Tom’s sister oona called by this afternoon for a cup of tea and a chat, and i had the day off work so we sat around for a while in the spring sunshine. Her daughter was with the childminder, and her son was watching simpsons in our living room. she went to roll a cigarette and pointed at the package, which said, ‘smoking can damage the sperm and decrease fertility’. “That’s ok, isn’t it?” she said to me, “mine usually say ‘protect children, don’t make them breathe your smoke’”. I looked at her. “You have no idea” I said, then corrected myself “Actually, you probably know how i’m feeling quite well”.

I decided just before christmas to stop taking the birth control pill. There were a lot of reasons for this – it was a time when I was moving around the furniture in my life, so to speak, and this change fit in quite well with all the rest. We decided it was worth a try, just to see if letting my body make its own hormones helped the stability of my moods. It had gotten to the point where for 10 days every month i felt like my clothes were made of sandpaper and everybody around me was poking at my ego with hot forks of displeasure. 10 days out of every 28! That proportion was too high to accept any longer so we started investigating the other options available.

Three months down the line I’m pleased with the decision, but have discovered one thing I wasn’t at all prepared for: the complete and utter irrationality of the power of hormones. I’m a fertile, fully ovulating woman for the first time in an undisclosed number of years, and suddenly i’m thinking about babies ALL THE TIME. To go from fretting over the responsibility of caring for a cat for nearly a year to thinking about pregnancy as one of my “career options” has me feeling quite disoriented. Every now and then, when I realise that my thought patterns are drifting towards dangerously obsessive, i have to take a moment to blink and look around. I have started making mental lists of all the reasons why now is not the right time for a baby. Peace. Quiet. Sleep. Sanity. Thesis. Money. But hormones have no rationality. They continue surging recklessly.

What’s a girl to do? Sandpaper clothes and hot forks of displeasure for 10 days out of every 28 or obsessive baby thoughts?? Getting busy with a new job or entrepreneurial project might help, i think. But an instinctive, animal part of my brain is telling me these thoughts are only going to get louder as I get older.

yikes.

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