“I’ve been clutching my uterus at precisely 12:34 every day and night for the past few days. Okay, I’m not literally pregnant; I’m just pregnant with the idea of being pregnant. Maybe all these babies running through my head slipped on my cerebral cortex and slid into my womb, because that’s the only explanation of why my mental baby obsession has caused me physical uterine pain.”
I’d say it was psycho-somatic, but then again, it’s probably best to keep your mouth shut around people launching themselves into pregnancy mode. Parental instincts won’t protect anything taller than three feet and it seems obvious to me that Kill Mode overlaps rather frighteningly with Parent Mode. I know when to keep my mouth shut.
Though I did have my thoughts, and I remember sitting at the base of the hill, frosty-eyed and content after sun-bathing on our own little beach front (Foss Hill just seems so unpoetic). I looked up at my friend when suddenly those phrases popped out of her mouth (there is not enough opposition in the world to bad puns to keep me from being grateful that words were the only thing popping out—oh zeugma, you never disappoint me!).
Well, aside from embellishing her words, nothing has been lost in the translation, so to speak. She said something of this effect to me, her eyes glazed over—serotonin levels running high?—directing themselves at tots scuttling with parents around the hill. They scampered around the hill, capris-panted, hat-wearing and button-nosed. It was awful.
Sure, their flushed faces were cute, their roly-poly bodies seemed on the verge of toppling over with precious delight, their eyes glowed wide with childish innocence, but couldn’t she hear the screaming? There were whines and calls and screams! Couldn’t she smell the evil on them—and by evil I mean dirty Pampers and ear infections and needs? I certainly could smell it. I could see it, too, if you had to know.
But where I felt sensory overload and pain willing me to escape, to run and to flee, no looking back, from any kind of progeny, she felt longing and need.
Lest we think this is a one person individual “predicament,” look around for a second. There are eggs, ripe and throbbing, falling by the dozens every day from Wesleyan bio-women; there are billions of sperm egging (I’m so dumb) bio-men on to copulate. Who do we think we’re kidding? Any amassed group of people is a hot bed for reproduction and birth. I’d say we’re dawdling on a volcano that is about to erupt with pesky, irritating, needy little babies. In fact, I’m slightly appalled by the impotence, the sheer lack of virility that must exist on this campus for there to be so few babies.
I know what you’re thinking: blame it on “birth control” and “gays” as if anyone believed those myths anymore.
Okay, all jokes aside (or at least less the ones that keep interrupting me), having a child freaks me out. While most people feel a desire to produce children, to think about “what it might be like” to endow the world with a child of one’s own, I feel panic.
You remember that old anti-drug campaign with slogans like “Sports are my anti-drug!” and we were supposed to think about all the great things that we could do without drugs? Well, I feel like babies are my anti-baby. Think of all the wonderful things I can do without a baby—like everything.
Statistically those with higher education have fewer babies, so in some ways we must be getting trained, socialized, or forced into delaying baby mode or even eliminating it altogether, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t the secret, rampant, all-consuming desire.
But considering the Spring Fever that hits campus, even more uteruses are squealing with eagerness at the prospect of a child. My poor housemate Ann Rush in uterine desperation has been shedding her endometrial female lining for twelve whole days! Talk about wanting to make babies.
Maybe for me it’s just that I can’t get over the fact that babies don’t stop shitting and peeing, crying and squealing, and needing and wanting things all the time. I’m not ready for that kind of selflessness. I barely like me enough to take care of my own functions and needs.
So is clutching a uterus or testicle our way of using our reproductive organs as an abacus? To calculate the passing minutes leading to infertility and heirlessness?
Really I think we’re just crazy. God gave us other people’s babies to remind us of how awful they really are. This preventative measure will become necessary and have to kick in some day. Until then, babies are my anti-baby.
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