When I was approaching my late thirties, a great realisation came over me. If I was going to have a baby, I really needed to start thinking about it sooner and not later. Other than a couple of isolated occasions, including once after great sex with a boyfriend, and for no particular reason for a minute or two when I was 31, I have never felt particularly maternal… at least compared to other women I knew. I can’t remember baby dolls ever being a major part of my childhood world, and if questioned in any of the first three decades of my life regarding aspirations, I really doubt babies or family would have rated a mention. I did like paper dolls and my Olympic Barbie, and at a rather late age acquired a Baby That-A-Way, but mostly due to Mattel’s unrelenting pre-Christmas TV marketing campaign and my interest in the mechanics of its crawling. Certainly more so than an opportunity to test out my mothering abilities. I left that to my sister who instead asked Santa for Baby Alive so she could feed it fake porridge and change its nappy when it worked its way through to the hole in its bum. This was really just an opportunity for the toy manufacturer to make money off the extra packets of fake porridge that I’m sure was just cornflour that you mixed with water. Anyway, I figured those missing in action maternal urges and instincts would just kick in sometime in my twenties or thirties. But alas, it never happened. I would certainly go all ga-ga over a new puppy or miscellaneous newborn animals, but not the human variety. As friends and family began to procreate, I did develop an interest and even a love for some of their offspring, but still didn’t particularly crave to have my very own.
But as I grew older, and that maternal clock started a tick tocking, I began a private poll amongst my friends and family that consisted of only one question… “Why did you have children?”. There were mixed answers, but I have to say most put their fingers to their lips, eyes skyward and came up with… “I’ll have to get back to you on that. I need to think about it.” The first few times I heard this, I decided it was mature of them to realise such an important question deserved considered thought. But when nobody got back to me, and the rest of the answers I considered pretty lame… “to carry on the family name”; “because I thought I had good genes to pass on”; “because that was the next stage – engaged, marriage, kids”; “because we loved each other and wanted to celebrate that love”. Shit, I can think of better ways to celebrate! So left with a huge, gaping hole in my justification for getting pregnant, I continued on with my life. I could actually think of some very practical reasons to have children, but most of them felt quite selfish. Like to fit in with my friends lives again because they were all having kids… to belong again. To have a lovely reason to go home more often to visit my family who lived interstate. To have someone love me unconditionally other than my Mum and Dad who would not be here forever. But when I really considered it, there was one main reason I decided to try to have children. I didn’t want to miss out. I have never wanted to miss out on anything. I was always the “It’s not fair!” kid. I would scream it down the hallway, in the supermarket, at the caravan park. If there was something to be had, I wanted to have it. And when I spent time with my friends who had children, I realised there was something truly wonderful about how they had grown from couples into families. They exuded a joy that I didn’t, and as always, I wanted a piece of that rich, light, joyful cake. They had somehow arrived at a happiness that I felt couldn’t be found anywhere else except by having babies. I wanted to relive my own happy childhood through my own children. So I jumped on the parenting bandwagon… and that’s where this story really begins.
