Expecting the worst…
Everybody seems to be in a frenzy of fecundity at the moment.
My brother’s wife is pregnant. My friend is blooming. My colleague Tom’s wife is wearing out Mothercare’s maternity range faster than you can say “It’s a girl!†Two people I used to work with have just progenated*. I keep seeing pregnant women on the train.
I’m not pregnant. There are no prospects of babies on the horizon for me. Even if I wasn’t going to Namibia, the BF turns pale whenever I coo over some helpless infant in a pram, and steers us firmly towards the nearest pub, via the family planning clinic. I’m having to live my life as a mother vicariously through everyone else.
I’m going to be 34 when I get back from Namibia, and who knows whether I’ll have found someone willing to donate their sperm for reproductive purposes. I know that many women have babies into their forties, but I imagine my tubes all exhausted from producing millions of eggs, just going “You want us to do more? Are you kidding?â€, and hanging an “Out of Order†sign on my womb.
It doesn’t really help that I would just love to be pregnant. Sometimes, in my fantasies of the future, I just waft around with a perpetual bump, eating banana and peanut butter pizza ice cream, and having people give up their seats on the tube. Mind you, in these selfish and twisted times, I’d probably have to actually sit on them before they’d move.
I’m not ready to have children. I can’t afford children. I’m not sure I’d know what to do with a child if I had one. But I feel a wrench deep inside when I see people with babies, toddlers, any child. Sometimes I feel a haunting emptiness, as if something that’s meant to be there is missing, and it’s getting stronger all the time.
I’m a great believer in letting things happen the way they’re meant to happen, and I’m sure if I’m supposed to have children, then I will, but I still worry.
Tick. Tick. Tick.
*I know this isn’t really a word, but it should be.