I never wanted kids.
I wasn’t that five year old with the doll baby, wanting to nurture and care for a bald rubber creature.
In fact, when I got them, I always wanted to go refund them for the slutty barbies.
While I’ve written about this before, I feel like the self-questioning about “do I really never want a family?” arises around the holidays. Because that’s when you see families piling in the car to go to the pumpkin patch or santa’s lap. And they seem all warm ‘n cozy. So, I’ll get that brief bit of envy streaking through me. And then it passes through a rapidly closing Ali Baba cave door for another hundred years. And I wonder why I get that shut-down feeling when so many other people just can’t wait. Don’t I want that too?
(See? Look at all the fun I’m missing out on.)
Recently, I think I dug a little deeper and struck uncomfortable gold with a self-realizache shovel.
What ensued was whatever the un-fun version of a eureka moment is:
In my early years, I didn’t get why babies got so much attention. I wanted all the attention. All of it. Because I was the youngest (“the baby”), that was my thing. I didn’t have all the other cool things my brother did with his gregarious personality or my sister did with her entertaining antics. So being the baby was my thing. It wasn’t much, but it was mine. But since my mom worked as a nurse with neonates, she’d have to leave too much for my liking (really it wasn’t that often) to go take care of other babies. So I became jealous during my early years and believed that attention-energy was a finite thing. So I grew up to feel very uncomfortable and insecure around children-kind. Then, as I matured (arguably not much), I realized where my problems came from and how helpless these freshly born beings are (like, something that dies if you just leave it alone should get top priority, obv).
While you’d think the combo of these realizations would make me have a sudden infant affinity, it didn’t. Sure, I came to have the same awe about them other people have when I thought about the whole wonder of people making people (the same way if you think too hard about how big the universe is, you short circuit a little). But I still get anxious around babies – because it just makes me realize that if I turned out so effed up so early, that…well… kids are pretty easy to eff up pretty effing early. And I don’t wanna be the one responsible. So I get afraid to be around them at all. Like they’ll smell my fear (which they totally can, you know) and be traumatized straight away. Or that the censor on my sailor mouth will come off involuntarily while I’m caring for one of them. And the wee bit in question will have a new word or twelve to share when mom and dad come home.
There’s that. And then there’s also the fact that they’re adults-to-be.
Which people forget is a terrifying fact.
This was reinforced when I was 18 and babysitting a kid in New Orleans.
His name was Sebastian, and I actually did alright. (A self-compliment I don’t pay lightly when it comes to kids.) But the mom retrospectively reminds me of the awful mother I’d probably turn into if I ever had any of my own. I could tell she was lying to me when she said she was going off to “night class” (and later called me to say it was “running late” from a crowded, music infused atmosphere somewhere). The forensic evidence of empty beer and liquor bottles lining the counters supported my earlier suspicions I’d tried to pass off as me being judgmental. Meanwhile, the kid was hungry and she hadn’t left dinner instructions (or dinner makings) beyond stale bread buns and a couple of hots dogs. So I taught him the “microwave trick” my mom had taught me in a pinch (to kind of kill the less-than-fresh flavor). And he was so excited about how much better it tasted than usual that it made me do that thing where you almost cry but then just scrunch your nose instead and pretend like you’ve got a cold coming on. His mom drove me home drunk that night because I didn’t have another ride.
I still wonder how Sebastian turned out.
But that night reinforced my never wanting kids.
Because some will say, “I could do better were it me.”
But really, I just know better about me. And I dunno if I could.
Maybe I did better than she did for that one night, as someone not involved in the intricate dynamics of having a family or all the little complications she may have been going through that I didn’t know about. But I also know there’s a just-as-much chance that I might just morph into axe-wielding mommie dearest if I were to have a child and be charged with its care for all eternity. The thing is, I might be an amazing mom. And yes, sometimes I get that nagging feeling of not just wanting kids – but wanting a family of my own (it’s rare, but it occasionally hits like the stomach-sock of nausea I got the first time I tried Tequila). And maybe I would be really happy. Maybe it’d cure me of my insanity. But on the off chance that that’s totally wrong and a fantasy, we’re talking about playing Russian Roulette with selfishness bullets. Except in this case, its not a life being taken but one being born into world class crazy who never asked to be.
And that’s something you can’t refund for a Barbie doll once you realize you’re wrong.