Children.  A word gargantuan enough to swallow me whole.

A blessing if I am able.

A plague if I am not.

In every book I have read, I am not certain there is an author adept enough to portray the necessary changes which must occur when bringing another life into the world.  Parents vehemently tell me that nothing can prepare me, that nothing comes close.  And so I necessarily must concur because I see a shaky conviction in their eyes, a weightiness to their statement that infers a knowing which cannot be expressed through any method but sheer knowing.  Through feeling the thing plopped down into your arms some odd Tuesday having never held a baby before let alone changed a diaper.

And it is this silence, this beyond words nature of children that truly terrifies me.  There is an old adage that to read many books is to live many lives.  I feel--having read like a psychotically ill loner--that I have lived many, many times over.  And yet, I feel parenthood is not something I can really touch.  It is not something I can understand.

And so I stand on the precipice of this decision an utterly blind person.  If I do then it "changes you forever in so many wonderful and indescribable ways (big fake, condescending smile)" and if I don't, then I am selfish and one of the losers in Darwin's survival of the fittest model.

I am so, so torn about the entire topic.  I want children because I think little humans are lovely and have so much to teach us about the world.  But on the other hand, I don't want to bring another, stinking human into the planet.  I feel like I do okay as far as humans are concerned and, even so, about 80% of the time I'm not very proud of my environmental or socioeconomic consciousness.  

And so I am at a crossroads of defying social convention by being the loner infertile womb or doing it and rushing head first into an adventure for which I am not certain I'm prepared.

I have never had warm, maternal feelings.  I doubt I ever will.  I am much too neural.  Much too close to insanity.