BABIES ARE ALIENS. But I want one.

Ok, so it's no secret that I have been feeling the maternal instinct kicking in for about a year now. I got married when I was 22, and immediately thereafter everyone began asking me when Scott and I were going to start a family. I had started teaching high school at the time and my students were strangely obsessed with me having a baby. I guess to them I was an "older" woman and it was just the understood course of nature. That and the fact that they were getting pregnant at the same time.

ANYWAY, after two years of teaching I returned to school to pursue my master's degree, and at the same time Scott was working full-time and getting his own higher degree. This all worked out just fine because Scott and I still were not interested in adding to our brood at the time. My terminal master's degree took three years (the standard amount of time) and about the end of the last fall semester, I suddenly began feeling like something was missing from our lives. It feels like this: You are eating dinner with your husband, having a wonderful time, and then all of the sudden you begin to picture him as a dad and you can almost see the little tot running around the kitchen and you can feel in your heart that this is what you want most in the world and you no longer want to throw up when you think about having your own children. At least that's how it began for me. Then you start seeing babies everywhere, and all baby-related commercials make you cry. You start thinking about names and what the baby will look like and watching it sleep and taking him or her to visit grandparents and cleaning up puke and changing diapers and sharing memories and suddenly you want it all. The good and bad. Not the romanticized. The real.

There is one part of the "real" with which I am still not fully comfortable. Carrying a baby inside of my own body seems like an extremely foreign and absurd idea. It seriously reminds me of the movie "Aliens" starring Sigourney Weaver. I know that it is beautiful in it's own way, but something about feeling another human being kick me from the inside and then squeeze out my unmentionable area is, at best, surreal. I just don't want it to pop out of my stomach and sing "Hello My Honey" like the creature in Spaceballs. How about you ladies out there who have already had children? Did you feel the same way? Just curious.

And who knows, perhaps my child will burst out and start singing showtunes. I mean, after all, he or she will have theatre nerds for parents.