I don’t want to have a baby. Oh lawds, no. I don’t. I won’t. I can’t. I shan’t.

Absolutely no offense to those out there who have been pregnant, who are pregnant, or who desire to be pregnant. The thought of pregnancy simply terrifies me. I try to imagine what it would be like to be in a family way and I just want to put my head down between my knees and rock back and forth and moan. Ghost nausea, I suppose.

But there are times. Times when I’m feeling fortified, emboldened. Times like tonight, when I feel drunk on the blogs of actual mothers.1 Not because their words paint a pretty pastoral picture of parenthood, no. What they do is expose it in ugly, sharp relief. They talk about those 3 a.m. sessions when you’re slumped on the floor, covered in poop, sobbing right along with your baby. And you know what? It gives me a strange hope. Like maybe I, too, could actually make it through that. Armed with my wit and sarcasm, maybe I could teach someone else something about this world.

Maybe I wouldn’t actually have to sacrifice the whole of myself for the sake of another.

A friend once described babymaking as a science experiment. I liked that, and now I think of it often. A science experiment, indeed. Who would the baby look like? How would it act? What would its personality be like? What exactly would we get if we combined this with that?

If we do, if we do, if we do. If I can make it past my latent terror. I hope the baby would get lots and lots of that.

Alert! Cuteness Forthcoming!

The beau at age 4, exhibiting THAT.

It almost seems like a crime not to pass around the beau’s cuteness genes.

 

1 I am reading blogs tonight instead of finishing my work work, or tackling my side work, or working on my posts about Colorado. I swear, they’re coming. Like possibly sometime within the next month. Probably within the year. Maybe.

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