I don't think I have ever experienced what some women call "baby hunger". I like children, I want to have a few some day and I love playing with the ones that belong to other people but I don't think much about them in my day to day life. For the most part, my life doesn't put me around kids much. I work with adults, I live with adults, until recently I went to church exclusively with adults. I have no nieces or nephews and all of my close friends with kids live far away.
Given my situation, I'm a little fascinated by a couple of experiences I've had over the last few days. Saturday my roommate and I went up to Moorpark to visit our friends and their four week old little girl. It's always fun to hold babies but I honestly couldn't let the child go. When Mariellen wanted a turn I was almost bugged. She had been sleeping on me for the better part of an hour, which is way longer than I usually want to do anything, and I still wasn't ready to give her up. The whole rest of the evening I was just plotting how I could get her back, I even took her while she was crying during dinner-playing it off that I was giving her parents a break.
Then yesterday, my friend Rebecca was in town for a family party. I went with her to a rehearsal for the musical number she and her sisters were performing and one of them had her one year old with her. When the girls started practicing the only baby holding choices were me, two husbands and a couple little cousins under 10. So I took the baby. This child was a snuggler and she immediately burrowed her little face into my shoulder. I melted. I had been holding her for about 15 minutes when her cousins realized she was there and suddenly they were desperate to play with her. I'm not proud of myself but I sort of pretended that the music was too loud and I couldn't hear them asking for her. Then when that didn't really work I tried to move across the room-I just couldn't let go. After a few minutes I realized what a jerk I was being and I put the kid on the couch between the girls. Then I watched like a hawk, hoping they would get tired of her. They didn't, the rehearsal ended and I headed home terribly disappointed at the brevity of my baby-holding time.
I am nowhere near close to having kids. There is no one in my life I'm remotely interested in having kids WITH. But I cannot shake the feeling that even if my brain is not there yet, something in my physical self is saying "come ON, let's just do this already!" I already have a pretty healthy appreciation of the body and the fantastic things it is capable of-there is something extra awesome about it's ability to hijack my brain.
So don't worry, I'm not going to go "Raising Arizona" and steal a baby or anything. But I guess I won't roll my eyes about that "biological clock" anymore. I'm pretty sure it's real. Girl bodies want to make babies whether the owner is on board or not. Who knew?
15 comments:
Next time you're in Vegas you can come over and hold our baby all you want.
~b
I'm really glad that you're recent experiences with children have been good. My sister told me she wanted to wait to have kids for a really long time after I stayed at her house for five days with my my 8 month old. Not something you want to hear.
careful brandi, that's the kind of talk that will spark a road trip.
to be fair cristin, i've been with kids that were tired and well fed so...i imagine spending a night or two might have an opposite effect-biology be damned.
This is sweet.
Do guys get this at all? Because the last time I was with my nieces and nephews, I had it bad.
Yes, road trip to Vegas!
But yeah, I've had similar feelings regarding kids over the last couple of years. Who knew?
Yeah, me too. I don't understand it.
It seems our ward has figured out the trick to inspire single adults to get hitched. They stopped bugging us about marriage and just marched the entire primary of someone else's ward into our chapel and had the kids sing (loudly) to us for an hour.
I am 93% certain every single person felt like an idiot for not getting one of those yet. That is one dirty trick, bishop. Dirty, dirty.
i didn't understand baby/kid hunger either until about a year ago. now i can't get enough of them! i def blame it on biology. granted, part of the appeal of playing with babies/kids that aren't mine is that i can give them back to their parents if they start to smell funny.
While I have always loved babies, I never had the baby hunger until I got married (all of 3 weeks ago). Suddenly I find myself hatching little schemes about me wrangling some part time work and being able to pay my student loan payments, while still being a mom.
Don't tell Jason about this, k?
It's real and it so that we don't run out of people. Plus, after producing and raising 6 Cliffords I can say that nothing is as fun, satisfying, frustrating and completely joyful as that. Nature makes that point at various times in life - often for no apparent reason. Sometimes because it's time to open your heart to it.ydazbk
re: "raising 6 Cliffords I can say that nothing is as fun, satisfying, frustrating and completely joyful as that."
Could not agree more.
Examples:
The fun: 5 year old making his Christmas list.
The satisfying: "Seeing" the older kids "grow up, grow wise" (some of the time anyway)
The frustrating: Having the 16 year old wreck my car and not his truck (no one hurt)
The completely joyful: too many to mention.
It's got to be something biological in women around the 30 year mark. The episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon accidently kidnaps someone else's baby and doesn't know how it happened- hit too close to home!
"If they start to smell funny," Cropper, you are a wiz!
I'll admit to some baby hunger quite a few years ago, but what's crazy is that I was completely anti-baby/kid about the time I got pregnant (Paisley was not planned). We were in a VERY large ward that had 6 nurserys, so sacrament meeting was nothing but chaos and screaming. So when we found out we would be contributing to this madness it was less than exciting. Now that I have her, though, the baby hunger has set in bad (I'm already getting excited for another one) - hormones are weird.
Come to Vegas K8 - we love visitors. We'll actually be in San Diego next week - not too far from you if you're up for a shorter road trip.
~b
Katie, you cannot be blamed -- we have observed that our little Kate elicits a particularly powerful pull when she falls asleep in your arms. You were helpless to resist.
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