Do babies scare the hell out of you? Because they scare the hell out of me. Mostly it’s the having them part, by which I mean the birthing them part, because every mother talks about the gore and agony of childbirth, and you’d have to be a fool not to fear that. But sometimes it’s totally unrelated to birthing issues – sometimes it’s just the babyness of babies that’s so freaky. Sometimes I think babies are aliens. I don’t know how to explain this without reference to mental illness, but truly, sometimes I see a baby or even a picture of a baby and I am gripped by this conviction that the baby is an alien, look at it, it couldn’t possibly be a human baby. It’s something about the eyes maybe. They’re just so weird. Other animals have babies that look like miniature adults, but not humans. Our babies look weird and out of proportion and, sometimes, I think they are an alien. I don’t want to touch or be anywhere near these babies. They are so wrong.
Clearly I am a prime candidate for postpartum psychosis and if I ever do have a baby I should be under psychiatric care at the same time.
I used to be pregnancy phobic. I went through this phase when I was about 10 where I was really worried I was pregnant, which was impossible because I had never had sex (obviously) and also hadn’t hit puberty. It makes no sense in retrospect but anyway, this was a worry that actually kept me up nights. I spent a lot of time examining my belly for signs of growth, and since I’ve always had a round, tubby tummy I had plenty of fodder for my anxiety. I developed convoluted plans for how to tell my parents, and worried that it would go too long for me to get an abortion, which obviously I needed because I was even more phobic about birthing than I was about carrying. I never worried about how the pregnancy happened – that logical part never got any airtime. This phase lasted most of a year, probably ten calendar months, which as an adult I find interesting, because that’s about how long a pregnancy lasts. Isn’t the unconscious delightful?
Eventually, I stopped thinking I was pregnant, but I retained this sort of phobia of pregnant women. Up until a few years ago I found pregnant women to be kind of gross, actually. You always see people trying to rub the belly of a pregnant woman and I could never understand this – when I imagined doing that, the mental image was accompanied by the feeling you might get if someone dumped a bucket of tarantulas on your head. It was just too gross to contemplate. I found the whole pregnancy thing kind of revolting, to be avoided as much as possible (exposure to pregnant women as well as getting pergnant). Now I no longer avoid standing next to a pregnant woman, and I no longer avert my eyes from their bellies (but I still don’t want to touch one). Now I just think they have alien babies.
There isn’t a name for this problem (I checked), and I don’t know the source of it. I ascribe to the depth psychology paradigm, and so I imagine there’s some very old conflict or trauma or incident in my childhood that spawned all of this, and one day I’ll sort it out. It actually seems to be self sorting, in the sense that some of the symptoms are gone now, but I do worry about this alien thing. Who thinks babies are aliens? Crazy people! Worrying, isn’t it?
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