Despertar

maybe we just like to do it

Not a day--or hour, probably--goes by that I don't think about everything I might be giving up, all the time that's ticking away.

*

I would have liked to have a big family. When I was in fourth and fifth grade, my two best friends and I played this really elaborate, long-term (we're talking the full two years) role-playing game: we were careerwomen in our late twenties, married to faceless husbands, each of us with huge packs of kids. We were at that confused, obsessive age, so the name of the game was outdoing each other: Kelli's imaginary counterpart had six kids, so mine had six, too. I still remember their names--Marcell, Rachelle, Nathaniel, Taylor, Jacquelyn and Tyler. They were nine, six, three, eighteen months and twin infants, respectively. I remember that Taylor's birthday was April eighteenth. Kelli, Colby and I had a secret birthday party in the girls' bathroom at our elementary school.

Mid-fourth grade, Colby adopted seven-year-old Congolese triplets, which added another dimension to the game. I one-upped her by adding four kids--two boys, two girls, all babies--to my tribe. Kelli did the same. Then Kelli got pregnant, so we had to, too.

By the time it was over, the summer before sixth grade (when everything went all melodramatic and screwy, anyway, what with the bras and the boys and Kelli's precocious period), I had twenty-three kids, the oldest twelve years old, and forty-six honorary nieces and nephews. Birthday parties happened pretty much weekly, and schoolwork itself was an afterthought, even during school days. We found pictures of cute kids in magazines, cut them out and pasted them into scrapbooks procured just for that purpose.

By the time it was over, we agreed that, as actual adults, we would be no less fertile.

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I'm already twenty-three. I have two more years of law school, and I'd rather not try to raise kids while I'm still too poor to do right by them. Also, I'd like to be married, preferably to someone I like enough to go traveling with and whatnot before we start procreating. Assuming that means I'll have my first baby around thirty-one, eight years from now, I wonder, do I have time to have twenty-three kids? Do I have time for eighteen kids, or ten kids, or, more realistically, three kids? Do I even want three kids, when all the studies say that's a recipe for psychological disaster?

That Duggar woman was twenty-one when she had JimBob, or whatever that oldest one's name is. Since then, she's had an average of one baby every fourteen months or so, which is, and I say this with total judgment, completely ridiculous. There's no way she and her husband still enjoy sex when you could probably fit a toy poodle into her vagina; plus, she'll probably have a nervous breakdown when she hits menopause, which she probably won't till she's sixty. In the world outside of Religious Cultville, Nevada, that many kids in one family is just totally impractical.

So is it weird that I'm still kind of jealous of Michelle Duggar, who is, to her own mind, at least, which is really all that counts when it comes to internal peace, completely fulfilling her spiritual destiny by making baby after baby?

I mean, yes, yes it is. Eighteen kids is totally stupid. Inasmuch as I believe in God at all, or that evangelical Quiverful doctrine is the way to go, I don't believe His plan for any woman involves ongoing abuse of her own body and sanity. Michelle Duggar had a miscarriage after the first baby, which she attributes to her irregular use of birth control. Why can't we call it God's will that we exercise a little bit of self-restraint?

Blech. I just, whatever. I just want two, and I want them (reasonably) soon. If that's asking too much, I'm quitting law school.

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But, I mean, we do like to do it. I haven't ever had unprotected sex, but I can imagine it must be a powerful thing.

You got lucky this time. I don't have time to write about Justin/Chris.