Baby fever
Authored by: modbean I never thought I wanted to have kids. In high school I didn't understand the girls who wanted nothing more than to be a mother. I liked kids and did my fair share of babysitting, but the thought of having children scared me-the way the idea of being in prison scares me.

I turned 28 this year, and for the first time I fantasize about having a baby. It's not just a passing thought, like, "Oh, I think I'd like to have kids sometime." It's a deep, tingling desire to have a swollen belly, to feel a tiny thing kicking inside me. I try to push the thought away, to tell myself that now is not the time. I'm not financially stable. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I'm not even married. But the thought comes back again and again, and I can't turn it off. It catches me off-guard. I find myself thinking about it as I'm driving, as I'm washing my hair, when I chop carrots for a salad. Would I know immediately if I became pregnant? I read somewhere, or someone told me when I was younger (we always talked about these things when we were teenagers: what pregnancy would feel like, what you would do, when would you know) that some women know right away. Some deep nerve twitches when the sperm takes root in the egg. I've also heard about women who didn't know they were pregnant until it was too late to have an abortion. My grandmother didn't know my mother was growing inside her until she had an appendectomy. The doctors opened Nana up and found my tiny mother curled up in her womb.

Last night J and I were standing in the beer aisle at Safeway. I was a little tipsy from the Negra Modelo I'd had with my burrito. Till that moment, the baby thoughts had twisted in a secret, dark place inside me. I willfully pushed them away. But alcohol opens my mouth and pushes things out without my consent. I don't look at J when I tell him that I've been thinking lately, and often, of having a baby. That for the first time I really, really want to have a child. He doesn't say that he wants to have kids with me, but he doesn't freak out either. I feel him freeze, and I think he must be choosing his words carefully. I am quick to make light of what I've just said.

"The power of hormones," I laugh and lean into his arm. "Those chemicals are such dictators."

"I'm not ready for a baby," he says simply.

"Oh of course not," I say, "I'm not either. No way. It's just the hormones talking."

Then I think of my sister, how she seems so content being a mom, and I feel a twinge of jealousy. I think of that small chest implosion that happens when you love something so much you don't know what to do with the emotion. It sits inside you like a hot stone. I know this (the jealousy, the desire itself) glosses over many, many realities, and if I really stop to think about everything that's involved in giving birth to, and raising, a child then I know I'm not ready. But the little voice is still there-the one that's been telling me how amazing it would be to have a baby, how nice it would be to be a young mother-and asks me to list the important things that have happened in my life and then separate the ones I've been ready for. You can't plan for everything, I think.

I am quiet for a minute, and then I point to a six-pack of Black Butte Porter that's on sale. We talk about whether we should get a bottle of wine instead and do we want a chocolate bar to share? Later, after we've talked about everything but what I said in the grocery store, I pop my birth control pill out of its little blue plastic pack and swallow it down. There is 1 comment