I go back and forth on this so much. And this ended up being longer than I planned originally.

I'm not really super close with my family. I love them with the fire of a billion galaxies but I could do without seeing them. I tend to distance myself and not share things unless directly asked. I love them, but I view gatherings/time with them as being more stressful than soothing or enjoyable. It's like "okay, two more hours until I get to go back to my home zone and away from this."

I think I want one child, if any. I want to shape a mind that is half me, half my future husband. (But tbh, I really don't care about being married at the time, if it happens, I guess it happens, but I won't be upset if I get pregnant and have a kid before I'm married. My mom and step dad weren't married until I was 10 and I loved being a part of their wedding day, being old enough to laugh and cry with them while they celebrated their love.)

I want to watch my child as they go from tiny helpless baby, to curious child, to crazy teenager, to full grown functional adult. All that crap. All with my help. I really want to be a mom. I want all that. I really want to see how I'd do, you know? I want to see how smart they are, what their interests are, if they're going to have my blue eyes or his greenish-brown ones. Will they have my sense of humor? Like the same movies? Will they develop some of the same little quirks as me? Are they going to be introverted? Curly hair? Cute nose? Are they going to be bad at math too?

But what if they ended up worse off having me as a mother? What if I end up resenting them? What if I push my vision of how I think they should be on them until they can't stand me anymore like my mom did? What if my expectations are too high? What if I can't handle it? I just don't know. There's a lot of scary unknown things that go along with being a parent and part of me is like "how can I be responsible for another human being that depends solely on me when I don't know if I'll ever get my own shit together?!"

Also, if I'm being honest, and I get shit for this a lot when I bring it up, (people kinda roll their eyes at me and don't like it when I say it) but I really don't know about carrying around another human inside me for 9 months. That part really freaks me the fuck out. I have pretty severe self image issues and I don't know how I would handle the crazy changes my body's gonna go through. I think being pregnant is a beautiful process, but I don't know how I feel about it while it was happening to me.