us to find a man, fall in love, get married and have a family.  That’s the Disney formula.  And there’s NOTHING wrong that…for most people.  Here’s the truth.  Do I want kids?  Yes.  Do I want to be pregnant?  No.  And that’s a real conflict of interest.  I just want a kid to pop out of a cabinet one day and be like, “Hey mom!” and dump a bowl of spaghetti on the floor or something.  I don’t want to sit and stew for 9 months thinking about all the ways I’m going to ruin this kid’s life while my server judges me for having a glass of red wine in my third trimester.

Cause people have gotten a little crazy, let’s be real.  I can’t have this, I can’t be doing that, that’s bad for the baby, the list goes on and on and on.  It’s like,  my great great grandmother was in a wagon somewhere drinking moonshine avoiding smallpox while 6 months pregnant and probably didn’t even know it.  Nowadays you get pregnant and, from what I’ve gathered, nothing is about you for the next 18 years of your life.  That’s a really long time.  It stresses me out.  I think it would make my decision a lot easier if I could meet the baby before I got pregnant.  Just ask them a few questions like

-Are you going to be an asshole?

-Are you alone in there?  Just curious for financial reasons

– How long is this going to take?  For drug purposes

-On a 10 scale, 1 being a serial killer,  where you at?  Cause I don’t want you embarrassing the family

-This isn’t a question, just PLEASE be into sports

You know?  Something like that.  A tiny little interview process so that I can be like, YES!  I like you, you’re hired, let’s do this!  Or I can be like, absolutely not.  Pull out method for life.  But that’s not how it works.  It’s a total gamble.  You have no idea what you’re going to end up with.  It’s like a puppy surprise all over again without a return policy- there could be 3 or 4 or 5.  (High five to you if you just sang that song in your head)  It’s a living, breathing, talking thing that’s going to grow up and make bad decisions and blame all of them on me.  I can hardly explain why I do the things I do and now I have to defend this tiny human who can’t even tie his own shoe!?  I can’t.

My mom and I booked a trip to Europe next fall and as I was looking over the itinerary I was like, “Oh my god.  I have to live in L.A. until next fall?”  I was legit stressed.  And the thing is, I have zero plans to move.  It’s like when I was in a panic to get my passport, everyone was like, “Well, where are you going?”  I DON’T KNOW, OK?!  Maybe Greece?  Tijuana?  The moon?!  That’s not the point.   It’s like my fear of activities where my feet don’t have traction with the ground.  I can’t handle it.  Snow sports, kayaking, rollerblading – I self-destruct.  I appreciate my freedom and I don’t want to feel stifled.  I have Agoraphobia which is the fear of being trapped.  Call me an escape artist.  I’ll take it.

So back to the point, I’ve been questioning if I want a baby or not.  My doctor asked if I wanted to freeze my eggs and my initial reaction was not really and then after I heard the cost it become a hard no.  I don’t have that urge to be a mom like a lot of women and while that slightly scares me, the idea of being pregnant TERRIFIES me.  To the bone.  Like, let me get this straight.  A tiny human uses my body as a hostel and I’m going to gain weight and possibly poop in front of a bunch of people I don’t even know and I can’t even drink about it?  WHAT KIND OF SICK HUNGER GAME IS THIS?!  Bleeding to death every month isn’t enough?!  And you wonder why women are crazy.

Maybe I’m a disgrace to women.  Maybe I just haven’t come to that point in my life where my maternal instincts kick in.  These are just things that go through my mind when I think about my future and having a family.  Then I look around and think, “Well if THAT lady can have a baby, I’ll be fine”.  I also think it’s really easy to say you want something when it isn’t an option.  Like, yes, I want to be with him.  But when he lives on the other side of the country or when that’s not the kind of relationship you have it’s easy to say things like that because there’s no follow through.  If it actually became a reality or a possibility, it changes everything – as it should.  We spend an awful lot of time playing pretend.  So I guess I’ll just have to stay tuned and see how this whole thing plays out because I really don’t know.  I think, as humans, it’s okay not to know what you want all the time.  It’s okay if you don’t fit the mold.  When I know, I’ll know – and sometimes that’s the only answer we can give if we want to be honest.