Babies smell.
I'm twenty four years old and I've been married for three and a half years. I have one husband, one dog, one cat, three guppies and an eel and we all live in an apartment in Indiana. I have two jobs. Neither one pays me anything close to "enough". I have no children. There are several reasons for this:
I may be twenty four, but I have all the emotional characteristics of a twelve year old 75% of the time.
I have crazy, week-long, incapacitating panic attacks
I have obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Rituals. Mind games. If you don't rip that post-it into exactly five pieces, something terrible will happen to you. Are you SURE you ripped it into FIVE pieces? Better dig through the trash and make sure. Wait. Dump it out. What if there's six? Jesusgod, what are you going to do?
I take medication for above facts. An every-day normalization pill and the occasional the-world-is-beautiful-let's-frolic-through-fields-of-daisies horse tranquilizer.
My husband will be thirty in April. His brother just had the family's first baby. Tony's been crying since fucking Friday. Isn't he beautiful. Isn't he wonderful. I can't believe how small he is. Oh look, Ralph, you made that. Oh, he sneezed. He blinked. He crapped himself. How lovely. Everyone has babies up here. Everywhere we go, Tony's got somebody's baby in his arms and he's rocking it and smiling like he just won the fucking lottery and he says things like 'I can't wait until my baby cries.' and 'I can't wait for my kids to grow up with my brother's and sister's kids. All together'.
Except. WAIT. HOLD ON.
He asks about hospitals. He asks for recommendations. I growl that I'm NOT having a baby in Canada where my mom ISN'T. I am going to have one where she IS. IF I have one at all. He says he's "making small talk". So. Every time he makes small talk it's like a hot knife in my chest. Knocks the breath out of me. I feel like I am in a constant state of having to choose between my mother [subsequently my home, my family, my peace of mind] and Canada [Tony's family, dirty hospitals, more immigration proceedings and very possibly more Total Emotional Shutdowns]. He gives me these long, searching looks and it makes me want to run into traffic - I'm miserable because I know I can put off the inevitable for a while longer, but sooner or later I'm going to have to come up with a Final Decision.
I want to go to one of those old Sanitariums in the mountains where you just sit in a rocking chair on the porch with a plaid blanket in your lap all day. And I want to take my tranquilizers.
My husband will be thirty in April. His brother just had the family's first baby. Tony's been crying since fucking Friday. Isn't he beautiful. Isn't he wonderful. I can't believe how small he is. Oh look, Ralph, you made that. Oh, he sneezed. He blinked. He crapped himself. How lovely. Everyone has babies up here. Everywhere we go, Tony's got somebody's baby in his arms and he's rocking it and smiling like he just won the fucking lottery and he says things like 'I can't wait until my baby cries.' and 'I can't wait for my kids to grow up with my brother's and sister's kids. All together'.
Except. WAIT. HOLD ON.
He asks about hospitals. He asks for recommendations. I growl that I'm NOT having a baby in Canada where my mom ISN'T. I am going to have one where she IS. IF I have one at all. He says he's "making small talk". So. Every time he makes small talk it's like a hot knife in my chest. Knocks the breath out of me. I feel like I am in a constant state of having to choose between my mother [subsequently my home, my family, my peace of mind] and Canada [Tony's family, dirty hospitals, more immigration proceedings and very possibly more Total Emotional Shutdowns]. He gives me these long, searching looks and it makes me want to run into traffic - I'm miserable because I know I can put off the inevitable for a while longer, but sooner or later I'm going to have to come up with a Final Decision.
I want to go to one of those old Sanitariums in the mountains where you just sit in a rocking chair on the porch with a plaid blanket in your lap all day. And I want to take my tranquilizers.
posted by inveil | 8:41 PM
2 Comments:
Even though I am a nice man, when babies cry, I want to kill them. I intend to have cats one day. Not kids. If I ever had I kid, it wouldn't make it to its fifth birthday, because I would kill it. I was watching the news the other week, and there was a report on Shaken baby Syndrome, where parents shake their babies to get them to stop crying, causing their little brains to bump around in their still un-fused skulls, and causing them to have either brain damage or to die, and I thought to myself, that's what I would do.
So no kids for me.
Seriously, you don't need to do anything just to make him happy. If you aren't 100% sure you want one, don't even go there.
Post a Comment
<< Home