What’s up with this motherhood thing anyway?

When I was fresh out of college I moved to a town six hours from home where I knew no one. I was working my dream beginner job – as a reporter for a small newspaper. Moving to a new town afforded me the opportunity to reinvent my sorority-girl self. I decided I would be Heather Locklear in Melrose Place. Except I wasn’t that skinny, clever, or blond. And I was making almost no money, living in an apartment I couldn’t afford, spending all my income on clothes and learning important things in life like how to drink wine like a lady, how to juggle multiple credit cards, and how to pretend I knew what I was doing when, in fact, I was clueless.

And I grew up. A lot. This was also the time I looked at my future – realistically, for a change – and decided that a.) I wanted to be married – not immediately – but by the time I was 30, and b.) children would not be in the picture.

Let’s face it. The only time a soap opera was interesting was when there was sexual tension between two people so thick you could feel its furry edges. I mean, who cares if the Quartermane fortune was slipping away and Marlena was possessed by the devil? It was the love interest lacking in my own life but lived out on my small TV that pulled me into the show. The minute a character announced she was having a baby, I turned the channel. Booooring!

It was during one of those soap-opera-type-sexual-tension-moments-because-we’re-just-“friends”-and-besides-I’m-dating-another-man dinners with the guy I would eventually marry (just three months before my 30th birthday, I might add) that my mind changed. As I sat across the booth from my future husband and listened to him say that, despite a horrible and, thankfully, failed engagement, he still wanted to be married one day and have children and live the practical life. And just like that, I changed my mind. I wanted it too. I wanted it with him.

We were married, like, 5 seconds later and after thoroughly enjoying a few years of the DINK lifestyle my biological clock started dinging every hour on the hour. The very first moment we tried, I was pregnant. Fourteen months later (I’ll explain that on another day), I became a mother.

Parents have alluded to it before – that crazy, paralyzing love thing that blooms inside you once you recover from the birthing drugs and get over feeling that you’re going to drop that helpless bag of skin and bones. It is more intoxicating than any spirit I’ve consumed. Children are like delicate Faberge eggs. When given one, it’s like you are ingrained to balance him on the end of a plastic spoon. Your job is to get to the finish line without causing harm or irrevocable damage to the tiny orb. The kicker is that you deeply care about that egg, about transporting it safely to wherever it must go, careful not to damage its flawless enamel or delicate jeweling. It sits there helpless on the end of your spoon, bouncing and bobbing as you take each step. It is completely dependant on you and, suddenly, your life has become so completely dependant on it that you are afraid to even breathe for fear of causing it harm. To not have children is to not know this painfully crippling kind of love. But it does not make you any less human not to experience it.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like, remaining childless and enjoying the freedom that comes with it – fancy dinners out on Tuesday nights, sleeping in on Saturday mornings, watching what I want on TV for a change. And then I look at my precious little boy curled up with his favorite stuffed kitty and I truly am thankful that on that cool night in a restaurant so many years ago that I let the flutter in my heart brighten the darkened doorway of my mind.