PBS and the biological clock

Hark! The timorous clanging of my biological clock's alarm, long praised for being defective and silent.

I am officially receiving hatemail from my uterus. Last night I had a dream about being suddenly and heavily pregnant and having to go about my daily tasks with a belly that rocked and swayed like huge, tumescent fruit. It was not my first preggo dream. They started almost exactly halfway through my 26th year and have been increasing with alarming frequency.

Other changes: my eye snags on particularly cute baby clothes in Target, ones with little footies and dump trucks and little bugs sewn on them, even when I'm there for condoms and pretzels; I react with pleasure when handed someone else's infant, instead of holding the thing carefully away from my body like a bomb covered in feces; and most recent and perhaps strangest, I do not feel the urge to projectile vomit when a pregnant woman discusses her pregnancy with me.

For most of my fertile years, pregnancy has either been a non-issue or worst-case scenario, the image of my genetic materials combined with those of the person with whom I was involved being enough of a nightmare to scare me into uber-meticulousness. About the only steps I had taken to prepare for parenthood were avoiding that huge, full-abdomen tattoo and staying off the heroin.

But now that my husband and I have held the marriage together for NEARLY A WHOLE YEAR, my traitorous uterus (what a great name for a metal band!) has taken the presumptuous decision that now is the time to start pumping out the kids. In idle moments it whispers to me, saying things like, "Hey, how old are you now? 27? Your mom was on her second kid by now. Your grandmother was on her fourth. And what are you doing? Oh, right-- reading the New York Times. No, no really. Go ahead. I'm just going to hang out down here. Getting OLDER."

I do plan on having kids, but I feel like there are so many things I'm supposed to have done first-- I'm supposed to have been well established as a Promising Young Novelist with a healthy 401K. I'm supposed to have at least a master's. And my husband and I are supposed to have been married for at least four years-- four years being the magical and somewhat arbitrary length of time I have deemed sufficient to build a Stable and Non-psychotic Relationship That Will Not Heinously Scar Offspring.

This is all to say nothing of the fact that he's in the military, which brings up such an ocean of variables that I find it more convenient and useful to just bang my head against a table repeatedly rather than try to sort it all out. Stupid war. Stupid, evil president!

So instead I try to be patient. I try to ignore my bullying uterus and vent my maternal urges by tickling my nephew and making him point to his umbligo. But days like this make it harder-- with our recently neutered cable offerings, the best thing on TV today was PBS's show-- I've already forgotten the name-- about this little Scottish pig and his cow buddy. Mel Brooks provided the voice for a sheep. Genius! And I had no one to watch it with.

Poor old PBS-- slowly strangled to death by Republicans (stupid, STUPID Republicans!) and now at the point of shitting the bed. I feel like I'm sitting by the bedside, holding its dying hand and at the same time threatening it that it had better hold on until I have kids.