Baby Dreams

How my mom's favorite show became my worst nightmare

I can’t stop dreaming about babies. At least one or two times a week I’ll have a dream that I’m either pregnant, giving birth, or have a child. This week I dreamt that I was at my ten-year high school reunion (which is actually supposed to be this year) and most of my classmates had kids - even the people I could never envision as parents.

All of my baby/pregnancy dreams involve me having a meltdown because I am not at all ready for kids - neither in the dream world nor in the real world. In each dream, I’m either giving the baby up for adoption, trying to get an abortion, or raising a child I don’t want with a weird name I would never pick. Now you’re probably reading this thinking, ‘of course you bimbo, you’re a woman in her mid-late 20s, your eggs are drying out’ (or whatever the incels say when they want to bully me in the comments).

My friend John who runs the record shop near my house and I were trying to get to the bottom of my baby dreams. John’s got like, 5 kids or something, so I figured he’d have good insight. Instead, we somehow ended up having an argument over whether or not Neanderthals were capable of symbolic thinking, an argument I won by pulling up photos of cave drawings in Spain made by Neanderthals 65,000 years ago. So anyways, John was useless in interpreting my dreams, but he basically reiterated Marisa Tomei in My Cousin Vinny (gif above, great movie, highly recommend) and added that I was probably just horny.

Neanderthal art, doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02357-8

Then it hit me. I am Ally McBeal. For you zoomers, Ally McBeal was a show in the ‘90s that moms loved - my mom especially. Ally is a lawyer who works at a firm with her ex-boyfriend, who she never got over, and his new wife. Ally is supposed to be… 27 years old. She hallucinates a horrifying CGI dancing baby which served as a metaphor for her biological clock ticking away. My stomach dropped this week when I realized that I’m the same age as Ally in season one and that my incessant pregnancy dreams served as my own oogachacka baby. 

My aunt was pregnant with my cousin at the time the show was on air and all my 5-year-old brain could think was, ‘there’s a dancing baby in my ciocia’s stomach.’ It became a joke in my family - but it also led to my lifelong fear of babies. The parallels between Ally McBeal and my own nightly hallucinations are undeniable, something I’m only just piecing together as I’m writing this. But why am I going on a rant about baby dreams when I should be writing about some dumb thing a dad said?

Well, the dads have also been changing their tune this past year. Whenever I ask, “What do you do? Do you have kids?” they’ve started asking if I have any children of my own. To which I always respond, “no, I’m too young.” A sentiment I genuinely feel due to a lack of financial stability, my own selfish need to spend my hard-earned freelancer money on vacations (eventually) and wine, aaand also the fact that I’m entirely too single at the moment to make a child. When I started posting on @swipes4daddy at age 22, I probably was too young for kids. Five years on, the dads have shifted their attitudes toward me, an aging broad, and are now starting to treat me as a Real Adult. Something I cannot identify with no matter how many kitchen items I buy.

This leads me to an interesting thought. Do I change the age on my Tinder profile to something a bit younger, say 24? Will my baby dreams stop if the dads stop assuming I’m a single mom? Or do I continue to age into a normal maternal window? Will the juxtaposition between my youth and their “maturity” be lost as I creep closer to 30?

Given my fear of the little humans, I don’t think I’m actually that fussed about my biological clock (also, modern medicine is great and there’s adoption if I really did want to be a mom one day). Perhaps the babies in my dreams are a stand-in for my fear of becoming closer to the dads themselves. Maybe the babies serve as little cave paintings in my brain that symbolize my fear of being alone. Or maybe.. I’m just horny.

It’s bedtime here in London so I’m going to log-off. I wonder what dreams I’ll have.