nannying and mothering
2004-03-31, 8:00 p.m.

"peace out" he kept saying over and over to me today as he made a peace "v" with his fingers. he's maybe all of eight years old. but i remember when i went along with his family on a trip to new orleans. ahh, nola. i love that city. but that's another diary entry. anyway, he was just a baby - a few months old, and his parents left to go to dinner and i, of course, babysat the baby. that's why they brought along a nanny. i remember there was the "expressed" breast milk in the bottle for me to heat up to feed to him. i was, i don't mind telling you, pretty much dreading having to handle those "expressions." i was hoping the baby would sleep through the evening. but he didn't. he started crying and howling and i remember holding him and trying to calm him down while i was heating up the bottle and i was so wrapped up in tending to him that i didn't even worry at all when i had to test the milk on the underside of my wrist. the mothering instinct, i presume. or was it? i now suspect it was more of the save-my-ears-from-the-noise-of-the-wailing instinct.

which is to say that i don't think i'd be a very good mother. i never really had the desire to actually create my own progeny. even when i was a little girl engaging in when-i-grow-up fantasies, my fantasy involved an adopted child. maybe from vietnam. probably adopted at an older age. i don't even speculate about that possibility anymore. people have told me that they think i would be a good mother. but it's not true. you have to have a certain kind of energy to deal with children, which i can't keep going for very long. certainly not all day. i don't have the patience. and i don't have the funds to hire a nanny. speaking of funds, i lack financial discipline. also, i lack homemaking skills. i'm not a good rolemodel, either. i know i definitely wouldn't want to have me as a mother. good thing i didn't. good thing i had my mother instead.