Babies

     Aside from the cookie-cutter, Now-I-Lay-Me-Down-To-Sleep prayer, the first prayer I ever remember praying on a regular basis as a little girl was that I would never be able to have children.  I can remember lying in bed at night, on several nights, and pleading with God to make my insides not work correctly, so that I’d never be able to get pregnant.  Who prays things like that, and especially at 12 years old?

     I suppose, in part, I was afraid to actually be pregnant.  On some level, pregnant women have always made me uncomfortable; the normal female body should notlook like that, and my twelve year old self thought this even more than I do now.  Also, at twelve years old the thought of what needed to take place in order for me to actually become pregnant completely and totally grossed me out… Ew.  Plus, if I had kids I’d need to be married, I thought, and I had definitely decided that I’d never have a boyfriend, let alone get married. 

     Now, as silly as it seems, I’m still afraid to have children for most of those same reasons.  Additionally, however, I’m also terrified that I’ll somehow screw my kids up.  Like whatever it is that is bad inside of me will be automatically passed along to my children, or that I will be an ineffective parent, or that I will expect my children to be absolutely perfect and not love them enough.  Or that I will love them too much, and hurt them that way. 

     I now want to have kids.  Someday I want to be married and have scads of them.  Well, maybe not scadsof them (what’s a ’scad’ anyway?)… but three or four might be nice.  When I am spending time with Christian and McKenna, singing songs and making up stories, I am so happy; having the opportunity to shape a little person’s life must be so rewarding, and I can’t imagine what that must be like.  How do I know that I’ll shape them correctly, though?  How do I know that I won’t end up just like my mother or father?  No matter how hard you try, they say, you always end up at least a little like your parents.  Do you get to pick which parts?

     It doesn’t make sense for me to be thinking about this right now; I’m still in college and no where near ready to get married and start a family.  The issue of having babies is just something I’ve been mulling over for a while now, and thought that if I wrote it out I might figure it out my feelings more easily.  Someday, when I’m married, I don’t want to have to work through my fears of having kids; I want to have already worked through all that.  Although, thinking about it now and re-reading all this, I think that I’m really just afraid of turning into a hybrid of my mom and dad.