Sometimes I Think, “I Need One of These” — or, a fundamentally broken thing

There are days, weeks really, when I argue with myself. As I get older, I feel more and more that time isn’t going to wait for me. I wonder at the futility and beauty of life, and I spend a great deal of my own in fear.

Tonight, this is my diary. I didn’t know what it would be before I wrote it.

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Sometimes I think about having a baby, and then I think about the literal death in the air. I think about how I don’t know that the literal death in the air will ever be reduced in any meaningful way and about how humanity has destroyed the planet. I think about how much I want to experience pregnancy and raising a child, and I fret about how I struggle to lift things that are more than 15 pounds and even then sometimes *unpleasant leg tingles.*

I think about how pregnancy may have lingering consequences or cause lasting pain, but I also remember how deeply I felt it in my soul four years ago when I looked at one of my little students and knew, “I need one of these.” Someday.

There aren’t words to describe the warmth of the feeling that hit me. There will never be a way for me to explain it if you haven’t felt it on your own.

I wonder if I am selfish to ever want this, with the world burning the way that it is and no safety net in sight. I wonder if I’m mistaken and I, too, would end up miserable and overwhelmed in the way I do often find myself over things like touching laundry and door handles. I wonder if my genetics are too broken to pass down, and I think of my father’s name, and how badly my parents want this for or from me.

I consider that for all my faults, I know how to love with everything I am. I imagine a child with my eyes and my husbands smile, my ears and his nose. I imagine the anticipation, the longing, the terror, the joy.

I consider that I truly cannot function without a solid nine hours of sleep.

I think about how my husband and I are both regularly overwhelmed and the responsibility of children makes us terribly fearful. I think of how I do not want to share. I think about how our parents had babies in their teens and early twenties, and we are not those people.

I think about how confident I am this man of mine would be an excellent father, and I imagine—not loving him more—but finding a new way to love him, too, when he holds our child in his arms.

I fear no longer being his most important person, his favorite. I realize that his love for another person takes nothing away from me and there will always be more when we need it. I remember that we are one, a team now and long after any babies move away. I may need reminding, because I am a fundamentally broken thing.

I am, I realize again, a fundamentally broken thing. I am a broken thing, more broken than many people know, more broken that I can explain.

I worry about he, and me, and us, and we, and I think—I know—I am too selfish.

I am in fact so selfish, sometimes I think I want this.