Re-shedding.

Although a snake can't, I did – slipped back into a skin I'd long ago shed. Two-thirds of my classmates are in their early to mid-twenties, and without much effort I lopped a decade off the level of maturity one might expect for my age and lived it up with the best of them, every chance we could find among the busy-ness of the course.

I didn't think about baby-making or babies or the lack thereof, not much, only when reading your blogs or giggling about teaching sperm or wondering if O-7 sex could actually be lucky sex or comparing myself to a similarly aged but not-so-similarly situated classmate or meeting with my sweet bloggie friends or getting slaughtered by Google or being advised to poke holes in condoms or talking with Gilles about plans to get together soon with another couple who I know have been trying to conceive for a while and who I'm afraid will slap us with a pregnancy announcement and who I'd thus rather avoid. Those usually constant feelings of sadness and longing and futility were much less present than they are when I have all the time in the world to dwell and brood and mull over what is ... over what is not.

It was nice.

But now the course is over and I've re-shed that carefree skin of youth. I've lost my protective husk and with it the ability to repress all that I've kept buried this last month. Finding myself back where I was, and counting the months to realize that I've been there for a year, has given me a new sense of urgency about this whole baby thing. I – we – don't want to keep going like this. Something needs to change.

Something will change. How, we haven't decided yet, but we've circled a day on the calendar to talk about it – multiple days, in fact, ones that will also be filled with hikes, mountain views, and no doubt more than one fondue. Why be satisfied with merely going on holiday when one could attend a reproductive decisions convention, too?

borrowed ethically from source