Truthily

I don't know if it's the sudden deluge of family time I've had lately, or the fact that I'm rapidly sliding towards my dreaded late-twenties, but I've been thinking a lot about kids.

I don't like them. This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, really. I've said it before. Unless I'm related to them, I do not care for children. They're loud, they smell wierd, excrete unspeakable things, you can't even try to reason with them, they hardly do what they're told, and they have trains of thought that are just mind-boggling. They're completely foreign to me, and always have been. But it seems like everywhere I turn, they're popping out left right and center.

There hasn't necessarily been a lot of pressure to have one from the family, which is nice, but it also means that whatever pressure is there exists more in my head than anything. Really, brain? You're really going to add this to the seemingly endless list of 'To-dos' plodding around up there? Where exactly should 'Kids' be listed? Before or after 'Buying a bedroom set that A) matches and B) isn't made of compressed woodchips'? Before or after 'Plump up the savings account for a house we'll never get a mortgage for'? Before or after 'Drop that last 10 20 30 pounds so I'll stop feeling like a beached landwhale every time I leave the apartment'? Is it really a good idea to bring an entirely separate entity that would completely depend on my deplorable parenting skills?

Then there's the other side. There's a large community of 'Mommy bloggers' out there who document the everyday trials and joys of having children. I'll admit to having read them, and while it shows the (sometimes very) bad with the good, part of my brain just keeps saying 'Well, if it were you it'd be different. It wouldn't be hard at all'. That part of my brain is about to get lobotomized with a grapefruit spoon, if I'm going to be truthy here. It's the part that starts showing me pictures of the perfect house where somehow, we've managed to work it so I can be a stay-at-home mom to perfectly behaved children that have nevertheless inhereted my vocabulary and my husband's tongue, who get straight A's and are popular without being Popular (there's a difference there, y'know.) That just couldn't happen. Or wouldn't.

I don't know what's right or not. Is it selfish to not want to hop on the baby wagon? Is it selfish to want to wait until we could give them everything they deserve?