In response and as a welcome to a dear friend, who finally enters the blogsphere. Always not a trend follower, well, like they always say everything in their own time and place. You are such an odd unique one--in that weird time and space of your own making....

Well Jing, I am not sure people really do want babies. To think I see lots of proud, paranoid parents and totally clueless babies everyday. I think babies are more like accidents which happen, and are thrown onto paretns, like it or not. But then of course, as always(in all things in our lives) they are both curses and blessings. But Jing, whether the babies are monsters, germs, adorable or unplanned for accidnets. You have to see the look in the parents' eyes to understand that that new life in their hands, how they are so full of hope and fears and just that knowledge that their life is forver changed. I don't know, but I think people in our generation tend to have a deep distrust of children, babies. Maybe women and men now see more to life than procreation as a sacred mission, and of course we have birth control, but most importantly we just want so much out of life for oursleves that having children may seem like a burden, an obstacle.

But mostly I think we are all probably wrong to think that we know for certain whether or not we want to have children. It is strange, but I just watched a movie which had this same theme on motherhood. A woman is trapped in a horrible marriage, and the last thing she wants is to have a baby. Nonetheless she is pregnant, and the whole movie is about her being thrown into reluctant motherhood and all her letters to the baby she hates. But the most beautiful thing happens when she finally holds the baby in her arms, she realize she has a new life in her hands, and her own power to create a new life for that baby and herself. She finally drops a one line bomb to her husband about a divorce when she had been planning an escape the whole show from a husband she fears. In that maigc moment, she finds the courage and in a calm clearheaded line delivers the very truth she has tried to hide.

Well, Jing, I guess I am trying to say that, it is foolish to have some magical illusion about motherhood, or to villify it. It is an experience in life that we may or may mot be blessed to have. It will not be perfect, and we will be so scared when we are thrown with the responsibility. NO one prepares us for it, and it is a lot of groping in the dark and learning along the way. But it is one of those things which will change us forever, and reminds us that there is always so much to learn and discover about ourselves and our world, our little lives on earth. I guess we will only understand when we hold our own child and realize that our world is forever changed and rightly or wrongly, we can share our lives, our past, and future with a new being who will now have a new journey to set out on.