I'll shoot that stork if he comes around here

[This was a post written a few months back. I'm rather behind on the posting, yes, I know.]

One of the unfortunate things about my workplace is that it has become, of late, a baby factory – everyone's popping them out as if their vaginas were conveyor belts of fertility. If they're not currently worshipping pagan fertility gods with their bodies, that's because they’ve already sprogged out multiple times and have lost valuable years off their lives already. The few people who haven't spawned are invariably clucky. Which leaves....me. My "I give a damn about your kid" facial muscles hurt because I have to awwww at some blonde thing which was banging at the blinds and required me later to get on my knees and wrench everything back into place because grubby little five-year old hands may be adorable to everyone else but are blind-pounding fists of doom to the venetians which I had to coax closed before I left work.

I don't like kids. I never have, and have not a shred of doubt that I never will. I was out throwing a rock at a small child the day God handed out maternal instinct. I'm comfortable with that.

It's everyone one else who’s not.

Somehow it's not okay to not want children. It is implied that being a woman, it is only right that I breed like the good sow that I am, and surely there's something wrong with me if I don't. I have lost track of the number of people who've looked at me oddly when I've stated my preference to leave a 'Not For Sale' sign hanging permanently in my womb. I could swim in the giant pool of money I would have if I had a dollar for every time they then tell me, patronizingly, "Oh, you think that now," and then smirk at me in the most annoyingly superior fashion. Nine times out of ten they'll tell me, "I knew this girl who used to be just like you, and now she's got fifteen kids hanging off her teats and she's never been happier!". Like that's a fucking incentive.

Words cannot describe how annoyed this makes me. It's condescending and patronizing to presume that you would trivialize my feelings on a matter that's extremely personal, and deem to know better than I would what I should feel five years down the road, simply because some woman whose hormones overtook her brain changed her mind. Who are you to tell me that my feelings or decisions about the course of my life lack legitimacy?

No one does this about other personal choices I make. You don't get general disbelief and the repeated assurance that you must be wrong if you say you don’t like bananas. No one gets all superior and tells you that you will change your mind if you mention that you don't eat intestines or wear shiny polyester. But when it comes to something which is a life-changing, monumental decision which fundamentally affects my state of being, I get told, every single time, that I cannot possibly know what I'm talking about and that I will change my mind in the future. Never mind that I've made monumental decisions in the past which have lad me far off the beaten track to where I stand today, in the wilderness. But no, somehow, I must miraculously come to my senses and change my bloody mind.

Why/ So that I can run with the other sheep?