I can't believe I'm blogging about this shit.

I play a game with myself every month. I call it "Am I Pregnant?" The rules are simple: I listen to the ticks and tocks of my body, pay special attention to how much alcohol I consume/how much I smoke, silently measure the pros/cons of my bullshit diet, remember to take my multivitamin each night (folic acid is important in early stage development!) and wonder if the last time we had special mommydaddy time if we may have inadvertently made ourselves a mommy and a daddy. This is the risk you take when you're of child-bearing years, uninterested in and/or unwilling to deal with the side-effects of hormonal birth-control (and similarly disinclined to other non-hormonal methods like condoms, spermicide or the rhythm method), and just as nonchalant about the concept of "accidentally" becoming knocked up. It sounds fucked up, doesn't it?

I don't know if I want to be a mother. I'm fascinated by the concept of becoming pregnant. At 30, I've never been pregnant. I was married in my mid-twenties, and for at least 2 of those years, my former husband and I didn't use birth control, but I never got pregnant. We tried for a few short months, but everything I read said it was completely normal for it to take more than 4 months from "Let's have a baby!" to "We're going to have a baby!" The fact that he wasn't all that into sex and that I was under a ridiculous amount of stress at work furthered my conviction that it wasn't any big deal that we didn't make a baby right away. When he lost his job right when we were getting into the real "Okay, any month now" part of trying, we gave up because of our suddenly tenuous financial situation. I never went back on the pill, though. Our infrequent coupling was more than effective. Jimi and I used condoms, most of the time, for the first 6 months or so. Then we tried to use good timing. Eventually, i tried the pill again, but when it made me batshit crazy, I gave it up, deciding that the risk of having a child outweighed the risk of him committing me somewhere. 3 years later, we've not had a single pregnancy scare.

So yeah, I wonder if I'm infertile. Or if he is. Or if we've smoked too much pot. Or if I've pickled my ovaries with Busch Light and vodkas with cranberry.

But every month, I feel every gurgle in my gut, every small cramp in my belly, every twinge in my nipples, and I wonder, "Am I?"

I once, naively, unintentionally smart-assedly, told my mother, "Surely I'll just KNOW the second I become pregnant. Won't I? Won't I feel differently? I think I know my body well enough that I'd be able to tell."

"I didn't," she semi-scoffed at me, wanting to laugh at me for my youthful ignorance and bold, nearly-egotistical assumptions, but not wanting to hurt my feelings, for she could tell I was speaking honestly. "I didn't have any idea until I was late and even then, I couldn't believe it. I felt completely normal until a few weeks later."

I want to know what it feels like to be pregnant. I want to know what it feels like to feel the baby move, to see little elbows and knees and a forehead press against my belly. But I don't know if I want to be a Mom after it's over.

Does that make me a bad person? Does that even make any sense?

I don't know if I'm ready to give up the freedom of being responsible for myself and myself alone. I can do what I want, buy what I want, go where I want, sleep when i want, watch what I want, drink what I want, eat what I want, smoke what I want. I get frustrated with the dog when he wraps himself around a tree and can't figure out how to unwrap himself. What sort of mother would I make?

And then there's Jimi. He'd be a wonderful father, but I don't know that I want to share him. I like being the one who makes him smile and who eases his mind at the end of a long day. I like being his favorite, his everything.

See how selfish I am? And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

But I also want to see a little clone of the best parts of both of us. I want to mold another person to be a good, kind, contributing member of a fair and equitable society. I want to bake cakes and read books and sing songs and play in the park and learn the beauty of the world all over again.

So I play this game every month. And I honestly don't know for what result I'm hoping.