[luxinterior]

I try not to make broad statements about what I will or won't do in the future. All I can say is that I've never had that "I hope I have kids someday" feeling. I'm not opposed to having a family, but I'm not sure I would want to take on the role of a mother. I love my own family (when I say that I usually mean for it to include my mom and my brothers), and I honestly cannot imagine life without all three of my brothers. They really are my best friends. So every now and then I get to wondering how I can reconcile this love of a big family with my own preferences of not having children in the future. And then I realize that it's not the amount of kids in my family that makes me love my family, or the fact that there are kids at all, it's each brother as an individual that makes me love my family. And that cannot be duplicated, so there is no point in thinking that by having children I could somehow recreate that. Basically, if I love my brothers so much, I should just try to keep in contact with them as much as I can once we are living apart, and always try to involve them in my life. All of this makes me wonder if other people get confused and think that they want to have big families because they liked their own big family so much, and when their new big family turns out to be quite unlike the family they belonged to as a child, the situation becomes more stressful than enjoyable.

Today at school all the art students went on a field trip, and I got to talking to a friend of mine on the bus ride back about all this sort of stuff. She was talking about how she could see herself marrying her current boyfriend, and how she wanted to have a career and later on have a kid or two. And I told her about how I didn't think I wanted kids, and how the thought of being a mom has always left me feeling odd in the bad sense, but that at some point I might consider adoption. Then she asked me if it was because I was afraid of getting fat, and I said no, based upon a few different things, one being that about a year ago I was nearly 20 lbs lighter than I am now (putting my weight at that time at a whopping 108 lbs). My normal weight fluctuates between 115 and 125 lbs, usually, depending on what foods I'm into at any given time. Sometimes it's pasta, sometimes it's bananas, and I become obsessed with that particular food for a while until I move on to something different. But obviously pasta is going to make me gain weight and bananas are bananas. We don't have a scale at my house, but I can tell by the way my pants fit. Anyway, I was going to school in Chicago when my weight dropped to 108, probably because I was actually eating balanced meals from the dining hall and not snacking at all in between them because I just couldn't afford it. I felt like I was wasting away and my clothes started to look baggy and terrible on me, and I had to invest in a belt because I couldn't afford new pants. My figure (or lack thereof) looked boyish to say the least. When I eventually moved back home and went back to eating terrible shit, I put on weight, and my clothes started to fit me again. I thought I was looking better even though my diet wasn't (and still isn't) all that healthy. But when I was telling my friend about all of this, it suddenly hit me that I do feel really uncomfortable when I experience changes in my body. Right now I feel like myself. If I were 20 lbs lighter I would not feel like myself. If I were 20 lbs heavier I would not feel like myself. If I got pregnant I think it would make me crazy. I don't think I could handle it. If I ended up as a mom, with my own biological child, I don't think I would feel at all like myself, because no part of me wants that. That's much worse to me than any bodily change. That's a lifestyle change, and it's a lifestyle that wouldn't be able to withstand my narcissism.