So you reproduced successfully, what do you want, a fucking medal?

It never ceases to amaze me how much people, particularly women, are supposed to care about the abundant fertility of others. Children are flaunted, and we are expected to oooo and ahhhh over these precious bundles of joy, as if basic reproduction is something rare and not achieved by millions of people per year.

Today a guy that works in my university brought his toddler daughter (who I must confess, I thought was a boy, oops! I should really be having kids, huh? Even gender confuses me!) into the office I share with four other women. Unfortunately for this man, he could not have picked a more child-ambivalent environment in which to bring his spawn. There is me, hopelessly infertile but nonetheless vastly unconcerned with the children of others, one woman is a childless-by-choice lesbian in her 50s, another is a child-hating woman in her mid-30s, a third has a stepchild and has no interest in any more, and the fourth is seemingly disinterested in anything aside from trying to project a managerial air.

So here is this clueless smug fertile, parading his androgynous child around a room filled with the women least likely to commend him for his potent sperm and his wife's particularly accomodating uterus and damn fine ovaries. I almost felt bad for him when he shuffled shamefully out of the room, head down with his child clinging to his leg like a leech. Ah, who am I kidding? It was all I could do not to make scary faces at the leech-child as they were leaving.

Naturally this anti-child rant is followed by my own reproductive plans because I am all about the natural segue. The meeting with the consultant to discuss IVF is rapidly approaching it's next Saturday, the 18th. Hopefully it will signal the go ahead to actually start IVF, though this would also mark the beginning of the bread and water diet that The Dude and I will be reduced to. I'm tremendously apprehensive, but I know this is the right path to take. Please remind me of this when I'm pumped full of hormones, my ass is even more dimpled, but this time as the result of needle marks rather than too much Ben and Jerry's. I'll be back to the talk of all matters fertility, even though I'll still have no idea what I'm actually talking about.

I am sure of one thing though - if by some freakish one in a gazillion chance this IVF does get me knocked up, I will not be toting my child around my former office expecting people to commend me for *finally* kicking my asshole ovaries into shape. I will expect all of you to do this, but uh...that's what you're here for, right?