Baby Talk

I can see how people get those wild eyes.  The “obtain a baby at any cost” eyes.  I think it’s easy to do when you get fixated on anything.   Like the one time (okay…multiple times) I knew there were doughnuts in the building but that I wasn’t having any.  Those kind of wild eyes.

We recently watched friends of ours go through wild eyes.  It’s a like a disease isn’t it?   Suddenly, they had an inward focus, almost as if they curled in on themselves and the tiny seed of hope that a baby might be born.  This only cemented my fear that our best friends would soon be no friends, gone the way of several mommies before them, sucking so closely and protectively together that the air would be squeezed out of our friendship.  Two weeks ago, I would have blamed this on baby mania and the inability to focus on anything but having a baby right. now. dammit. but all of a sudden, I can see how the slow inward curl is less like a vaccum and more like cinnamon.  As the bark dries, the curl gets tighter and the heady scent overwhelms everything else.  It might be a good thing.  A getting ready thing.

Without even visiting the doctor, we’re suddenly immersed in baby conversation. Perhaps it’s baby talk lite, after all, we still agree that the abbreviation TTC is too much and that that small child shrieking through the restaurant was reason number 7002 not to bring another kid into the world.  No, we are not cooing over every cherubic gerber tot in our proximity.  But we are talking about donors, and open v. anonymous donation, and baby daddies, and hospitals, parental rights and lawyers.  The magnitude of what could legally happen sometimes paralyzes me, at least when I’m not being paralyzed by well, everything else.

It’s fun to talk about having a child.  It’s not necessarily a new thing for us – even when we didn’t want a kid we talked frequently about how we would or wouldn’t be as parents (perhaps we were delusional?)  As much as I enjoy talking about the what-ifs, I feel a touch hypocritical since all I’ve done for two years is lay out reasons not to have a child.  I’m trying to get over the righteousness – people change, right? – and embrace what’s going on for what it is.  A mild case of baby fever.