Why I write
I dedicate this post to my mother, a wonderful, insanely kind woman who does not have
Facebook. If she did have Facebook, I'm confident she would not understand how to use it.
Some people write because they have entire novels inside of
them.
Some people write as an act of courage.
Some people write to bring change.
Some people write because they are going batshit crazy and just
need to get something off their chest.
…
Much like Tiny Fey did at the end of “Bossypants” (that is,
the whiny, not-so-funny part), I have to get out my thoughts on procreation.
Much like my students (that is, YOUR future, America), I
will write with no regard for coherence, logic, or accuracy, and insodoing, will
probably cause offence.
I have a great lifestyle for a kid. This is a thinly
disguised way of saying, “You don’t go out and you naturally wake up very, very
early like some sort of freak.”
I have a decent body for a kid. This means that my “pre-baby”
body basically looks like the body of a woman 5 months pregnant with her second
child. Instead of a 5-month old child in
utero, however, I have a ball-like cushion of past Cheez-its, cheese curds, dry
cereal and other nutritious snacks I cannot eat in moderation.
I have a good job for a kid. This is a veiled way of saying
I get almost as much time off as a European, and it would be very easy to be a stay at home mom
by virtue of NOT working at this job, since my salary is so low that it wouldn’t
even cover the cost of day care.
I have a lot of love to give. This is the sort of reasoning
only a mother, and a very nice one at that, would give. As such, I’m not sure
it’s true, and I won’t comment further.
And yet,
And yet. Having a child seems like the sort of thing you
need to be fully on board with, like wanting a tattoo badly enough to be OK
with seeing it on your sagging flesh in 50 years. I have too many doubts about
my ability to do it “right” and not fuck it up. The “it” in question is a HUMAN
BEING. The stakes are very high, and I have always been scared of heights. Does
this make me a coward? Does that make me selfish? Does it make me honest? Does
it make me like Gloria Steinem or Jennifer Aniston? Does it mean I’ll have hair
as nice as either of them (preferably Jen)?
If you have any answers, please let me know. If you have any
Cheez-its, please let me know that, too.*
*only if they are the normal flavor, and not that Parmesan
garbage.
Comments
I am a mother and, I have to say, never went into it knowingly or desiring to be pregnant because I'm impetuous and in my younger days, irresponsible and rather flighty. As a child, I wasn't one of those girls that ever wanted to have a kid. But I have to say that being a mother has been my favorite thing in life. I say that completely devoid of all the #blessed connotations that come with it. I honestly just like it. I think it's fun. It's hard, but I've never been one of those people who is miserable with it, mostly because I have never missed a shower due to mothering and I remain pretty selfish. It's come somewhat easy to me and for the life of me, I can't figure out why. I don't think anyone, my mother included, would have picked me to be a decent mom.
The time has come in my own life, as I'm married to a wonderful man with no biological children of his own, to decide if I want to do it again, and I feel much the same as you have elucidated above. I am stable, I have all the "pre-requisites" that I never had before. It would be easy to go for it. But I don't, and most days I don't want to. Some part of me feels more of "It's not me, it's them" in mothering; that faced with another child other than the three that I got, I would be a truly awful parent. Like my old tricks would stop working and I'd be somehow entirely different, more akin to something seen in a mommy blog and I can't freaking stand mommy blogs.
I'm not offering you anything here other than to say that I understand and that thinking about things makes them all 20 times worse. Good luck as you try to figure it out. You're a pretty dynamite person, and a great writer.
Morgan (this is linking to some very old account I had and I haven't a clue how to make it stop, but I'm that girl from college)
I hope you will see this reply. I think I'm the only dinosaur that uses blogger (I started this blog NINE years ago-Holy crap) and I didn't know how it works in 2007 and I don't know how it works in 2016.
I loved everything you said and I just wanted to say, for whatever it is worth, that even from my impersonal glimpses of your life on social media, your family looks like so much fun amd all of your kids seem awesome. Overthinking is a bitch, isn't it? It is all WM's fault.