On the good news side, my DSL is working again. Apparently SBC just became "SBC/Yahoo" (huh?) and it sounds like they are getting a LOT of calls because nobody's DSL works any more. I had to redo the connection and it was fine. Sheesh, give warning much, guys?

On the bad news side, all the drugs I've been taking for this coughing problem kinda stopped working last night, and I coughed from about 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. Not big hard barf-causing coughs, mind you- pretty mild for my usual- but persistent as all hell. I huffed the inhaler hourly, I snorted the supposedly-ending-congestion nose stuff more than I'm supposed to, nothing helped much. Suffice it to say neither of us got much sleep last night. My theory is that I become totally congested over a period of four days and that's what sets off the hacking, and I guess all the medicine did was delay it by a day.

Yikes.

So I was reading Stef today and hit this line: "You not only lose your own identity, you are forced to adopt someone else's. This week alone, I have been Blossom, Bubbles, Magenta, and Mrs. Claus." The identity-adopting bit aside, it occured to me that that's EXACTLY why I am scared to death of spawning children.

Well, there's two huge things and a bunch of other things. Pregnancy, as you know, is the first Big Huge One. I'm a little-framed girl, pregnancies tend to run complicated in my family, my big fears of surgery, babies run HUGE in his family... it's enough to make me want to get snipped up myself. But besides that, I have always had the big scary psychic feeling about me for as far as I can remember that giving birth would kill me. Yes, I have been told that hardly happens any more, and my heart just doesn't believe it. I also am not domestic, not patient, and tend to be spacey about feeding plants and animals, so I don't think those are good future parenthood signs either.

But the other one is... you guessed it, losing my identity.

You know what, I honestly do NOT understand, can't imagine, can't even comprehend, why someone would with all their heart and soul want their own baby. Because to me, anyway, it seems like once you have a child, your life is essentially over, at least for the next 18 years. Done. Finished. YOU no longer exist as a person. You've just died, your soul hit the ether, and your body is now being inhabited by a Mommy Demon. Your own interests, your own life, are all sacrificed for bringing someone else to life. And no, this doesn't seem to be the case for men *sigh*.

Why on earth would you essentially want to get rid of yourself, who you are, just to have a baby? Are the mommy hormones THAT bad to deal with that they wipe your brain? Is is that great to become this exhausted person who stops caring about anything she loved before and even if she still cared, couldn't do it anyway, is it REALLY worth that? I find it hard to imagine that it is. Okay, so most of the mothers I know kinda tended towards the totally self-sacrificing (this is why mine and I have issues) so this is probably tempering my judgement, but the whole personality makeover aspect of it frightens me. I have enough issues with that with getting engaged to deal with and have a hard time with.

I'm not self-sacrificing. When you hear those stories about some woman who wanted to be a mommy SO VERY MUCH that when she got pregnant and then diagnosed with cancer, she went through with the pregnancy anyway, then of course by the time the kids were born she was too far gone and died afterward, well, I just don't get it. If it were me, I'd be skipping off to the abortion clinic post-haste. I'm not going to kill myself by foregoing treatment so I can birth babies that I'll never see, I'd rather fight for my own life.

I guess either way, I equate having kids with dying. Pleasant, isn't it? I don't associate adopted kids (who are presumably older and might have their own lives) in the same way, but the idea of my own flesh and blood kids seems like voluntarily getting a life-sucking parasite.

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