I have never, ever, had that melty gooey impulse that most females have about babies. I do not have a marked fondness for the sticky little things; mostly because that's what they are: helpless bundles of goo that rely on you for everything. Their life is in our hands and that means cleaning up every peculiar-scented thing that seems to spurt from all of their orafices. That's the odd thing about humans, other baby animals don't seem to puke nearly as often as babies do. Why is this?
In addition to this comes pregnancy and labour, excuse me? What about this is charming? Again, why do humans seem to have the hardest time with this? In all those nature programmes the monkey, or the deer, or the elephant or whatever is just walking around and then -phut!- out pops a baby or seven. The mother doesn't even seem strained by the whole thing. There certainly aren't teams of elephant doctors standing around her helping her out or anything, and absolutely no drugs. I know cows and horses, and other domestic animals get veteranarians for problems during birth, but wild animals don't and they do OK. Is it something to do with the domesticating process that we humans and cows can't have natural painless painless seeming labour, or do the hippos just have a higher pain tolerance because they're wild animals (with very thick hides, I might add)? Or are the masses of coneys who die in rabbit birth just not something the forest rangers keep track of?
Anyway, the point is that none of this has ever sounded even slightly interesting to me, as a personal experience. I've never wanted to be a mother, not even for an adopted child. Nathan and I have had a number of discussions on the topic and we have pretty solidly agreed that it's a bad idea. Nathan has bouts of thinking the other way, but then he sees his four nephews together and rethinks that. The idea we tend to share is that kids are nice, but only if they're not yours and go away after a while, you know, rather than the average 18-24 years your own child would suck life and money from you.
This is why I was shocked last night while I was re-reading Anne's House of Dreams, and I got to chapter 19 and I cried. Cried like I have not cried over a book since I first read Where the Red Fern Grows. I've read House of Dreams before, many times, and I have never felt the way I felt about that chapter. I stopped reading and just sat and thought for a while. I felt so sorry for Anne losing Joyce, and it occured to me that that's what I wanted.
I had strange visions of Nathan as a father, me reading stories and going to parent-teacher conferences. This was something that seemed like an incredibly good idea. Nathan came back three minutes into this pondering and wanted to know what was wrong with me- I seemed preoccupied. I didn't tell him, he'd just finished with the show and was generally tired and grumpy. So I just sort of added that to the list of things he just doesn't know about yet.
It's a considerable list too, at this point. It's all stuff that I don't really need to worry about anyway, so he definately doesn't need to worry about me worrying about it. Either I'll work it all out for myself in a few days, or I'll talk to him. Unfortunately for both of us, I tend to have problems without clear solutions, and so there's nothing either of us can do except convince me everything will be fine anyway.
Leo the Russian has been thinking lately about directing Romeo and Juliet. He said today that it's still a great big huge maybe, but if it does go, do I want to be his Assistant Director? I agreed, of course. It sounds like a very interesting project anyway, but I wonder if the Leo/me dynamic will be problematic. He is much more bizarre in his thinking in many ways than I am, so it will at least be extremely interesting.
He has already said that he is most interested in it being better than standard UNISTA (our student theatre organisation) fare, which makes it great right from the beginning. But it would have to be a huge affair, there are only so many things that can just be accepted in R&J. I dislike modern versions because you can only say "Fetch me my longsword" and mean a gun so many times before it gets silly. Also, but by no means less importantly, because dead people are embalmed these days. If you're just "sleeping", you're going to wake up for that one.
That would be everything in my life right now other than the show and my directing scene, and I don't much want to talk about either of them.