I caught myself the…

I caught myself the other day thinking it would be nice to have a baby. Although what was hilarious is that I didn't actually want a baby, especially given how much I dislike actually caring for babies. (We hates it, my precious. Sorry if that upsets you; I like kids a great deal, but babies, not so much. At least not my own. Other peoples' babies are fine.) I realized what I actually wanted was downtime for my brain.

See, having a baby is physically utterly exhausting (at least it is if you are old for babies, like me, and also don't cope well with brutal interruptions to your sleep), but infants are not mentally challenging. It doesn't take many of your brain's higher functions to remember which part of the baby gets fed and which part gets diapered. Especially if you have one of those timer-things to remind you when the feedings should be and a chart so you can write down how many ounces of precious pumped breast milk the little monster did or did not eat. Walking around for hours and hours in the middle of the night may make your arms feel like they're about to fall off with the screaming agony of it all, but your higher brain functions can basically check out for that whole process.

For the last three months, I feel like my brain has been going at high gear, just a mile a minute. Books and teaching and books and research and books and setting up all kinds of things for my arts orgs and did I mention that there are like six(!) different books I would like to be writing right now and they all seem to be jostling for space in my brain? So that I'm trying to do something like plan the kids' dinner of mac-and-cheese-with-frozen-peas and that will be interrupted a dozen times by random ideas for different hard-core intellectual projects that are all very cool but also make my head ache.

Apparently, my brain's reaction to all that is to throw up the image of a blissfully sleeping baby. Which is SO not going to happen because a) my babies don't sleep, and b) we are very very done (I have given away all the baby stuff, that's how done we are), but I do think it's sort of funny that the only way my subconscious seems to think I can take a break from brain-work without feeling guilty about it is by having a baby.

Be quiet, subconscious. Christmas break will be here in a few weeks, and then I am going to stuff you full of shlock tv and popcorn reading. It'll be fine.