I will not be your baby-maker!

Let me take a step back, calm down and clarify. Recently a friend sent me this article:

http://www.askmen.com/dating/curtsmith_600/629_curvy-women.html#ixzz2cRujqA1P

“One other researcher suggests that curvy women are smarter and make smarter babies. Steven Gaulin from the University of California at Santa Barbara says that guys who choose women with chubby booties and thighs have a reproductive advantage. He believes that women’s hips and thighs contain omega-3 fatty acids, which help nurture both mothers’ and babies’ brains during pregnancy. Yep. This dude thinks curvy women make smarter babies. Just sayin’.“

It was sent to be funny and I laughed quite a bit and also found it pretty flattering in the moment.

Lucky me! Then I panicked.

(Let me start off with a disclaimer saying that I have the utmost appreciation for mother’s. I’m at an age that most of my newsfeed is filled with pregnancy status’ or baby pictures. I respect and love my mother and everything she put up with with raising me, my sister who was born to have kids and I envy the way she cares for her son and yet-to-be-born daughter, and my mothering friends, like Heather, who went into birth a month early and rocked it out proving that she is one of the bravest people I know. So please don’t read the rest of this thinking I look down on motherhood at all, if anything I believe the women that were born to be mother’s are at an advantage to me and I wish I could be like them.)

So back to the article, it’s not a secret that I’m a curvy girl. I still remember the moment when I was 12 and getting ready for church and my father put his foot down about a certain skirt I was wearing because I had already begun to grow my bodacious backside, at 12. It was embarrassing and I cursed it then but now I have more of a love/hate relationship with my derriere.

Imagine though, this study suggests that men want me and other women like me, because we will be able to produce intelligent offspring for them. Or so they think…

This terrifies me. I don’t like the idea of being viewed as an incubator because I’m not ever sure if I want to be ‘laying my eggs.’ I’m sure the stats are right and we’ve all heard about how a women’s body was created the way it is to attract a man evolutionary-wise so they can produce more little half-apes. But even if scientifically women with ‘lady lumps’ are viewed as good, potential mothers, it doesn’t mean that we want to be those mothers! I’m sorry but I haven’t wrapped my head around the whole birthing a human being from sensitive areas yet. And I certainly haven’t found a man worthy enough to carry around his offspring for the better part of a year.

I’m probably overreacting to this article. (Okay! I know I am.) And it’s not the article itself, it’s just what the article made me start thinking about. MOTHERHOOD.

As a girl who usually played the ‘Dad’ in me and my sister’s play-house scenarios when we were children (because the Dad got to go off to work and leave for a majority of the day) it’s a little daunting to think that I could only be viewed subconsciously by men as a good baby-maker. I haven’t decided if children will be in the cards for me yet and this article is suggesting that my body is saying ‘Screw it, this is what you were built for.’ I love being an aunt, as I’ve mentioned before, but actually having the responsibility of another human being for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year,  524,160 minutes a year is terrifying. There’s a reason I never became a teacher.

Yes, calm down, this post isn’t entirely serious. I know these studies can be flawed and every man is different but goodness, way to make me panic AskMen! I do hope though that the men I meet are looking at me as less of a baby machine and more as a potential partner. A partner that may not give them curly-headed, blue-eyed babies with outrageous IQ’s but as a partner that may be just as happy spending non-kid money on houses, books or traveling the world. A partner that may want to contribute my education and work ethic to our marriage instead of the responsibility of bringing mini-us’ into the world. I want people to realize that curvy women are not just fine, purebred’s (ha) but that we also have thoughts to contribute to society.

I guess I could just start eating dangerously low calories and get to an unhealthy weight range, but even then I don’t think I’ll be able to get rid of my curves.

They are a curse of gigantic proportions.