Boys and Girls, Men and Women

This year I will become an aunt. Any day now my sister-in-law is supposed to give birth. A few days ago I received news from Romania that my best friend's sister has just had a baby girl. My neighbor is pregnant. And another friend who lives in Oregon is due to have a baby in October. I know that every day hundreds of babies are born. But there have never been so many that I was aware of, or connected to. It gives me the feeling some women get when they watch all their best friends get married without getting married themselves. You watch a certain kind of life pass by you, and though you've made a conscious choice not to live it, you feel a little bit of sadness, a slight sense of loss. I don't want to have children. Husband and I made this decision together, rationally. And yet the biological instinct is so deep and so powerful that there are times when I want to chuck rationality out the window and just hold a baby, my own baby, in my arms.

I wouldn't make a good mother. I would be too emotional, I would worry too much about trivial things, I would have a very hard time giving my child enough space to grow, the freedom to make his own mistakes. And I'm still so confused about so many things, there are still so many questions about the world that I can't figure out the answers to, that I don't feel qualified to be responsible for another person, to guide him through the first part of his life. What scares me the most about having children is not the dirty diapers and the sleepless nights, but how to teach another human being what's right and wrong, how to watch another human being figure out how to be happy and live a meaningful life and fall down and hurt himself in the process. What if I have a child who happens not to like books and readings? Or who doesn't want to go to college? How will I be able to love him without stifling him -- generously enough to support him whatever choices he makes?

I worry a little bit about the baby my Oregon friend is going to have in October. I can't imagine her being a mother, a good mother. She's not easy to get along with. She's a free spirit but moody, self-centered, stubborn. Or used to be like that. She may have changed. But if she hasn't, it troubles me that she's having a baby; I doubt that she's prepared for it. I was relieved when I heard that the baby is a boy. I caught myself thinking that a boy can withstand a not-so-good mother much better than a girl. (I remember reading an article that argued that boys who begin their sexual lives too early are not as traumatized by it as girls are, and being horrified that the writer had made such a sexist distinction.) I wonder sometimes how my parents' children would have turned out if they had been boys instead of being me and my sister.

I stare at babies in car seats and strollers, I watch young children splashing around at the pool and chasing each other in the park with beaming earnest pink faces. Their joy and freshness is irresistible. I try to remind myself that all of them grow up in the end and become adults who have to figure out that impossible question about the meaning of life. And I can't help being sad for them.