It doesn’t help that when I play with His son, I am really good at it! I am good at looking after him when he’s upset, cheering him up, entertaining him when he’s getting bored, playing his silly games, and telling him no when it’s necassary. Plus I love it. People usually mistake me for his actual mother and I get this immense feeling of pride and happiness. I don’t mind that I’m only step mum because he’s such a gorgeous child that any time with him is a blessing. Perhaps if he’d been a little bratt I’d feel differently? I don’t know.

As long as I can remember I’ve wanted a baby. I’ve been on contraception in one form or another for a long time, but went through a very bad patch a few years ago after a particularly difficult incident where I decided if I got pregnant by some random guy then I could have a child alone and never need to worry about getting hurt and ill treated by someone again. Just me and my child and we’d be fine. I did some very stupid things because of those thoughts and thankfully it never came to fruition. I know now that being in a stable and happy relationship is very important and I want to bring a child into that not into my own personal turmoil.

The scary fact is though that it didn’t work. I try to put it down to the fact that I’d been on long term contraception for a long time which stopped my periods and then was sporadically on different contraceptions, so my ovulation hadn’t settled down. Plus it takes some women months or years of regularly having unprotected sex before they get pregnant. I didn’t have that, I had occasional bouts of insanity.

But what if I can’t get pregnant? Maybe that’s part of why I’m so desperate to try. The sooner I get started the sooner I will realise it’s a problem and will start getting it sorted. I don’t want to be one of those women in their late 30s or early 40s still trying to get pregnant. I don’t want to wait for years of trying to find it’s never going to happen and to then start looking into adoption only to find I’m too old. It terrifies me!

I have regular dreams about being pregnant. I occasionally inerpretted those as my body telling me something I didn’t know and taken negative tests. I had times when I have bloated and reacted to smells and been feeling sick, and done negative tests. I’ve had my breasts be tender and grow larger and weird food cravings, and done negative tests. My head and my body have both tried at different times to convince me I’m pregnant and every single time it has been a cruel joke, and every single time I have acted relieved and said “well thank goodness for that!” and every single time I have holed myself up somewhere and had a private little cry for the child that never existed.

We have discussed it and aren’t going to have a child until we’re married. It’s the sensible and logical approach and something I actually want and agree with. But I’m a little bit envious. His ex got pregnant within two months of them getting together. Two months!  It came as a shock to him but he was happy about it in the end and even though they weren’t meant to be a couple they produced a fabulous child. I’m jealous. I know that’s a hideously unfair thing to say and feel but I am. I think part of why he is so insistent on waiting until marriage is because getting to see his child has sometimes been a battle and he feels very seperated from him. Because no matter what we do and where we go we are going to have to disrupt things for ourselves and for any children we do have to try and include him. It won’t always be easy and I am sure at times I will resent it because it’s a complication that nobody expects when planning their dream life. If we’re married when we have our kids then it will prevent more problems like that. But still, she got to do it. Jealous.

Eventually I will have a baby, and perhaps it will happen sooner than expected but I don’t think so. These things do happen but I don’t technically want it to until it’s the actual right time for us, even if everything else in my body is screaming out to have a baby, including my brain!

I think before addressing the issue of the Afterlife I am going to address an issue which I think is intrinsically connected; Religion.

I am not religious. I find the whole concept of organised religion both creepy and rather offensive. I was raised Church of England and educated in a Catholic School, perhaps that is what put me off I don’t know. Basically, a collection of people blindly following what their leader tells them to, not thinking to question it or have their own opinion, but when asked why something is to say “Because it’s in the Bible” is to me hideously ridiculous.

This is not a popular opinion but I think groups such as the KKK, Islamic Fundamentalists, Christian Fundamentalists, the IRA and football hooligans are all suffering from the same drone like lack of independent personality. It’s basically refusing to form your own opinions because of the family you happen to be born into, the country you live in, what your family biased you towards, and various other socio-economic factors that you had no control over. Had you been born into the group of people with the opposite beliefs you would have had those beliefs too. It’s refusing to take a step back and look at the world through your own eyes as oposed to the eyes you’re having blinkered for you.

My own personal experience of religion has been the Christian Bible. A few different stories written a few years ago over a long period of time as tales and poems got passed down through families and then collected together. Some stories were taken out if they didn’t fit the format. These were then translated and translated and miss translated and corrupted, presenting us eventually with a book we are today expected to follow as fact. God only knows why.

So that’s my opinion on organised religion. However, I think to have that kind of undoubting belief in something must be comforting. I have no belief. When I think about dying and where I am going to go, and where my family is going to go, I have no unwavering belief that we’re off to a better place, that we’re going to Heaven, or to be reborn, or to become spirits existing on another plane of existence.I don’t know.

My mother doesn’t find the idea of us just disappearing at all frightening. When I asked her she said she thinks that’s quite nice, she feels she has done a good job raising my brother and I, has had a life full of happy memories and fun, and when she leaves the world she will leave a legacy of happiness in us and her grandchildren.

I find the idea of disappearing terrifying. To just cease to exist. Gone as though I never was. I don’t believe in anything enough to stop me thinking that realistically this is probably the most logical outcome. I know there’s nothing I can do about it and I know that once I’m snuffed out then it won’t matter because I won’t have a consciousness to be aware of it. Yet it makes me feel sick with fear.

Perhaps I haven’t accepted my own mortality. I have attended a funeral, I have seen grandparents and family friends pass away, I have had numerous pets reach their inevitable frail age and die from natural causes or being put down by the vets, I have been there whilst it happened. My grandmother died in my home, actually in the room that is now my parents room. Yet I am not willing to accept that one day, and one day soon relative to existence, I am going to die. And worse still, all the people I love and the people I am yet to love are going to die. They’re going to disappear as though they never existed too.

My biggest dream in life is to have a child. It is what I have dreamed of since I can remember. If I found out tomorrow that I was pregnant then despite the financial circumstances of it, and being unmarried and living with my parents still, I would be thrilled. But if I bring a baby into this world and disappear? Without having raised them with any religion to give them comfort that it is going to lead to better things, it seems hideously selfish. But it seems worse to raise them with religion which I believe to be far worse.

It is ridiculously confusing and hard, and what is distressing is there is no answer. I googled it! I know! Every page has a different answer. There is no way to know until I get there and I am in no rush to do that.

But what happens when you start feeling invisible sooner?

I feel like I have started to fade.

Don’t get me wrong, I am a happy person and I have a very blessed life, but I feel like every day a little bit more of me starts to fade away.

It could be because I gained a lot of weight last year, three stone, going from 8 stone to 11 stone, and being 5″7 that means going from having a noticeably slim body and cropped top suitable stomach, to being the proud owner of a hefty muffin top, a big wobbly bum and thighs with the beginnings of stretch marks and cellulite. Oh joy.

I’m happy like this in that I don’t feel “fat” and I think clothes look nice on me, and He certainly seems to enjoy squishing the new booty I have swaying away back there, but I don’t get the same attention I used to, and I certainly don’t feel like I can slip into something sexy and dance the night away without looking stupid. I worry that I would embarass Him and embarass myself.

I used to be a dancer. I danced all through school appearing on stage in plays and dance recitals that I was usually at the front of. After that I danced across the dance floors of my local town until the hours of the morning that I am now fast asleep in. I wore sparkly heels, floaty dresses and was a glamorous and sexy woman. Now I wear chunky boots, leggings and sweaters. I don’t dance because I fear that my ever increasing clumsyness, as I try to adjust to the new body I haven’t quite worked out the size of, is going to cause me to break either my own body or somebody elses. And that I won’t look like the same graceful dancer I once was. I’m a different person and that scares me a little bit.

Twenty something and already fading into obscurity. When I turn 40 will I have disappeared altogether?

Once a sacred gift bestowed upon only the most talented of writers, we now offer praise and critique over any piece of script shoved before us be it a mini blog on Twitter which we follow with the most avid of page refreshes, or a full on waffling as I myself shovel up here.

Good or bad? Does it matter? Personally I think anything that encourages us to verbalise our thoughts and issues through writing is a good thing. I have never been able to keep a diary despite many lonely teenage hormone fueled efforts, but I love to write. As a teenager filled with dramatic angst it was poems, in school classes it was essays filled with opinions I passionately longed to express despite the abysmal spelling, grammar and punctuation. I’m still not 100% sure on nouns, verbs and adjectives.

The point is, it got it out. We are becoming increasingly solitary in this life. Whereas once we had to talk to people face to face for every little need we had, we now buy our groceries online, email friends to update them on our lives, order clothes from internet shops and find out about the latest music releases from youtube or Amazon. I have come to the worrying realisation on more than one occasion than other than the bathroom, I will not have left my bedroom where I do most of my work until it’s time to cook the evening meal. And leave the house??? I save that for very special and rare occasions.

I am not actually complaining about this, I have something of a hermit-like nature. One of the great benefits of my job is that I get to sell to people all over the world without ever having to speak to them. My boyfriend is much more of a social animal than I and volunteers at a local youth club, one of his favourite demonstrations of how much of a hermit I am is when he asked if I wanted to go and help out, my response: “There is only two things wrong with that idea. “Youth” and “Club”".

However, this does mean that my actual interations with people are becoming increasingly limited. When your brain is clustered full of thoughts that practically ooze from every orifice, you have to have some way to express them. Whilst I love Him, and my family are wonderful people, my small collection of real friends also very good people, I don’t for a minute think that they will care about every thing I wish to actually put out there. I’m sure they would listen and nod, but without actually understanding fully.

The thing about blogging is, if you don’t understand or care then you don’t read, but if you do, and it makes sense and you understand then it means something to you and it might provide comfort or entertainment, and then the words you have poured out will have impact and the world will change in some positive way because of it, rather than getting lost on the airwaves forgotten about by some well meaning, but slightly confused, loved one.

These ways are not always deliberate. As a twenty-something still living at home with my parents, our dogs, cats, rabbit and hamster, plus my boyfriend recently made redundant and undergoing major life upheavals and needing a roof over his head, I am not what you might call a success story in the general scheme of life.

Don’t get me wrong, I am very proud of what meagre achievements I have made, I run an internet shop which is gradually becoming more successful, and have a few other accomplishments to my name, but when you have status updates from people you associated with at school telling you about how their careers are taking them on international tours to new an exciting lands, others who are getting married and moving into luxurious new homes, and others still who have achieved increasingly higher levels of academic qualifications whilst managing to maintain happy and balanced social lives, one can’t help but feel somewhat flat.

I am happy for these friends… well… most of them anyway, and love to celebrate their successes, but if it weren’t for Facebook I would actually have minimal or no contact with most of them. I would be happy in my bubble blissfully unaware that He’s moving to Paris to work on some important scientific research, and She’s just bought her new house with her fiance and they’re decorating so tastefully. He’s off on a hiking tour of America and planning to write his memoirs and She has been promoted at work and is moving across the country alone to embark on a new project in her new more highly paid capacity.

Woohoo.

The thing is I could have followed in this life had I chosen to, so it’s not that I wish it were me. It’s not envy in that sense by any means. I have no desire to go flitting off alone to research particles, nor trek across anywhere really, let alone the whole of America. I could have though. I got the A level results necessary and my mother has the financial ability to support me in many endeavours of this nature. But I chose this path, which I love, I just can’t help but feel a failure sometimes.

Would I still feel this way if I wasn’t receiving these cruel little rib pokes from Facebook? Hard to tell. But I’m not going to unplug myself from Facebook any day soon to try and find out.