Aversion therapy

This is, once again, as I knew it would be, crunch time. The time when I find myself with unscheduled (but over-subscribed) free time. The time when I drop my two children at school and feel wavery, limbless, missing something. The time when, in an unguarded moment, I might rush out - I mean, upstairs with my husband - and get pregnant again.

Yesterday during my sojourn in Target I happened down the sanitary products aisle and glanced at the pregnancy tests positioned so thoughtfully at the end there, right beside the condoms. It's like a graphical representation of Our Bodies, Ourselves: you need these every month, or else you might need to pee on one of these, so if you're planning on getting up to anything, you'd better buy a pack of these just to ensure that you keep coming back every month to buy those. Anyway, I almost - almost - had a pang of nostalgia for that moment when you really want the pregnancy test to be positive, and you're pretty sure it will be, and all that monumental excitement and no-backing-out-now and a tiny bit of dread is just escalating inside waiting for you to, well, to pee on a stick. I wish I could do it again, I thought. No, no, I didn't. I experimented with the notion of thinking it.

Then I made myself remember how it's all very well and exciting being pregnant, but then you have to get fat and spend months wearing yet again all those clothes you grew to hate, or else feel guilty for buying new ones; and then there's childbirth, and home births still aren't strictly legal here in MD so we'd have the middle-of-the-night drive home from the birthing center again (because babies are never born in the afternoon); and then there's the way my children don't like to sleep when they're new, or when they're three for that matter; and the fact that no matter how much Mabel professes to like babies, one that was horning in on her precious mumeet might not be tolerated in the house; and then, at the end of all that you still don't have a cute little adorable totable baby any more - you have a monster bent on self-injury and destruction, that won't give you a moment's peace until you can ship them off to nursery school and the whole cycle starts again.

I love babies; don't get me wrong. (They're delicious. But I couldn't eat a whole one.) But we've done it. Twice. And that's probably enough. The question of no. 3 came up at a party we were at on Saturday, and I explained that the possibility was still on the table, not off the table completely, but definitely moving further down the list of things that were most likely to happen.

Ask me again tomorrow.