I had another baby last night.
I have babies on a regular basis. I’m pretty sure this is my fourth at least within the last year. I’m THAT prolific.
In my dreams, the babies are always boys. I have never had a girl baby. I doubt that it’s prophetic, but what it might actually say about my psyche is a mystery to me. While the physical sensations or being pregnant, or the baby nursing, feel very real (I never usually have physical sensation in dreams, only in these dreams do I feel) the plot is usually something ridiculously hilarious. Like, baby William leaps off the table and into his crib like a particularly spritely young gibbon. Or Perfect Husband insists on naming the baby Beau. Or I panic, thinking my baby is dead, only to realize that it is actually a Baby Think It Over doll whose batteries have died, leaving me with an embarassed feeling that I made all this fuss over something that was just a doll. Or I leave the baby on the back of a couch and it dies, and everyone thinks I’m being rather obsessive and quite boring when I just won’t let it go.
Last night was the next instalment in the Bizarre Baby saga. So, last night’s baby was delivered successfully (I usually lose consciousness during this part, reviving when it is over. Since I often do pass out when in pain, this isn’t all that surprising to those around me) and I even got him nursing with some help from my mother. But then, driving him home and looking at him (suddenly he was a robust 18 month old with freckles and a lumpy looking birthmark/tumour) I was struck by the fact that I had missed my whole pregnancy. I had been so focused on the stresses of my job, and getting the new house in order, that I had forgotten to enjoy and savour my pregnancy. I hadn’t eaten right. I hadn’t sung to the baby or played music for it while it kicked in response. I had just let the time get away from me, and now I had this baby who was clearly all freckled and tumorous because of my deficient prenatal attention, and I couldn’t do it over again. I felt rather disappointed by my baby. Clearly he would turn out to be mentally deficient because I had not given him the attention he deserved while still in the womb. Now I would be stuck with this mediocre baby that I hadn’t even really taken any notice of until he decided to be born. I considered revoking his name and replacing it with my second choice name, so that when I had another kid that I had constructed properly from the womb outwards, HE could have the “real” name.
… Maybe I shouldn’t have kids.
Is there any way to psychoanalyze this which doesn’t result in “you would be a terrible mother and are a generally bad person”?
