Womb Watch 2014

I'm beginning to understand how Jennifer Aniston feels - her lovelife has been a source of jokes from her friends, her hair is so amazing that it inspired a revolution, and the vacancy of her womb seems to be a constant topic of conversation.

If you're a woman of child-bearing age and you happen to also have perfect hair like Jen and I do, you can probably relate, too. EVERY single time I walk into a doctor's office, no matter what my symptoms are, I'm asked if I'm pregnant. When I politely but definitively tell them 'no', I am asked several follow-up questions to which my answers are always ignored, and then I'm told, 'we're going to have you take a test anyway'. Like I'm a 16 year old who is going to hide a pregnancy and then give birth in a bathroom at the prom. I could run into the Emergency Room on fire, with flames shooting out of my head, and they'd probably make me pee in a cup before extinguishing my perfect Jen Aniston hair.

Every time I mention that a baby is cute or that I heard a funny thing from a toddler, I'm flooded with questions of when I will be making a kid of my own. Every time I say, 'Guess what?' I'm bombarded with, 'OMG! You're pregnant!!' Nope. Just wanted to share that I have a 3 day weekend/upcoming vacation/great seats to a concert.

It's not that I don't like kids. I LOVE kids! From newborns to teenagers, I am a free sitter of all. I look forward to spending a day with a niece or nephew or a friend's kid. I get to feed them ice cream for dinner, be fun and play the whole time, and then my favorite part of all - RETURN them. When they get sick, or have an attitude, or I just want to be responsibility free, I get to take them back to their parents. The awesomeness of this arrangement cannot be over sold. It's really the best thing EVER.

And also, here's my soapbox moment for the day - it's kind of crappy that society puts this kind of pressure on people. Like the lack of producing an infant somehow makes your relationship, or worse - life, incomplete. I assure you, the people who don't have kids find plenty of other wonderful things to fill their lives with - like travel and sleeping and not cleaning up puke.

Here's the other piece of this womb watch intensity - it's not like we're 18. One of us is pushing 30 and the other is pushing a number a few bigger than that. We waited a tad longer than a lot of people do to enter wedded matrimony, and I feel the need to explain this to all who inquire about our lack of tiny humans. We've been told by countless people that the first year of marriage is the hardest...until you have kids, and then relationship satisfaction often plummets. Awesome - sounds fun - can't wait. Having made it through Year 1 with flying colors, I'm looking forward to a few more calendars filled with vacations, extravagant gifts, and not having to push a grocery cart with an extra 30 pounds of a small, smelly creature.

While I do think that it is sweet that people are anxious for us to start a family, and I sometimes feel like a jerk saying this, but I'm not really interested in letting a tiny human keep me up all hours of the night, puke on me, and suck all of the money my husband and I spend on ourselves. At least not quite yet. Before you write me a letter professing my lack of a heart or maternal instinct, let me say that if we end up with a small creature that bears a resemblance to us, I'm sure I'll be thrilled.

Know what else is thrilling? Sleeping in on weekends. Having nobody puke on you. Not having to explain to a tiny human why they can't lick the floor. Getting to have as many date nights as we want without having to pay someone to keep the tiny puke-y floor licker alive for a few hours.

You can try to argue that logic all you want, but there is really no rebuttle to that. And despite the best efforts of doctors everywhere trying to prove me wrong, I will take this opportunity to confirm that there is currently not a future puke-y floor licker renting out my uterus. Hope you didn't have December 2014 in the office pool.