Whats the Technical Name for This?

Wednesday, August 30, 2006
I always thought that it was an adult only domain, because lets face it, its really something only adults would (or ought that read should?) consider. Something that only people with rapidly ticking body clocks that sound as loud as the exploding firecrackers used by train line workers hoping to avoid being mowed down by fast moving trains could discern. I believed this theory because I had only ever known adults – women – who felt this urgency. This longing for, this overwhelming desire and very real need for a baby before the internal mechanisms shut down permanently. My thinking is altering.

As any woman who has been hit with the overpowering desire to procreate knows, every public place is a mine field of yearning filled with babies exuding that oh so fleeting fragrance of heaven that they can truly call their own. Women, like ripe fruit swollen with hidden precious sweetness of newborn hope waiting to be welcomed to the light are always within visual range, smiling because they know they hold the secrets of the universe within. Television and magazine advertisements feature chubby babies’ cherub of face and form creating yet another layer of futile resistance to imaginings and do nothing to stop the very real physical pain inside the reproductive system.

The sight of the baby section in a department store becomes the secret fairyland of dreams where admission is a gently clasped hand held over a belly in loving protectiveness. Magazines will have page after page of ideas for a bare room to be turned into a much needed nursery that sighs with longing to be decorated. Badly acted soap operas have a seemingly endless supplies of scrawny teenage actresses in storylines that routinely show them unhappily finding out they are pregnant and rejecting the offspring supposedly created miraculously within their body.

Admission to the secret society of motherhood requires at the very least a cursory role of a man. And for the single woman, it’s the deal breaker of acceptance. Because for a single woman, there is no way to get past the road block, as physical reality dictates that to create a child you need semen, which, as luck would have it, involves a man. No amount of wishful thinking can get past this reality. So what is the single woman dreaming of parenthood to do? Get drunk enough to ignore personal moral standards, go to a night club and take her chances with a stranger? Try to overcome the many legal obstacles that stand between her and artificial insemination? Or ignore the repeated callings to motherhood and find other distractions?

And what do you do as a possible (probable?), soon to be single woman when your 18 month old daughter starts to point out every baby smaller than herself to you? And how do you deal with her when she becomes ever more urgent in her efforts of gaining attention and praise for pointing out a different baby? How do you ignore the constant clamouring of your heart and body when your own child is making you more fully aware of the very thing you are desperately trying to ignore? And could I technically get away with saying that my Baby has Baby Fever, and that its not me looking at every baby with what could be described as baby lust?