Harry Potter and the Uterine Urgency Graph

I recently read an article on Slate.com about how parents talk about parenting. It struck a chord with me throughout, but this quote in particular practically had me jumping up and down: "If becoming a parent 'changes everything,' as everyone says, then what is its promise to those of us who are already happy?"

I like my life. Currently, not hypothetically. All I keep reading are these satirical or tongue-in-cheek or painfully earnest blogs and articles about sniffing butts to check for poop and never sleeping again and having no life/friends/hobbies/time/sanity..."but it's so wonderful, I wouldn't trade it for anything" yadda yadda. My friends on social networks post these articles alongside winky faces and LOLs and 48 tagged friends who “will totally get this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” As a 31-year-old woman, I see these things every single goddamned day. “I haven’t eaten a meal with two available hands since 2013, but life is great!”

You're not selling me. I like sleep. I like free time. I like the fact that I am beholden to only myself and some dogs. I can stay late at school as needed, sleep in on weekends and school vacations, take a dump in peace, imbibe infinite quantities of caffeine, put caustic chemicals in unlocked cabinets, go to the grocery store with an exhaustive list and leisurely stroll the aisles reading labels and comparing products without regard to naptimes or boredom levels or a little one's propensity for removing all bottom-shelf merchandise. Away from work, I don't have to watch my language or think about what behavior I'm modeling all the time. I can play video games for 14 hours. I can watch TV shows with violence, language, and sexual situations no matter what time of day it is or who is in the room. I can say things like "snack" and "cookie" and "ice cream" and "park" and "nap" without having to spell them. (Our dogs are very stupid.) I don't have to choose between making just enough money to cover the daycare that I need because I’m working or bringing in no income but not needing daycare. I can spend a great deal of time and energy and money taking care of my wonderful and pathetic students who always need EVERYTHING and who aren't going to get it from most of their other teachers (or families, for that matter). Dan can take trips to Vegas with friends or go to Orlando for work and be gone for four days and my response is "okay, have fun!"

Everyone I know who has kids speaks very fondly of their lives as parents. Then again, I don't know anyone who would be like "you know, if I had to do it all over again, I might have just gotten a vasectomy/tubal ligation and gotten on with my life." Some people probably THINK that, but it seems there's some sort of contract you sign in the Labor and Delivery ward that prevents you from ever saying it, except through Post Secret. Even parents who were not trying to have kids speak lovingly of their lives as parents.

Which is fine. But all I keep hearing about are all of the objectively terrible things that happen when A Wild Offspring appears, and isn't it so humorous and vexing to have everything you once loved ripped from your life in a procedure not unlike antebellum battlefield amputation. And I completely understand the need to commiserate and reflect and find humor in parenthood, which seems to be most accurately characterized as "a mixed bag."

In fact, I do the same thing with teaching - I frequently share both positive and negative things about my job, with most of my commentary being far from the "I want to save all the children" mantra that we carry with us to various schools of education and our first teaching jobs. The difference is that I don't try to sell other people on becoming teachers. I love it. I think that if you believe you'd love it too, you probably would. But it's hard as hell, and it's NOT for everyone. Not by a long shot. Teaching in America, specifically, has a lot of systemic problems right now that make the job worse than it should be. So if someone said, "hey, should I go into teaching?" I would give them a lengthy answer, the gist of which would be "maybe. If you want to."

But from parents, all I hear is "god, this kid is driving me crazy and I haven't washed my hair in four days. BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY HAVE KIDS THOUGH." Which seriously besmirches their credibility, as far as I'm concerned. It's like when you find something gross-smelling and your response to your friend is "EW! Hey, smell this." No, bro, I don't need to smell it. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.

I was told my biological clock would be ticking...?

This is part of why it’s so infuriating to have people telling me, directly and with no uncertainty, that I should have kids right now. Although the most vocal individuals are my female elder relatives, this refrain comes from a wide variety of sources, same-age peers included. They cancel plans over and over again because of the kids, but then lobby for you to join the Procreation Army, the cult-like shadowy organization that shall not rest until all child-bearing age humans are among its ranks. Sure, the conversation always starts as a question – “Are you guys thinking about having kids?” But when my answer isn’t either “yes, we’re fornicating regularly solely for this reason, thank you for inquiring about my uterus” or “NEVER!” then they turn on the hard sell. “Well, there’s no good time to have children,” they say. Yes, that’s true, I think, but also NOT a good reason to have a kid. Something being accurate does not automatically make it convincing. 

We live in a condo that doesn’t even have enough room for my possessions, and THOSE can be shoved into a closet. There is literally no room for a baby. The baby would sleep on the couch. Or we’d watch TV from the crib. Either way, we don’t have room. Are we planning to move? Yes, probably in the next 6 months to a year. Do we feel the need to get pregnant as a precursor to that move? No. To this line of reasoning, they reply, “You know, it’s hard, but you find a way to make it work.” This is how I would describe an adequate response to an emergency.

Parenting should not be an emergency. Yet that is probably the closest word to what parents on these blogs and websites consider parenting to be. Your kid is always about to die, about to kill the dog, about to be killed by the dog, about to burn the house down, about to die in the aforementioned house fire, or, perhaps most insidiously, slowly killing you through a calculated program of sleep deprivation and starvation. Basic hygiene and self-care go out the window, social engagements get missed so often that the opportunities stop presenting themselves, husbands and wives find all sorts of things to argue about, and

For all my talk of 14-hour video game marathons and leisurely strolls through the grocery store, I do actually find myself quite busy most of the time. I always have papers and things to grade, I struggle to find time to make it to the gym, and chores get pushed back for days or weeks at a time. Could I power through all of those things on a regular basis and leave myself almost no free time in the process? Yes. If I once trained for a marathon while simultaneously job-hunting and planning a wedding (and honeymoon), then yes, almost anything is possible. But adding a kid to the mix? A kid who lives with you, like, all the time? And relies on you for every single one of its needs? That sort of commitment is beyond what I’m willing to make right now, whether or not I would technically be able to handle it.

I think one of the things that makes me so resentful about other people pressuring me to have kids (immediately!) is that they don’t seem to have a lot of respect for or trust in my own personal decisions. Either my preference to wait comes from a place of gross ignorance or my thoughts are simply irrelevant. “I would love to see what kind of mom you’d be! I think you’d be great!” Thanks for the vote of confidence, but I’m not going to procreate so you can settle a bet. “Once you have a kid, you’ll understand.” Yes, I’m sure that’s true. But given my talents for rational thought and extreme empathy, I bet I have a pretty good handle on most of it. I’m not saying I have experience and knowledge equivalent to parents, but rather that I have a pretty solid imagination. I can imagine that being in a concentration camp was bad. I can imagine that being a gazillionaire with a large staff to care for my mansion would be pretty sweet. I can imagine that splitting my pants in the middle of the street would be embarrassing. I don’t need to have these experiences myself to wrap my head around them, and I don’t need to have a kid to wrap my head around the general experience of parenting. If anything, I’m over-informed. Maybe if I didn’t know about episiotomies and liquid infant poops and terrible twos and the stage when your kid wants to examine and discuss and utilize his/her genitals all the time, I wouldn’t be so hesitant to embark on the journey that everyone has decided is next for me.

To be honest, though, there are a million reasons I’m not ready. Sometimes when I get frustrated with the dogs on a walk, I pull their leashes harder than I have to. Certainly not hard enough to hurt them (or, it would seem, inconvenience them), but I don’t like that I have that reaction. I worry that I would be that way with a kid.

When my life gets busy or difficult outside of work, I tend to be less creative and productive at work. I get behind on grading and I don’t put a ton of effort into innovating and making cool lessons. When I broke my foot last fall, the combination of my mobility problems and my dark-as-midnight depression meant that I was almost no better than a substitute teacher would have been. I worry that I would have to choose between phoning it in as a teacher and phoning it in as a mom (and I would choose the former, obviously).

After losing more than 60 pounds and getting down to a size 6 or so (from a size 16), I have struggled to keep the weight off since I started teaching at my current job in September 2013. The added workload of a public school job (as opposed to the alternative school, where the children did almost no work and therefore required very little grading, comparatively) meant that my gym routine suffered dramatically – I went months at a time between gym visits and even runs around my own neighborhood. Earlier that year I had been running 6 miles a day 3 times a week with a longer run every Saturday. I ran almost 100 miles over the course of April 2013. In October 2013, I ran 1.7 miles. Total.

Not pictured: Chicken Fingers Consumed Per Month

I did a little better over last summer, doing at least a couple of runs per month, but I never got back into the habit fully, and then the combination of the school year starting back up and a lovely foot fracture this past October was the death knell for my exercise life. With almost no time and/or ability to exercise, I found it hard to keep up my food habits as well, and my motivation was inconsistent at best. Since the summer of 2013, I’ve put about 20 pounds back on (roughly one pound per month), not nearly the full amount I lost, but enough to make a significant portion of my clothes no longer wearable. And that’s just because I went from one teaching job to another. I worry – not unreasonably – that I would not be able to maintain healthy food and exercise habits with a kid. I know that many people do, but I don’t know that I would. The endless posts about not being able to lose baby weight and having one's own body betray one in unimaginable ways are not helping.

So although I enjoy my life, it's certainly not perfect. I struggle to find a balance between all of the areas that I wish to give my attention. My greatest complaint about my life right now is that I don't have enough time for all the things I want to do. If that's my main problem, why would I add a kid to that? That seems like the exact opposite of a good idea.

Of course, I also worry that I am going to wait too long, that my eggs will be made of silly string and that horrible chocolate with air pumped into it for some reason. I worry that if and when we eventually try to have kids, we will find out that we can't. Or we'll have a bunch of miscarriages, or kids with disabilities because my eggs are all jacked up. Or we'll spend $25,000 on fertility treatments and IVF only to have it fail again and again. Or that if we can't have biological children then we'll happily adopt, only to have to fight to urge to murder everyone who asks us if we have any "real" children. Or parenthood will be amazing and we'll regret having waited so long because we'll be "old parents". Or we will realize we want to have like a bajillion babies but we won't be able to because we waited too long. But I don't share these concerns with the Procreation Army because they don't need my help fighting their side of the battle. They have already perfected the significant glances that accompany the whispered dire warning of "just don't wait too long."

For all my dismissive talk of the practical and horrible sides of parenting, I am absolutely positive that, in addition to the fecal and various other nightmares, it is actually as wonderful and mind-blowing as they say. I can imagine the Grinch-heart-expanding feeling when your small child accosts you with affection with their newly-discovered gross motor control. I can imagine the pride and satisfaction and bittersweet joy of first words or first steps. I can imagine the secret, foolish-feeling tears shed in the car after dropping your kid off for the first day of school. I can imagine the gut-wrenching conversations with your spouse about what your child is or is not ready for, and how much trust to place in someone who, just a few years ago, ate a button battery and made you go to the emergency room for four hours (only to be told by the doctor that everything was fine but you'd have to go through the stool later...and you did. You went through poop just to be safe.) I can imagine the frustration and heartache and confusion the first time your kid, no longer little, talks back to you with genuine, fully-realized anger.

I have absolutely no doubt that these experiences are part of a realm that is difficult to fathom before you have kids. But I also don't think I'm ready for them, financially or emotionally or in any other realm, and I'm not suffering from their absence the way I was always told I would. The dogs woke me up this morning, a Sunday, with horrible whining at 6:30am. The only reason it didn't ruin my day was that I knew I could take a nap later, or just go to bed extra early tonight. If it were a kid waking me up, rather than the dogs? To paraphrase a Seinfeld legend, no sleep for you.

For all of the anticipated joys and delights that come with parenthood, the blogs and articles that populate the web reveal to me what I've always suspected - a lot of a parent's life is just abject misery. It's misery that's worth it of course, misery that you would absolutely suffer again and again for the protection or happiness of your child, but misery nonetheless. Parenthood eats your money, your free time, your sanity, your willpower, your friendships, and sometimes your marriage. These hyper-honest Mommy Blogs make no pretense about that.

I share my concerns, openly and without guile, but the Procreation Army is still not satisfied. “Yes,” they admit, face full of concern and understanding, “it’s true that a lot of stuff changes when you have a kid. Some things will always be different. But it’s amazing, you’ll see.” As with the smelly item proffered for communal suffering, I put my hand up and say, “No, bro, I’m all set. Your reaction was very clear. I trust you.”