Do I Still Want Children?
How a weekend with a 9 month-old turned 28 years of certainty into doubt.
A family of my own has always been the one thing I knew I wanted in life. The one certainty, above any educational or professional aspirations.
Babies have always fascinated me, and I used to have a blast playing with toddlers, watching them learn how to walk and how to babble their first words. A kid’s ability to make up fantasy worlds when at play never ceased to amuse and surprise me.
My wish to have children turned from an abstract aspiration to a burning desired in my early twenties, no doubt fueled by biological urges imposed on me by nature.
When I turned 26, I thought I might explode if I didn’t have a baby within a year.
It occupied my thoughts more than anything. I would research baby stuff (top 10 absolute necessities for your maternity bag), and read all about cloth diapers vs. disposables, and how to get your baby to sleep a full night. The fact that I had zero chance of even getting pregnant in the first place — my husband was not about to let it happen — did nothing to curb those instincts.
I was mentally and emotionally, full-on nesting.
After I divorced my husband, however, I could feel my baby fever subside considerably.
And then I spent a weekend with a 9 month-old.
He’s my friend’s baby, and he’s adorable.
He’s very calm, he doesn’t throw temper tantrums and he doesn’t even cry very often. He’s a sweet, sweet baby.
But he’s been learning to crawl, and he loves to lean on things to prop himself up — the steps to the jacuzzi, the sofa, his bouncing chair, a pillow on the floor, my legs… And he’s teething like nobody’s business.
My friend asked me to stay the night and watch him as she and her husband went out to a party.
I got set up in the guest room as she put the baby down. They went out, and I eventually went to sleep, baby monitor ready by my bedside table.
Only it wasn’t sweet and peaceful dreams for me. At all.
The weight of the responsibility kept me from going into a deep, restive sleep. I kept tossing and turning, afraid that the baby would cry and I wouldn’t hear it.
After a long time of quietness, I turned the baby monitor on to check on him. He wasn’t just sleeping, he was completely immobile. Still like a rock. I’d heard of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS), a perspective that scared me out of my wits, so I had to get up to check if he was still breathing. Twice.
And then he cried.
The first couple of times were easy, all I had to do was to give him back his pacifier. The third time, though… The third time was rough.
I found him sitting down on his crib, full-on crying. What a set of lungs.
I picked him up and tried to rock him back to sleep. He pushed back against me — hard. He screamed so loud I was afraid the neighbors might think I was torturing him.
When you’re trying your best to calm a baby down, to hold him with all the love and care you have to offer, and he pushes you back like your touch is radioactive, it hurts. It hurt me that my good intentions, however clumsily expressed, were being so rejected. It hurt me that I had no way to make him understand that he was safe, that I was there for him and would let nothing bad happen to him.
But as I tried everything I could, the hurt turned into annoyance. His parents were close, so close it wouldn’t take them 5 minutes to arrive if I called, but I didn’t want to call since it would mean admitting I had been defeated by a tiny baby and my own incompetence.
I wanted to prove I could handle it.
Eventually, by a miracle, he calmed down. When I put him back on his crib and he fell peacefully back to sleep, a feeling of accomplishment washed over me like a wave of warmth.
I went to sleep feeling like I had re-established my worth as a human.
But the weekend wasn’t over yet.
The next morning, I woke up early as usual, despite feeling tired from my interrupted sleep.
My friend asked me to watch the baby for a few hours while she got more sleep herself. I was fully dressed and had no plans to go back to bed, plus, that kid’s smile as he woke up just melt my heart all over again.
“I did this,” I thought. “I watched over him and made sure he had a good night’s sleep and that’s why he gets to wake up so happy.”
I was proud of myself, even though being awake after the night I had felt like walking through slush. I was groggy from not having slept well at all, worrying about SIDS for half the night and rocking a screaming baby for the other half.
So I set up to sing little kid songs, make sure he didn’t crawl head-on into a piece of furniture, change peed diapers (no poop, luckily), spoon-feed him a smashed banana, and… that was like an hour of my morning.
It wasn't just the baby, time itself had decided to crawl on me.
And then the magic question popped up in my head: “how do people even do this?”
Hats off to full-time moms.
Really, you’re nothing short than super-humans.
I stayed with that baby for a little over an hour, and I was ready to blow my brains out. And he’s an easy baby, really. And I love him to death. I do.
But OMG I wanted to run away.
The fact that I felt tired and sleep-deprived didn’t help one bit. How can women go on for months of this? The connection you have with your children, them being yours and everything, certainly helps, but it’s still a valid question to ask.
Why? How?
And why?
I used to think I knew why. Now, I’m not so sure.
I like my adult, independent life. I value doing what I want with my time and not having to make sure a tiny human survives the day without any major scars, physical or psychological.
I’ve said it before, sometimes it saddens me that I didn’t take my mid-twenties baby fever and just ran with it. Now, I’m not sure I’ll ever have the same drive to do it — let alone the stamina.
Babies still work like a magnet to me. Whenever I see one, I’m immediately draw. The difference is that now I’m not so sure that if that gut reaction is enough to qualify me as a potential good mom.
I still think I have a lot more soul-searching to do on this subject before it’s anywhere near settled. I have moments when all I want is my freedom and independence, and moments when having a couple of kids with the right partner sounds like a recipe for happiness.
When I think about my friend’s baby screaming and kicking me away from him, I want nothing to do with anything like that. When I think of him peacefully sleeping after I’ve calmed him down, I want to hold him forever and never let go.
I guess that’s what parenting is: embracing how bittersweet it all is.
I’m still not sure if I’m up to experiencing it firsthand.
