Day Thirty Six: Clock

I have no biological clock.

Most women hit twenty five and have an irrepressible urge to have children. Me, not going to happen. I can already tell you that. I’m not trying to say that wanting to have children is a bad thing; I just don’t have that urge. I don’t think babies are cute, I don’t want to clean up their adorable little messes I don’t want to do the goo-goo-ga-ga crap for the first year of their lives. I’m not a baby kind of woman.

The reason I like this about myself is that it makes me feel like I’m in control. I know a lot of women who hit my age and had this aggressive biological need to produce offspring. Someday, I might actually want kids, but it will be on my time and on my terms. It won’t be because my uterus is screaming at me to get a family started.

As a female in this society, I’ve been raised to think that I have some kind of moral imperative to become a mother. As a child, it was all “you can be anything you want. You can be a doctor or a lawyer.” But the unspoken subtext was that I could be a doctor/lawyer and a mother. Boys don’t get that pressure. When I tell people I don’t really want kids or mention that I might not want them for another several years, I get the “WTF, are you even a woman?” look.

There are some women in the world who are fabulous or going to be fabulous mothers. I love that. The world needs more good moms, so good on them. I am not ready to be a mother by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t want to be a mother, not for a long time if ever. When I’m ready, I’ll have kids. But no societal construct, no raging hormone is going to decide for me.

Babies are ugly anyway.

Challenge to my Readers:

Do your part to stamp out gender stereotypes. Don’t just buy a baby-doll for your little girl, get one for your son too. Get her a Tonka truck to driver her Barbies around in. Screw getting her a pony, go out and teach her how to ride a horse.