Crazy Cat Lady

I once dated a woman I met on the psych ward. (In hindsight, this was a bad idea.) Then I dated her again. (Don't look at me like that.) There followed, after breakup number two, a period of dry years. (In more sense than one.) 

Then I fell swimmingly, dizzyingly, head-over-heels-over-head-over-heels in capital-L Love with this amazing girl, only to have it set off a host of abandonment issues that not only broke us up, but created a rift between us so wide we can't scream across it and won't ever try.

2 years after that, I crawled into bed with someone I never should have slept with, ever in a million years. And that has been the extent of my love life, save the boyfriend I had for about 3 months during my senior year of high school and a date sprinkled here and there like stray confetti.

Why am I telling you this? Because.

I'm at "that age" -- you know, the one where 99.9% of the women around me are pregnant and I'm buying more toys for the cat. Before that, I was at the age where 99.9% of the women around me were getting married, and I was sharing powdered donuts with my pet ferret. But I didn't mind the marrying as much as I mind the babies.

And I mind the babies because I'm jealous.

It's true. It's horribly, awfully true. It's also true that I never wanted children before I hit, oh, about 25, and that I never believed in such a thing as childbearing as a biological imperative up to that point. And maybe for some women it isn't. Good for them. Because all I really know is that my brain has been screaming for a baby for the past three years, and I can't shut it up.

It sounds vaguely ridiculous: me, a mother? Me? Forfeiting sleep and changing diapers and bandaging ouchies and chasing a little person everywhere? Ha! Saying the words, "I want a baby" out loud makes me feel kind of stupid, really. 

The first thing my folks say is, "Oh, but you're so young!" but even they're adopting again -- an infant this time, not a teenager who shows up at the door hungry, like a stray cat. They're getting a baby. My little sister has babies. My little cousins have babies. My friends have babies. I have a cat.

Also, I have no prospects for babies. Not even some nice girl to consider settling down and adopting with. Not even a fourth of the financial security I'd need to go it on my own, sans welfare. Also, I have a lease that prohibits the adopting of more cats! I CAN'T EVEN GET ANOTHER CAT!

I'm going insane. Wacky. Cuckoo. Fruit crackers. I've just begun to come to grips with the reality that perhaps I was meant to be single -- damn those abandonment issues -- and now I'm looking down the barrel at coming to grips with not having the opportunity to be a parent. Not even a single parent, because I am eternally impoverished.

I know, I know: I'm so young. Chronologically. My body is much, much older than 28. I can't shake the feeling that I don't have as long to do these kinds of major life things as other people do. Maybe that's just trauma speaking -- I know by now that survivors of chronic childhood abuse such as myself often exhibit a foreshortened sense of the future. Somehow we expect to die young. (And given the lasting toll of chronic stress on the body and brain, maybe we're onto something.) But then I have this disability too, and … sigh. I don't know. I just know that I feel like I have to hurry. Which doesn't help the general sense I've had lately that life is passing me by and I can't do anything but watch it go.  Which is where half of my stress comes from in the first place: hurry up; fit it in; there it goes. It's a vicious cycle.

Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. Always the auntie, never the mother.

(How do I be happy with now? How do I find the patience? Some serenity, some 'Que sera, sera?' Someone? Anyone? I know I need to slow down, stop taking life in huge gulps of anxiety. I just don't know how.)

Sigh.

I could use my mommy right about now.

So. Many. Frustrations.

Older childless friends? Older childless gay friends? Older, childless, gay, disabled friends? Um ... halp?