Babies.
I’m 32 and from a small town, so I’ve gone through two waves of female friends having babies. The first wave came around 20, when my girlfriends started getting pregnant by accident. I can’t count the number of pow-wows I had with terrified girls, weighing pros and cons of starting a family, weighing pros and cons of the guys that got them pregnant. Picking baby names was compared to getting tattoos in regards to their permanence and influence on future careers, and both decisions were made equally seriously. I hung with them through their pregnancies, visited them in the hospital, and went to raucous first birthday parties that seemed more like block parties.
These children are all just reaching teen-age now, and they are amazing- they skateboard and play drums with adorable attitudes, they have mohawks, they dream big. Never once did I have any reaction while hanging out with these adorable tykes, one of whom being my goddaughter, akin to yearning. I never thought “Oh man, this is what I need in my life!” I visited, babysat, cooed and loved the babies, and then I went home to my cat, my job as a therapist, and whatever man I was dating at the time.
To be completely honest, I’ve always had a little bit of… condescension when it came to women for whom pregnancy didn’t just “happen”. Deciding to have a baby, especially at a young age, to me signaled that you were bored with your life. Bored with your relationship, bored with your job, and wondering what significance your life held. I’d look at their Facebook profile pics and cluck my tongue before running out to one of my thousands of side projects.
A few years ago the second wave started, and as you can guess, this wave is comprised of the ladies who are either in relationships or single and have made the decision to get pregnant now. Just like before, I go to showers and hospitals and birthday parties, but something started to feel different. I would hold babies and instead of seeing them as tiny toys I can play with, I started to feel protective of them. I wanted to teach them songs my parents taught me, and I wanted to teach them how to tie their shoes. Seeing babies in public has gone from being a part of living in a city to being a little gift I get. My husband and I hold our 3 year old cat and discuss how the cat will react to a baby… and that’s another thing that’s changed: talking about having children in a casual, almost business-like way. I don’t know if it’s a function of age, the joy of the relationship I’m in, or what, but motherhood feels more and more like a natural thing for me. And I promise you, I’m not bored. My career has taken a gorgeous turn into a new place and I am kept quite busy by it, and my relationship constantly keeps me laughing and on my toes. I am happy, and I am fulfilled, and ALSO, I want to teach a child nursery rhymes at some point. These things coexist in my big silly feminist brain.
I’m not saying anything groundbreaking here, and I’m not saying that I’m going to get pregnant tomorrow (ahem, Mom), but I just want you to know that I get it now. I do.
