All of my friends are having babies.
Okay, slight exaggeration. But it does feel like everytime I open facebook or my email there’s more news, more babies and more baby bump pictures than I can count.
Naturally, my mind turns to my own uterus and thinking about the potential of future motherhood.
I want children. Just eventually, not yet. I worry myself sometimes looking at mums and babies out in the real world and I don’t feel like I’ll ever be ready for growing and raising another little human being. It seems quite terrifying. And understandably life-altering.
But if not yet, then when? And what exactly am I waiting for?
I don’t feel any more grown up over the last few years, though I am in my mid-twenties. I don’t see a good enough grasp of simple household tasks and finances in myself that I’d feel safe adding more stress, mess, spending and worry on top of my not-as-well-organised-life-as-I’d-like. And I think about my career and the fact that I’d have to put any kind of training on hold to have a child, and then how on Earth could I manage work and a family.
Theory: We all expect to grow up and feel comfortable to a certain extent before consciously deciding to move on to the next level, and instead life just throws you into the deep end and expects that you totally went to those life-swimming-lessons that one time.
So instead of starting to dream about babies and buy their gorgeous tiny clothes, I’m doing the practical, perhaps slightly pessimistic, thing of starting to prepare. As in, I’m researching babies and pregnancy and raising children and troubleshooting issues like getting them to stay in bed all night and toilet training that works!
Maybe I did go insane.
Thought it was better than winding up unexpectedly in life’s deep end without any kind of advice, expectation or knowledge.
So I have an excel spreadsheet which I’m filling with all of the information the internet is throwing at me. Perhaps it would be better to get the ‘what to expect when you’re expecting’ book, but for one thing I think my poor boyfriend would freak out just a little if he saw that book, and for another, I did flick through it once at a book sale but didn’t see much useful child-raising information within the reflux, constipation and haemorrhoids section of the delights of pregnancy. Perhaps I’d flicked through the wrong part of the book, but as I wasn’t and still aren’t actually expecting anything yet, I thought I can save that one for the nesting stage.
I don’t think that I will have all of the answers when it actually comes time to have kids, but at least I’ll be somewhat prepared, I hope.
Pre-emptively nesting,
-Gigi
The Orist. 