Yesterday was a day of interesting conversation.
I like kids, but I told myself years and years ago that I was not going to have children. I still agree with my seven year old self, who knew that having your own children was more trouble than it was worth, who knew that pets were more rewarding, and that children were easy to screw up. On top of all that, I have always been terrified of pregnancy and dislike babies. As my MySpace page declares, I love kids, but not for me.
On the other hand, I work at a portrait studio right now. I see lots of babies, lots of pregnant women (two of the girls I've worked with are having babies later this year), and lots of kids. It is my job to tell people that their children are adorable, or that they are gorgeous pregnant, yadda yadda yadda.
It is literally brainwashing me, because I find myself singing the praises of extremely ugly babies (I'm sorry, but a naked bright pink three week old is not a terribly pretty sight). I found myself thinking the other day that there weren't so many ugly ones coming in. It occurred to me that it had nothing to do with the relative attractiveness of the babies, but that my brain had Pavlov'd them more attractive than they were. Since my automatic response has to be that they're gorgeous, they are looking better. As a result, this is also killing my personal resolve so that I find myself thinking, "well..."
The Boy goes back and forth on his opinion all the time. Sometimes he agrees with me that children are not a good idea, and that we should be the last people to have them. Then he sees his youngest nephew (a year and a half now) for an hour and thinks that we could certainly do a better job with a kid than that child's mother is, and why aren't we having kids again? And then he spends a week with his older brother's kids and changes his mind again. If he's honest, he's always thought of himself as having kids, but he knows what I think and sometimes tends to agree with me.
Some of you may simply prefer to stick your fingers in your ears and hum for a bit through this next section, but it figures into the equation, so I mention it.
Sometime between third and sixth grade, girls are informed of the coming horrors of growing up. They are told that they are special and unique and because of this, they're all going to leak each month for about a week. Woohoo! Further advice is given to track this on a calendar.
I've done this off and on the last few years and can say with assurance that there is no method. I'm not following a lunar calendar, or any other regular period of days. I think if I wanted to find a correlation, I'd have to be tracking the weather and my weight as well. It's not unusual for May or June to pass and leave the calendar unmarked- I've always attributed that to the fact that it's warm and I'm outside a lot more.
This past year, however, November and December came and went. Nervous, but knowing that my innards do tend to change course without reason and the fact that I both was working long hours and had a slight cold (which usually screws me up internally), I decided I'd consider it a change in schedule rather than anything more worrying.
The Boy mentioned yesterday that he was a little disappointed when January came and I didn't have anything to worry about anymore.
Those of you with your fingers in your ears (eyes?) can join us again.
We are in no position to spawn right now. We don't own a house, we can hardly afford the way we live right now, we're going to be moving in August to an as yet undisclosed location. We may not be staying in the place we move to for more than a year, meaning that we'll yet again be renting. We will also begin to pay back his loans, and we're going to have to buy a truck. [In TB's line of work, he needs a truck. You can't run to the lumber yard and pick up extra plywood with a sedan. You can't usually transport rental scenery, props, or furniture with a sedan.] Financially and logistically it's just an incredibly bad idea.
Having all that going on plus suddenly having a whole other pile of "excitement" that I most certainly do not want right now added on scared the crap out of me just to contemplate it. He admitted that it would not have been great timing, by any means, but he was disappointed all the same. Poor guy.
As I told TB, even if it maybe sounds like offspring could be a potentially decent idea, there are still a lot of obstacles before we reach a point that I would agree to start on that. We can hardly afford ourselves right now, let's get settled and then talk later. We're just not in the right place yet, and I may never be in the right place. Right now, I'm not.
I know that I am very up in the air right now. Part of me wants to buy a house and settle down and never leave. The other part wants to see the world. TB has said that we're not likely to be settled down anyplace in the next five years. Then the rest of the time he says he wants a university job so he doesn't necessarily have to keep moving.
So much of the future feels like it rests on the next two months. He's got job applications out that could send us from Washington to Iowa to Connecticut. I still want to buy my grandparent's house. Absolutely everything is up in the air, and has been for a while, and I want the shoe to drop, good or bad, I want a little bit of certainty.