The other night I received a call from my best friend, a girl I've known since the eighth grade. She and her husband have been contemplating having a baby and have gone so far as to stop taking birth control to "see what happens."
A while back, when I heard the news about them actively trying to conceive, I was terribly supportive and lectured them for about an hour about how they were too young and too poor. Additionally, I threw in a few arguments about them needing to travel to Europe and "go out to dinner more often."
And you know, I wasn't projecting at all.
Of course, all my other arguments make me sound like I hate children. "If you have more than one, do you think you'll like them equally?" or "When you see kids in public, do you actually want one?" or "Don't some kids just look like total jackasses?" or the classic "Doesn't having a baby seem very alien-podlike to you?"
The truth is, I don't hate children -- I just have no experience with them 1.
My friends have always been afraid of my judgmental side -- that's part of the reason I never expect anyone to tell me what's going on in their lives. I half expect my best friend to call up one day and say "Hey, guess what? We had a baby...and, well, he just graduated from high school!"
And that's the call, or at least the pregnant variation, I was expecting.
Instead, my friend told me that some of her blood tests came back with an elevated level of prolactin2. This means that she may have a tumor on her pituitary gland and will need to take medication to become fertile again. According to some online resources, this condition doesn't seem extremely serious but it's certainly not something you want your best friend to go through. The thought that there may be a tumor in, on, or near your brain is scary in itself.
(I did tried to reassure her that at least the tumor isn't causing Acromegaly, the condition that causes giganticism; I had seen a documentary on the disease a couple nights before she called and was now a veritable M.D.)
It's really amazing how my priorities changed once I realized that my friend couldn't have a baby. In a instant, I forgot all about Europe and dinners and money and considered all the ways to fix the problem and get her popping out babies.
One of the reasons they were starting early was because they were worried she'd have problems getting pregnant or carrying the baby. Her husband has like seventeen sisters and a good number of them have had problems with their pregnancies. And, since they want four or five children, they figured they should start sooner rather than later.
Lately, I've begun worrying about the sooner rather than later situation.
Ben and I always thought that twenty-seven was a good age to have a baby. Ben's mom was twenty-seven when she had him and that age always seemed perfect. At seventeen, when we started dating, twenty-seven was a lifetime away. Now, it's like tomorrow. And we're not ready at all. Next week, we'll be celebrating our three-year wedding anniversary and next February we'll have been together for eight years. All those years and, mentally, we still feel like kids.
I mean, one of the reasons we want to have a kid is so that we can take it to Disneyland and vicariously enjoy the park through our child's eyes. That's a pretty screwed up reason to have a baby.
And, I worry that at twenty-seven or eight or nine, I'll just be as neurotic as I am now -- someone who's quite capable of raising a neurotic child of her own.
Take this letter I found a couple months ago at my grandparents' house -- what the hell was going through my mind when I wrote this (at age ten)?
Yeah, it was a joke and all, but still.
I can only imagine the day when my own child will slip this in the family mailbox and expect hijinks to ensue.
Oh, the anticipation.
1 Adventures in Babysitting
Once, at a wedding, I was put in charge of a hotel room filled with about seven or eight children. I was fifteen or sixteen and had no experience as a babysitter. Some parent (a complete flake, if you ask me), left an infant in my care. When the baby wouldn't stop crying, I eventually realized that I needed to change its diaper. Based on absolutely no experience with poop and diapers, I just sort of put the baby's butt under running water and dried it with a paper towel -- all the while I was gagging uncontrollably.
My second experience babysitting, I took three kids to a a creek bed to play and inadvertently dragged them through an area covered in some sort of animal shit. When I brought them back to their parents, they were covered in the stuff and crying.
Finally, at the age of 13, I made my best friend's four year-old sister cry by telling her an infinite loop sort of joke. It went like this: Pete and Repeat were swimming and Pete drowned. Who was left. "Repeat" Pete and Repeat were swimming and Pete drowned...
2 If anyone is familiar with this condition and may be able to share a personal story, please let me know through email. I want to reassure my friend that everything will work out.
