Babies

I have been distictly hormonal for the last eighteen months or so, turns out there might be a reason for that aside from the humouress body clock references. I’ll know in a few weeks. I started out last year keeping a diary of my hormonal moods, and they started out with moods and progressed with various physical things and all the rest of it and I have become gradually aware of quite how hormonal we human creatures are, I mean how controlled by our hormones.

I suppose it makes a certain degree of sense that becoming aware of my hormones I’ve been really thinking about kids. Well, isn’t this about the time my body clock is supposed to start saying ‘get a cat!’… I mean ‘have a baby’. Well, ok, so I’ve got another four years before it’s traditionally going to get insistent but I was looking around me and talking to someone the other week about what the epitome of sexy was. The notion of seeing something in another person that you wanted to mix your genetic material with came up. In fact over the last year conversations about breastfeeding, babies and such things are coming up as much as morgages and parquet floors and all the rest of it. Oddly enough I don’t mind the baby conversations as much as the morgage conversations. For some reasons the morgage conversations seem fake, plastic whereas the baby ones seem to be, well, natural isn’t quite what I mean but you have to choose to own a house and rave about it’s flooring whereas a baby could just happen by accident (however hard we might try not to let it). It is best to be prepared afterall. Maybe it’s just the dreadful prospect, like that of STDs (and I do occaisionally think of a baby as just another STD), of the fact that if I found myself pregnant, given that I use condoms with all the men I’m sleeping with I would not know whos it was. Right now the prospect of telling the Jellicle, FJ, Princess Lex and Mother-In-Law that I have some sort of STD seems especially unpleasant.

(As a quick aside I’m still clean on all counts).

In anycase this hormonal thing of mine, which may well render all discussion of babies highly theoretical, has me aware of all of my friends of around a similar age to me (mid to late twenties by now I’m afraid) and I’m thinking well ok, babies are coming up in conversation. I’m guessing our hormones are pumping our bodies with the information that we haven’t reproduced (which is the biological imperative our bodies attempt to follow whatever our personal decisions) and we’re nearing thirty which is something of a cut off point for successfully having kids. So biologically our bodies are fairly sure we should, and, interestingly I think this applies to the men as well as the women. In fact, in my experience men are usually much more up throughout their lives for having kids than women are, and they seem, from my observations to be as hormonally driven in this respect though of course there’s no way that their bodies can know if they’ve reproduced. This leads me to ponder on the interaction of the concious and subconcious and body-concious(Is that different from subconcious?… I feel I’m edging into Jung here)

So babies. Am I going to post, as Fluzz did, that I suddenly want children? No. I still don’t know how theoretical this debate of mine is going to be rendered and though these thoughts are starting out from that point I am taking it as real and not only theoretical for now, my honest-to-goodness real thoughts on my having kids. My relationship with my Gentleman Friend made me seriously think about having children for the first time in my life without my automatic dismissal of them. Maybe my hormone driven body would have got to this point on its own but maybe not, I maybe motivated by hormones but I am still guided by my intellectual thoughts and ideas and they give my hormonal drives their focus.
If I were to have children then I would want to be a good parent, I would not want a child now because I have nothing to show to them, I am a woman with a temping job who still has not got the career she is aiming for (writing). I love my life but I am not satisfied by it. I am aiming for a whole lot more. I would not want to bring a child up on my own, I would not want to bring a child up as part of a couple. I would want to bring a child up in a loving family, in a loving polyamorous family. I would want any child of mine to know, to really know, the happiness I’ve felt on being surrounded (but not stifled) by a group of loving people. This baby thing is getting more theoretical by the moment hey? Obviously financially I’d need to provide for a kid but that’s not my major concern, love and stability, two things I’m not very good at, would be what I would want for a kid.

Here we’ve hit up against the reason that I’ve always had for not having kids; being preganant doesn’t bother me, the pains of childbirth don’t scare me (can you tell I’ve never given birth?!) but providing eighteen years (as a minimum) of stability, home and love, that’s something that if I were pregnant I’d be terrified I couldn’t give.

So, my mandate for having kids; a stable poly relationship, a published book and contract for more and a working womb and bits.

Oh well.

I’m quite looking forward to being an Aunty.