So I was watching this made for TV movie a little while ago with Michelle Pfeiffer in it. It was called the “Deep End of the Ocean”, and it was about a woman whose kid gets kidnapped when he’s three years old and then like eight years later, he randomly shows up at her front door. It turns out that the woman who kidnapped him was living three doors away.

So yeah, anyway, I’m sitting there, watching this movie, and I’m thinking- “Hey, now, this isn’t such a bad deal.” You get to skip those years when you have to watch the kid twenty-four seven and you probably save like $20,000 in diapers and food and “Tickle-Me Elmos”. You can go on with your life and your career, and then eight years later, when he shows up at your door, if he turned out well, you can welcome him in to your life and then blop him into military school or if he turned out poorly (bad skin and/or poor manners), you can just be like, “What kidnapped kid? Nope, never lost a kid. You might want to try next door.”

Now, I know what you’re thinking- I’m like 45 years away from achieving the maturity level necessary to raise a child; and hence, the obvious solution might be to just delay having kids until my career’s settled and I’m ready to put in 100%. Well, I might be tempted to agree with you but thanks to a sensitively entitled Time Magazine article that I found online: “Babies vs. Career”, I have now discovered that that’s not really an option. Apparently, I have til like 32 before things start breaking on the old body.

Well, thanks for nothing, World.

How the hell is two years going to be enough time to achieve my goals of becoming a rock star/ Pulitzer Prize winning novelist/ Florence Hendersonesque mother? I’m going to have to quit my job today- I can’t be spending time filing and photocopying. I’ve got to write a song and a multi-volume novel and find the ideal mate. My mother’s been very helpful with regards to the “husband” portion of the equation. She suggested I try matchmaker.com. “Well, gee thanks, mom, are you going to be willing to come down to the morgue and identify all 4,567 pieces of me?“ Of course, then she gives me the speech about how “Laurie, the fat girl, who used to live on my block has found herself the nicest man on matchmaker. He’s a high school math teacher.” GAG.

Alright, I’m going to fess up and say, I kinda bullshitted a little bit in the last paragraph. I have never really imagined myself as a Florence Hendersonesque mother (the rock star/ Pultizer Prize winning novelist bit- that was legit). In fact, I had this life sized baby doll when I was a kid, but it really didn’t do anything for me. Although, I did like to watch the cat gnaw on its fat little fingers, I was much more interested in my giant stuffed polar bear… (Well, the polar bear was soft and cushy and had a smile on its face, whereas the baby was hard and plastic and smelled like mothballs- it was an easy decision).

I think it’s just all of this biological clock pressure getting to me. Well, Mom, Time Magazine, the fertility doctors of the world, and mother nature, you can all kiss my ass. This is a raw deal. Look if we can clone sheep, why can’t we figure out how to put a big old snooze button on the biological clock? Freeze an egg. Hell, freeze the entire kid if you want. I’ll be ready to defrost it in about 2022. Until then, it can hang out with Walt Disney’s head, I’ll be at the bar…