Baby Wait

I told myself that I wouldn't get anxious about it.  I said I wasn't going to worry about it.  I said I wouldn't get sad about it.

You just have to relax.  It can take a normal, healthy couple up to a year to conceive.  You have nothing to worry about.  It'll happen when it's supposed to.  It's going to happen before you know it, really soon, just you wait.

There is a dichotomy: My rational, thinking mind, which rationally knows certain things vs. The rest of my feeling, emotional self which doesn't really care what I know.

There are layers: The confident, unbothered me who has nothing to worry about and is focused on my stuff and sailing along, the me who belies the previous me and gets anxious because it hasn't happened yet, the me who gets annoyed at that previous me for getting anxious, the me who feels sad because maybe the fact that it hasn't happened yet means that in the cosmic scheme of things, we're not truly ready for it to happen and because maybe I'm just naive and have no idea what I'm wanting to get myself into, the me who gets angry at the sad me because I told myself I wasn't going to get sad about it and I'm making such a big deal out of nothing, and lastly, the me who gets annoyed with the angry me who got mad at the sad me because I'm human and need to stop beating up on myself...

All these layers and metalayers are so exhausting and just reading back over the previous paragraph is an additional waste of time to the waste of time that it was to even write it in the first place.  It's like, in the end, the whole expense of mental energy is so laughably unnecessary because the fact that existed before the expense of mental energy is the fact which still remains: I have no control over when it happens.

Like, why do you even want to have a baby?  Because you're afraid you're getting old?  Because all of your friends have them (at this rate, my friends' babies would be my hypothetical baby's babysitters rather than playmates)?  Because it seems like the next logical step?  Because you have a primal instinct to reproduce?  Because you feel it will validate you as an adult and a woman?  Because on some level you're the same parent-pleasing girl you always were and you want to make them happy by producing a golden grandchild?  Because you wonder what a mashup of you and your husband would look like?  Because you think your kid will be some kind of magical, multiracial, multilingual, brilliant being possessed of an otherworldly beauty?  Smh.  Weirdo.

It's almost like I'm afraid to even want to have a baby.  Isn't that ridiculous?  Like, what is embarrassing about wanting to have a child?

I just had an epiphany.  Baby is the new husband.  Wow.

Like, the way I used to obsess over not wanting to be obsessed with getting married?  It's just transmogrified into obsessing over not wanting to be obsessed with having a baby.

It never ends, does it?

I wish I could get into a time machine, travel back to the year 2000 right before I graduated from high school and give my 18-year-old self a bit of fair warning: It never ends.