How do you like your eggs?
After a baby-killing au revoir five months ago, I am back with some vanilla-filled waffle about baby-making.
Babies have never really been my thing. You know how, for some people, babies are their thing? They want to hold them and make noises to them and all that stuff? I’m not one of those. As one of the eldest of 12 cousins, I frequently had new-ish babies thrust into my arms when I was a child, and I never knew what to do with them or myself. I have never had that kind of mothering instinct. I never liked dolls.
And yet,
I am a woman. If not mentally, then at least biologically. I have known that (fertility permitting) I could have babies for much longer than I have known that I could orgasm.
When I was nine years old I wrote in my diary:
I am really worried about my mum, she was sick earlier and has been in bed asleep ever since. I did all the washing up and washed the table and put mum to bed and I’m more concerned about her than I am about my birthday party tomorrow. While I did those adult-like jobs, I pictured my life as an adult: I would live in a cottage (my dream one) with my husband and five kids (three boys and two girls but I can’t choose) and I would cook and make all the food, I would do all the shopping (nice and healthy) and when all my children started in school I would get a job at the school and after school I would drop them back home with my husband and I would go back and do a bit more work and then I would come home and all of us would go to the park and play in the garden or go cycling or play hide and seek and we would have dinner and we would read books and then we would go to bed.
I envy my nine-year-old self who wanted nothing more than a job as a teacher, a husband, kids, a house and a garden. She didn’t question what she wanted, she just wanted.
Although I think what little me really wanted was be one of the kids in that perfect, little family and the only way she could imagine getting there was becoming the mother and the only job she could imagine herself having was school teacher.
She also thought it would be fun to be a mother because she was too young to realise that mothering wasn’t always fun and that her own mother had sacrificed everything else in her life to become a mother. She’d be a fun mother, she thought, the kind of mother who only wanted to be a mother. Then bloody periods and teenage pregnancies became a thing of reality and she (I) adjusted her (my) outlook a little.
Since then I have had plenty of pregnancy scares. They are always scares, even when the only potential father is also the person I want to spend my life with.
When I was 26 years old I wrote in my notes app:
It’s not so much the fear of abortion that scares me, or the fear of pregnancy itself, but the fear of the situation I’ll find myself in if I discover that I am pregnant: the situation of having to choose.
Another not-very-feminist envy: for women who lived in a time when there wasn’t as much choice. I’d never in a million years give away the privileges of being a woman today, but in some ways it must have been easier, surely, just to let fate decide?
A man I know runs his own business and, according to social media, is very busy doing that a lot of the time. Also according to social media, he and his wife just celebrated 20 wonderful years together. She looks after the kids and home while he runs around posting on social media and doing business. They look so happy. I see her (via his social media) grinning and hanging out with her kids and I think about all the stay-at-home mothers of today and I also envy them. To have made the choice that didn’t used to be a choice for women, but a duty. Perhaps they, unlike me, are able to put all the politics aside and focus on what is really important in life: love and nurture and raising children. Perhaps they, unlike me, are happy to let their partners go out and do all the business-y stuff, because they don’t see it as more important than what they do at home. Which it isn’t, of course. Or it shouldn’t be.
I wish it was an easier choice to make. I wish there wasn’t such a stigma about being a non-earning parent today. And I wish there was more financial support available for parents, especially single parents, who don’t have a partner to do the money-earning stuff. If stay-at-home parenting was considered one of the best ways to contribute to society and was paid accordingly, it might become a more desirable choice for mothers and fathers.
Not that I’d necessarily make that choice myself, but, you know, on principle.
Anyway, back to my notes app:
If I turn out to be pregnant, and decide to keep the baby, who’s to say it wouldn’t turn into the best choice of my life? Even though, right now, it might seem like a dangerous, stupid or risky choice. Who am I to think I know better about what I want, what the future holds, when I’ve been proven wrong so many times before?
I wasn’t. Pregnant, that is.
Now I am no longer as scared. I don’t have a particular desire to be a parent or a particular desire not to be a parent but, just in case I find myself in the situation of having to choose, I reason:
Pros
Culturally very acceptable.
It might make us care more about the future of humanity.
I often feel very lost in life and a child might anchor me a bit.
Children are the greatest artists in the world and it would be nice to be free like that again, or at least soak some of it up.
I want to give someone my partner and I as parents. Because even though we might be shit, we might also be better than our own parents.
I was also born. If my parents hadn’t had me, I wouldn’t exist.
I want to see what a mix of our genes would look like.
I want to meet a version of him, when he was young.
Eating for two.
A curiosity about childbirth. A desire to experience what it is like to be human. Not just human. Woman. To not deny my biology. To find a way to embrace my biology, despite its historically frowned-upon existence.
Someone still alive enough to visit me when I’m old and confined to a bed in a retirement home somewhere.
It might be the best thing we ever did.
Cons
It’s what we’re “supposed to do” because we’re a man and woman who live together and are of baby-making age. In other words, how could we be sure we weren’t just doing it because we thought we should?
There is so much I want to do and explore in life that doesn’t involve being a parent.
I like being alone.
I also like being with my partner.
We parent (and child) each other enough as it is.
I am very bad at setting boundaries and would probably drop absolutely everything else in my life for the child(ren), and be constantly resentful about it.
I don’t want to pass on my dubious genes and habits to anyone.
I don’t want to inflict onto any child what my parents inflicted on me. Also I’m scared of turning into my mother and really, the best way to ensure I turn into her is to become a mother myself.
There are enough people in the world.
Childbirth.
Expensive.
No going back.
On that inconclusive note, here are some toppings from people who know a lot more about making babies and parenting than I do.
Optional toppings
🔬 A Shrinking Society in Japan on The Daily podcast is a fascinating reportage about the declining birth rate in Japan
👙 Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami is a book about girlhood, womanhood, sex and infertility, which, despite the shoddy translation, is still brilliant
📕 Mit Arbejde (Danish) by Olga Ravn is one of the best books about motherhood—and also just one of the best books—I’ve ever read
☁️ Drømmen om familieskabelsen feat. Moussa Mchangama (sorry, Danish again) on A Seat At The Table podcast, talking nuclear and alternative families
💤 @jean_jullien on Instagram
*Tickles feet and blows a big, fat raspberry on your belly*
— H. E.