A few days ago, I was suddenly sideswiped by a giant ticking biological clock. It knocked me right on my ass,  sat squarely on my chest, crushing me… I could barely breathe! It  looked me straight in the eye and said “Tick Tock, motherfucker. Tick fucking tock.”

It wasn’t the first time I had heard that phrase. Suddenly this feeling felt incredibly familiar and I flashed back to January 2011, when my body was sending me the same urgent message: HAVE A BABY! GET KNOCKED UP! DO IT, DO IT NOW!!!!!! Of course, it wasn’t a good time. My husband and I were getting married that summer, and we had a few things we wanted to do before starting a family, but mostly neither of us felt ready at all. Fortunately there was a timely article on Offbeat Families, one of my favorite blogs called “Babycrack: When wanting a baby gets weird”. http://offbeatfamilies.com/2011/01/babycrack  that helped me deal with the emotions then.

I still find in extremely comforting to read about the experiences other people are having with the same situation, so I went back to read all the comments on the article and noticed the menacing sentence uttered by my bio-clock was posted by another women trying to ignore her bio-clock too. I also noticed my own comments on the article.

Well, I was having a baby crack free day until I read this post. Now my eyes are welling up cause the desire to have a baby is sometimes like a physical ache.

I didn’t understand the whole biological clock thing at all until about two years ago. I was on the fence about having kids, until one day I was laying in bed with my fiance and I heard my DNA speaking to me. “Have his baby!” cried my genes.

Sometimes my rational mind can shut them up for a bit, but it’s getting harder. My rational mind knows that we have a plan and the plan is to start trying next spring… First we want to get married, go have a rocking time on our honeymoon, move to a bigger place so it’s not all stressful moving while I’m preggers… But it’s hard. Especially when my mom reminds me you can’t plan everything (I was an accident, as was my sister).

Just gotta keep popping my anti-baby pills. I now get my fiance to remind me via text half an hour after I’m supposed to take them, just in case I miss my phone alarm. I’m so paranoid I’ll miss a pill after somehow missing one last week.

Just keep breathing… One more year…

Note: This is from January 14, 2011. It was exactly 2 years, less 2 days ago from when this crazy feeling reared it’s head again.

Our plans had changed, and our window for when we wanted to start trying keeps being pushed back by the both of us… I started dancing so much more, and wanted to really put some time in taking classes, performing and teaching before taking time off to have a child. Also, the feeling of MUST PROCREATE NOW! had faded away so it was easy to just imagine having a child as something we would do later. Neither one of us wants to disrupt our very comfortable and happy lives with a little one at the moment.

Except, apparently, I do.

Or at least, my body does.

I’m still not fully ready. I have tons of travel plans over the next year. My husband is switching fields and going back to school. We’d like to save up more money. We both want more time with each other. The list goes on…

But, my body was literally screaming at me. I felt consumed by confusing and conflicting emotions. I’ve made a commitment  with this project to listen to my body, so I was afraid for a few days to actually have a dialogue with it. I was terrified my body would just lay it out for me. Because of the intensity of the feelings I was having, I expected my body so say This is it, the time is now. Let’s do this!

When I felt ready, I initiated a conversation with my body, and it turns out that the most important thing it wanted was to be heard. It wasn’t unilaterally deciding that this was happening now. It wasn’t going to circumvent my birth control and just make it happen (I really thought this might happen). Biologically, now is the time, but having a baby isn’t a purely biological process. It’s also a mental and spiritual process, for me and my husband. We still need a bit of time, but my body wanted to make me aware that this is fast becoming a priority so I’d better start getting used to the idea of sooner rather than later.

Because of my vow to listen to my body’s messages, I was able to take this startlingly violent message for what it was. An invitation to listen to my body’s biological clock and innate rhythms. Well, more of an insistence than an invitation, but that’s just because it’s an old message I had been ignoring for quite some time. It’s reminding me of what I am evolutionarily programmed to do. Simple acknowledgement was enough for the moment, but it’s also an opportunity to really put the effort in to prepare myself for something I’ll be doing soon enough.