Baby Blues

First, please let me set your fears at ease Mum, and anyone else reading this who actually knows me - I am not, nor will I be, pregnant again.

Lately, I have found myself surrounded by pregnant women or families with newborns. On Saturday we took Bird for his annual photos with Santa (also called The Holly King around here), and the family after us had a wee little girl who didn't look like she was more than a few minutes out of the box.

She stared at me while the photographer and her parents tried to get her to look in another direction. At three weeks of age, there's no way she saw me, but she was staring at me nonetheless.

I have a brilliant son - he is my heart, my best good thing, the frustrating, bedeviling light of my life.

I always wanted a daughter. I admit that when I first learned I was having a boy, I was disappointed. At the time, I didn't know he would be my only child, so it wasn't that...I just wanted a girl first.

I got over it in a minute or two, and haven't looked back...much.

When Bird was still new (but never wee - at ten pounds, four ounces and just over twenty-one inches long, the doctor told me I'd had a toddler, and I half believed him!), I thought I would have another child one day, and perhaps then I would get my daughter.

I used to dream about a daughter - I saw her face clearly, and I knew her name as well as my own (hers was Katharine Saoirse)(never mind what mine is), and she haunted me so much that I refused to go to sleep for fear she'd be there, waiting for me.

That was long before I knew T; I wasn't dating anyone, didn't have a "baby daddy" in mind or anything like that. At the time, I never thought I'd have any children, because I truly believed that no one was going to want me, let alone want to...you know. Self esteem? What's that??

These days, I think about another baby, but it isn't going to happen - between health concerns on my part and our financial situation, another one isn't wise. I could just have one and not worry about the consequences...but that wouldn't serve anyone, not even me.

So no daughter. No Katharine Saoirse. No little girl to carry my family on to the next generation (only a girl can pass on mitochondrial DNA to her children - the father's dies with him), and so my mother and her mother end with me.

DNA aside, it just makes me sad that there are no more babies in my future - I'm too old to be spawning again, anyway (eggs go stale after a certain age, and it's too risky for me and for whatever little zygote would end up perching on my uterine wall).

If I'm being honest, I have to admit that once in a while I am quietly suffused by the fear that my son could die before he's grown, before he has kids of his own. It's irrational, and I don't let it get in my way or even slow me down, but it's there.

Ah, well...I think I have a touch of the blues - not just (no)baby blues, but the regular old funk that's been the undertone of my life since childhood. It'll pass.