Breeders!

Weird about being home again: all my old HS friends are still around, and that's cool, but now they've got their brood in tow... not cool.

I know that it's very common for women in their 20s and 30s to be breeding out the wazoo, but, wow, I really did not realize that it was expected of me to have some little larval creature cooing in my arms before I got my first gray hair. (In that case, I would have had to have had a baby before my 26th birthday, when my stepmother noticed a streak in my locks, pointed it out to me over my birthday cake and cackled.)

Here's how I feel about children, after 7 years in San Liberal, where also, breeders abound, but so do greeners: Not having a baby is the Greenest thing you can do. Think of all the diapers, the bottles, the nappies, the binkies, all the things that can't be recycled that come along for the ride, and anyone has to admit that there's a lot of stuff going into the ground that won't ever, ever lose its form and return to the earth.

So I stay righteous about my decision not to have children. But...

Then I see the happiness (and loving exhaustion) in their eyes and I wonder if I'm not missing out on something. Of course, not being married, or having a partner, having a child would be a little, shall we say, exotic at this point, if not plain stupid considering my salary at the moment. And the fact that I'm an unstable writer chick who can't even care for a pet fish! (Gotta go to Fish 'n Stuff and get a new one. I like having another consciousness around me, even if it is a simple Betta consciousness.)

But anyway, babies. I was raised to feel that I would be incomplete as a woman if I didn't have babies, and no matter how strongly I feel about not bearing any children from my own womb, I still feel its emptiness from time to time. Don't know what that's about.

So I'll enjoy everyone else's children, even though kids make me nervous as hell--what if they don't like me? What if I break the baby???" Dunno what that's about.

Maybe I should write a story about this choice I've made, and about being around people I love who have made the opposite choice.

Or maybe I should write about how, even though I'm here, back where they are, none of them choose to call me... at least not a lot.