I think it’s funny how life has such a logical progression, despite how few people actually follow it. When you graduate high school, you go to college. When you date someone at least a year, you marry them. When you get married, you have a baby. I occasionally find myself dreadfully bored with the predictability of my life. I have been one of those people that follow the rules, make sure step 1 is completed before step 2. I’ve never deviated from the path people assume others should follow. I have watched family members and friends do all sorts of crazy stuff. 8 year bachelor degrees. Illegitimate children. Stints in jail. Vegas weekend weddings. I have watched others do that stuff and generally laughed at their irresponsibility. However, at the same time deep down inside of my rule following soul, I have envied those people. The ones who made their own rules and created their own path, even though it was generally out of laziness or promiscuity and resulted in a divorce 3 months later or other life-altering repercussions that people still talk about behind their backs. Not me. I literally cannot think of anything I’ve ever done that was off the wall.
I have found myself recently being bombarded with the next step on the recipe for a successful life…Dun, dun, dun BABIES!!! They’re everywhere. People just had babies. Or just found out their pregnant. Or just started trying to have babies. They’re at walmart. They’re in the halls after school wreaking havoc in a generally non-baby high school. They’re in magazines. They’re peoples’ Facebook profile pictures. Those untrasound pictures that really look more creepy than cute. And certainly are not of any interest to anyone other than the humans who created that weird, blurry, alienesque image. They’re everywhere. Babies are everywhere. Baby names, baby books, baby clothes, baby cribs, baby bottles, baby diapers, baby squeals. Babies, babies, babies.
In my perpetual attempt to follow the rules, I have recently found myself considering having a baby of my own. I do believe that Cody and I have genes worth passing on to future generations. I want to have some children. I am intrigued and humbled at the thought of reproducing some little athletic, intelligent, beautiful child that I get to raise. The other day I went so far as to count months in intervals of 9 to decide when the best month to get pregnant would be. Scary.
Then it hit me. Babies are the one thing in this world that you should not let anyone else motivate you into having. Everything else is reversible. College degrees will always be there. There are jobs you can get with a criminal record. Most STD’s can be cured or at least contained with modern medicine. All of those things can be fixed to some degree. But a kid is a kid for 18 years. A kid is a kid 14, 15, 16 years after it comes out of your womb. It’s all the sudden sucking every ounce of money you can make out of you and eating your food and waking you up in the middle of the night and having sex way too early with questionable partners and disrespecting you as if you didn’t push that 8 pound lump of flesh out of your birth canal. I am not ready for a baby. Or a child. Or an early adolescent. I am not ready to reproduce. This universe can show me the cutest pictures its got with the most perfect infants all cuddly and quiet looking. It can make me run into the most precociously adorable 5 year olds that remind me a lot of me at that age. It can force all of my friends around me to get pregnant and recount all of the wonderful things about a baby. It can make every person I come in contact with on a daily basis ask me when I’m going to have a baby, and all I’m going to do is keeping shaking my head no. I am not going to give up my life. I am going to be selfish and sleep in late and waste money and do what I want to whenever I want to do it for as long as I’d like to do it. My biological clock is not ticking, but my selfish clock is ticking loud and clear and I’m holding on to the awesome life I’ve got right now for a while longer. Babies can wait. I’ll just play with everyone else’s until I get my own.
