Last night marks the first time a child was in our house. We had people over, and I emerged from the computer room after talking with guests to find a toddler in the living room, trotting back and forth from kitchen to living room.
I had my drink in my hand and I stopped dead in my tracks. I remember my first thought upon seeing this child - as if I was observing myself from the outside.
My thought was, “Where did that come from?”
My observation of myself was of some rich bitch in a museum-quality home, dressed in fashion blouse and slacks, standing horrified with drink curled in hand towards her chest at the sight of a small child having gained illegal admittance to her abode.
And that is when I realised (again) that I’ll not be having children anytime soon.
The visual reality is that our house is set up like a Halloween parlour and I was wearing my standard all-black clothing. I had on a black sweatshirt and jeans, and my fuzzy black slippers. It was the attitude that transformed me to the rich bitch.
I recovered quickly from my shock and turned to my aquaintance, exclaiming, “she’s gotten so big!” The last time I saw this child was on one, perhaps two occasions, when she was an infant. Prior to that, the child was still a large round protrusion from her mum’s belly. So being that I’ve only seen this child a couple or few times, I was in awe that she’d grown to a toddler seemingly so fast.
I find it very interesting that I seem to have little maternal desire, considering the fact that I was raised with a large extended Southern family. I was the pleasantly willful designated babysitter/entertainer at family functions for my literally dozens of cousins under the age of ten in the 1980’s when I was a young teen.
I played with dolls past the age of normal little girls, and dreamed of growing up to have a family of five children of my own. My mother is one of nine, and several of her siblings have on average four children of their own.
I took childcare courses in high school and worked with children in my junior and senior years. I then went on to college to study to be an elementary teacher. By my sophomore year of college, I went to work in a daycare full time, and spent five years as a toddler teacher.
Two things happened during that time. In 1990, I’d had an abortion after being impregnated against my immature/naive knowledge by a man who insisted at the time that he never came inside me. I had unprotected sex. I was stupid, I admit that readily. But he later admitted to an agenda of secrecy until I confronted him with the pregnancy. I saw how elated he was at the news of the pregnancy, and how devastated he was by my declaration that I’d abort. He told me at the clinic that he thought I’d have just gone with it and married him to have a baby once I found out I was pregnant. It’s what his other friends’ girlfriends had done, why was I being so difficult?
This man later tried to kill me after the abortion. I only escaped his basement and the aim of his shotgun because he let me. He later stalked me at college before finding another girl’s life to ruin.
But that was 1990. I was either in my first year of working at the daycare, or just about to start my career there. So that experience alone didn’t stop me from loving children, but I think, as I got months and years away from my abortion experience, I grew to really resent the idea of bearing a child, because I kept tying it to not being in control of my own body.
Then, the car accident happened in 1994. My personality changed drastically, as often happens in people with closed head injuries. I quit the daycare within a year of the accident, having grown very disgruntled with people and children. I had also “turned goth” as they say, and had begun wearing all black and dying my hair to match, to reflect my blackened attitude of the world. It was at this point in my life that children became known as “it”, and “thing”, and pregnancy became known as, courtesy of a friend, “sperm infection”.
I found myself wanting to vomit whenever I see pregnant women or pictures of fetal ultrasounds.
And this continues to be where I stand today on the whole subject.
Was it latent reaction to my knocking up?
Was it the car accident?
Was it both?
Does it matter so long as I know I have issues? 
Major props to my aquaintance, by the way. She kept her kid from getting to anything sentimentally valuable or deadly during the kid’s brief stay in our house. She’s got experience being in child-unfriendly abodes! Also to her and her husband’s credit, as well as the child’s, the kid was quiet and very well behaved. Had a screeching or bratty child been in my house, I’d not have been pleasant.
Which again is so weird for me, as I have experience working with toddlers and their various behavioural issues. All that patience and training, out the window by 1994.
