C is for Children

Okay, a much shorter post for today than yesterday's, I promise!

So, C is for children, a thing that I don't currently have. At the ripe old age of nearly-30, I'm finding more and more that conversation turns to having kids fairly regularly, especially conversation with people who don't know me quite well enough to know that I am in fact an overgrown child myself and in no way fit to teach a tiny squalling and squiggling thing how to be a human. Of course, it doesn't help being surrounded at work by pregnant nurses and people with young families.

The thing about me is, as I say to people who ask me do I have/want children, I really love children, and I would also love to have a child one day, but I'm absolutely terrified of pregnancy and childbirth. And everyone, well, maybe not the guys so much, nods and says "oh yeah, it's quite painful" or something similar, and I say "no, but..." and try and explain that when I say terrified, I don't mean I don't like the idea of pain, I mean I'm completely, utterly, obsessively horrified by the thought of giving birth, and then they say "oh you'll be fine when the time comes" and then I say "yeah...yeah I guess so..." and well, that's pretty much the conversation done.

Nobody seems to get how horrified I am by the whole idea. Don't get me wrong, I know that nobody looks forward to the painful process of the tiny person actually coming out of them, however excited they are about actually having them in their life afterwards. And some people do say "ugh, yeah, horrible, I'd never want to have one!" But wanting to have a child and yet being utterly petrified about the whole thing seems to be quite rare.

It isn't pain I'm scared of, by the way. If it was just pain, I would be fine with it, I'm sure. It's the stretching and splitting, the tearing, oh god tearing, really? And it's something else, something I can't put my finger on but something to do with the loss of control, the inevitability and the inability to say "okay stop this, I've changed my mind". I dread being pregnant, because I think it would be nine months of utter terror for me, I really do. I dread it so much that I keep nearly resolving to not have any babies after all, but the fact is that I do want them. I didn't used to, but the stereotypical thing happened to me, and at a certain age, probably about my mid-20s, I found I was starting to. Curse you, reproductive biology!

Then there's the fact that I would have to come off my meds, and without my meds, my life is 24 hours a day terror anyway. Then there's the fact that people with a history of depression are way more likely to have post-natal depression...  But honestly, these are things that I intellectually consider when I actively think about the subject, and completely removed from my visceral, uncontrollable, illogical horror.

I knew that even though it seemed like it, I couldn't be the only one who's experienced this kind of thing, so I did a bit of googling around, and found out that the word for it is tokophobia. (That's your little factlet for the day courtesy of me.) But honestly, there's not that much about it out there. It seems to just be expected that all women are able to and do go through the whole of pregnancy and childbirth in a serene way, expressing no negative feelings whatsoever - if you've ever watched the insanely popular One Born Every Minute, you might have noticed that even the midwives seem to feel it's okay to mock the women who have the audacity to scream, or be afraid of what they're going through.

I suppose the truth is I don't know what kind of support terrified pregnant women get. If I ever am pregnant, I guess I'll find out.