The biological clock …

With less than a month until my son’s birthday, the party countdown has officially begun! And yes, I do realize that the rest of the world doesn’t share my (perhaps overzealous) enthusiasm for Steele’s birthday. During the month leading up to my (new) favorite day of the year, I plan to make a few posts briefly detailing his life so far. To start his story, you have to go back about eight years before he was born and you must accept the fact that the mythical biological clock is real and that it is a very powerful thing. For those of you that have not personally experienced this phenomenon, you may not believe that the biological clock exists. I know I didn’t. You would be wrong.

Oddly enough, my son’s birth started about 8 years before he was born, with a guy he will probably never meet. It was late 2001 and I was dating a single father of a nine month old baby. The relationship was short lived, but the effects would be very long lasting. Apparently females are hardwired to rear young and once my body got a whiff of motherhood, it was hooked. So as I mentioned, the relationship didn’t last very long and just a few months after the relationship began, I got dumped. Had it not been for the baby, I would have been over it pretty quickly, but losing that baby was very rough. It was made that much harder because that little bugger had activated the dreaded “biological clock”.

So here is my experience with what is commonly referred to as the biological clock. Prior to the aforementioned relationship, I had absolute zero interest in having a child of my own. In fact, I actually had nightmares about having children. The dreams where I ended up having a baby were always the dreams that really scared me and kept me up at night. I didn’t hate children. I just had absolutely no desire to be responsible for one. Also, I really didn’t want one of those overly large parasites kicking around my internal organs for nine months. Then I got to spend some quality time with a cute little baby. Suddenly I was dreaming of having my own baby. And these were actually good dreams! In the span of a couple of months I went from being completely terrified of being a parent to being absolutely determined to be a parent. I can’t say I ever got over my desire not to host a really large parasite for nine months of my life, but I was willing to make that sacrifice if it got me what I wanted.

Now that my biological clock had been turned on, being a mother was what I wanted more than anything else in the world. Mother’s day was suddenly a depressing holiday because I wasn’t a mother. It seemed (to me) that not a day went by that NPR didn’t run a story about the rise in infertility, especially in older mothers. I was suddenly convinced that I would never be able to bear children. After all, I wasn’t getting any younger. And hadn’t I watched several friends suffer with infertility. So I was single, aging fast and it was going to take me years to get pregnant. Now I was completely stressed out and all because of a biological phenomenon I previously didn’t even believe in.

In the end, it turned out that all that worrying was really unnecessary. I was very lucky, and apparently very fertile. My “advanced age” didn’t hinder my ability to get pregnant. I always find it interesting how seemingly small things can have such a large impact on your life. The brief fling I had in the fall of 2001 has had very little effect on my life, but the brief encounter I had with motherhood as a result of that fling completely changed my focus in life.

Up next: the dreaded pregnancy and how it was both more awful and not as bad as I had imagined.