I really want a family. I love kids. But I'm honestly not totally crazy about babies and pregnancy and new-motherhood are a pretty frightening prospect. I feel like I should be excited but I'm just about the last of all my friends to have a baby and I've seen them all go through it. I'm scared of lots of things, including (but not limited to):
- Losing all sense of myself. A decent proportion of my friends seem to have had a total personality transplant on becoming mothers. Some have turned into serenely superior saintly breastmilk factories who never swear or joke or laugh. Others have seemingly lost the ability to be polite - constantly asking for favours, never saying thank you etc. Lots of them can't talk about anything other than their DC, don't even ask how I am when we chat etc. No judgypants here - I'm not blaming them but I do feel a bit sad for them and I'm scared I'll go the same way.
- Becoming competitive/judgmental as all buggery. Lots of my friends, even though they are very sweet people, are constantly telling me what other mothers are doing wrong. They try to dress it up as "each to their own, that didn't work for me" but what they are really doing is slagging one another off and looking for me to agree with them. What on earth are they going to say about my inevitable myriad of fuck ups? They've all got so much advice and so many opinions and they express them really strongly (DH and I spent 20 mins the other day being lectured by a friend (and her DH) about how people who ff are "literally poisoning their babies"). Gulp.
- Spending 18 months feeling terrified/bored/enslaved. I've had some anxiety and depression in the past and I have various tendencies (hypochondria, perfectionism) that I can imagine are going to make me a mumzilla, rather than the chilled out, "sane" mother I'd like to be.
Sorry this probably sounds desperately churlish. I know some of you are going to say don't bother, but I genuinely want a family and so does my DH and I'm going to 35 this week so I feel like it's crunch time, but the prospect is at least as scary as it is exciting. AIBU?