The Unbearable Desperate Dichotomy of Wanting A Fat Chubby Son

In which I talk about how badly I want to eat every chonky baby out there

This thing happens to me every single week before my period. Like clockwork. My uterus starts playing mind games with me and I spend hours on social media, scrolling through baby videos. I seek out vicarious pleasure through my phone screen because I am unable to give my uterus what it really wants…A fat chubby baby.

My sister tells me that if money and men weren’t such an issue, I would have had 10 kids by now and she would not be found lying. I do love babies. I love the idea of growing a flesh-eating monster in my belly. Yes. I do love torturing myself.

Sometimes…in the early waking hours, I will get a soft warm feeling in my face and arms. I get a very sweet dream where I am holding a fat baby. This baby has a dimpled chin and arms and legs with fat deposits that look like bread rolls. Two bulbous cheeks, like two ripe tomatoes weighing down its plant. He has long eyelashes and a big head with sparse black hair. His tummy is round and squishy. And he is my son.

This dream makes me teary-eyed because this chubby boy seems so real. Sometimes I can feel his small pudgy hands grabbing my hair and pulling it the way babies do. I want to hug my baby and smell his head. I can viscerally hear my son going goo goo gaa gaa, gurgling and smiling at my face. I also know that this dream is never coming true.

I have been an aunt for as long as I can remember. My first nephew was born when I was eight years old. He would come wrapped in a cotton diaper to my house and I would feed him, bathe him, wipe his vomit, pee and shit. And I loved every second of it. After about a dozen nephews and nieces, gallons of vomit, pee and shit…I feel spent. The last 20 odd years have confirmed that I am unskilled, incapable, undeserving and totally not ready to be a mom.

Because there are a million and one ways to fuck up a child. Speaking from my personal experience of being a former fucked up child and current full time fucked up adult. As a stay-at-home daughter and aunt, I am painfully aware of my shortcomings. And yet, I want nothing more in life than a baby seal in human form.

Maybe, even if I did consider getting my shit together and working out my complex internal matters, it is the world that scares me. I would handicap this imaginary baby by being an overprotective helicopter mom who has her kid tightly wrapped around her chest. All because I cannot bear the pain of intense human suffering that the world will subject this child to. As it does to all other children. The world will affect this baby, and I will be powerless in its mammoth face. It seems so selfish to bring a child into this world and then have nothing to offer them besides “thoughts and prayers.”

An East Antarctica ice shelf disintegrated last month because temperatures soared 40 degrees above normal. Climate change is happening faster than any scientist could have imagined. I don’t have too much belief in the grand entitlement of the human race, because let’s face it…We are all just a bunch of flesh and bones crying and whining on the internet about how everything sucks.

I try to look at the positive side and be hopeful, but I can’t help being cynical and pessimistic.

To have a blood-sucking vampire grow in my belly, I need to first find a fine specimen of the male species with quality sperm. LMAO. It’s like the universe put me on earth in this gorgeous female body only to further exacerbate my pain.

Gender roles are not what they used to be. At least boomer men had life skills that they provided besides hating women. These crypto bros today don’t even have that. I speak very harshly of men because we get told we are emotional and sensitive and they’re out here waging wars because someone ignored them at a party and didn’t shake hands with them. Like, I would love to be hated the old-fashioned way, the male specimen today has mutated to be even more insufferable with their toxic masculinity and manipulations. I draw a 5 km radius boundary with any man who says he is a feminist. Because a man can never be one, he will never know the lived reality of women. At most he can be an ally.

Add the violent anti-fat society into the mix and then things really go down the drain. In the words of our Lord and saviour Ashleigh Chubby Bunny, fat women like me are treated as a safety net by men. That they would at least have fat women to fuck, if none of the other straight-sized girls was putting out. When we exercise our autonomy, we face a violent backlash. How dare we have standards and say no! We are just fat ugly bitches who should just get steamrolled under the weight of patriarchal structures.

And these are not my imaginations, this actually happens. I know how the world treated me at the height of my depression when the heavy tranquillizers and mood stabilizers made me obese. I kept telling myself that it is better to be fat than dead. Against all those who were passive-aggressive to me and tried to concern shame me, bully me into losing weight. Because if I don’t fit the societal norm, no man would find me attractive and hence I won’t have someone to father my children. I punished my body beyond belief to finally find acceptance and it didn’t happen. Until I realized you could not change by hating or criticizing yourself. It took me years to finally reach a place where I am happy and at peace.

I also feel so tired of performing my femininity. My female-ness needs to be proved and I need to carry the social weight of my gender by constantly performing gender assigned roles. And I am so TIRED.

On top of all this, I still get dreams of wanting a son? A future man? What is this double standard? And I need to have sex? Peno-vaginal? With a man? The thought makes me barf. And exactly how am I to bring up a male specimen in today’s times? How am I going to socialize this boy into not being a massive jerk? While we live in a world designed to fan a man’s ego. Where he is lauded, appreciated and encouraged just for being a man. I am yet to meet a man who deserves to father my children. If I choose to have any, that is. Because, fundamentally, I believe men are incapable of loving women with the same intensity and tenacity the way women do. I would set my heart on fire in love, and my lover would most probably be struggling to find a lighter for his cigarette. And I come back full circle to the vicious cycle of wanting a baby, inclusive of his father in a cis-hetero normative husband-wife structure. Because I struggle to imagine a different reality.

India had 72 million single women the last time I checked (which is January 2022.) That’s bigger than most countries’ entire population. This list includes widows, divorcees, unmarried women and women who are separated from their husbands. It also includes 13 million single mothers who are heading households. Women out here doing all the hard stuff alone while men do what exactly?

Even scientists agree that single women lead happier healthier lives than all demographics. Marriage is amazing for men, but a torrential shitstorm for women. And exactly why should I disrupt my beautiful single life and for what? Because my uterus throws tantrums every month and is afraid it’s running out of time. Of course, it is!

When my surgeon checked out my ovaries last year, while operating inside my gut, he told me that they were white as chalk and in excellent condition. It would be a terrible waste of my perfect eggs if I didn’t get married and pop a few kids in the upcoming years. He gave me cosmetic stitches that took him twice as long because he wanted my future imaginary husband to not be turned off by the scars. I would have loved it if he said hey! I gave you some pretty and cute stitches so that you can absolutely rock hot girl summer and show off your body without stigma but no! My body had to be centred around male pleasure. In the words of Vanessa Hudgens, terrible…but inevitable.

He planted this seed in my head where I kept telling myself that my perfect eggs are getting wasted every month. I kept thinking of myself as spiderman where with great power comes great responsibility. I even thought of running away to Germany and living with my gay friend who badly wants kids. We could grow our kids in the lab and he would have what he desperately wants, and I could have what I desperately want.

But where’s the fun in lab-grown babies? When I got an excellent lab right here between my fine long legs. And then, like clockwork, I get more thoughts about how it’s never going to work out. How would we even bring these kids up? With my trash mental health? In an unknown country with surprise medical bills? And no family or friend support? Where both of us have to live inside the closet forever? I know you’re reading this A. I love you and I desperately want to have your children. But this idea has been temporarily shelved.

I was trying to pick at straws but it was a straw that broke the camel's back. In my desperation for a child, I met a man-child last year who showed great promise to be a great father but he squeezed every single living joy out of me. At one point, I thought he would hit me when I disagreed with him. He thought he could cure my depression with Patanjali Yoga. LOOOOL. I kept swallowing my pride and accepting abuse, for what? A flesh-eating chubby fat moron that would call me mom one day? The nerve. The audacity. The gumption. The gall.

Women do terrible tasteless things in desperation. I once even put ‘Looking for Rinkiya ke Papa!’ in my dating app bio when I was using it. Nobody got my Bhojpuri song reference and one guy even admonished me for having pathetic taste in music. Wish I had been more desperate for a stable income, stable mental and physical health and stable friendships. This is where I am focusing my energies right now, besides creating my hardcore Bhojpuri songs playlist (Guddi Gilehri is where it's at my boys.)

But the dreams don’t go away. No matter how much I run away from my thoughts, I can’t run away from my biology. I microdose babies by sniffing every baby head that comes in my way, like a crack addict on the mend. I can’t run away from my desperate ovaries who do backflips when they see a baby anything. A baby human, a baby animal, a baby bird even a baby cockroach these days (you don’t understand the severity of the desperation my reproductive organs are going through. Please keep me in your “thoughts and prayers.”)

So many women, including my transgender friends, would kill to be in my body. I keep being ungrateful for the gifts I was so carelessly given, like loose pocket change. I sprinkle my life with self-doubt and agonising under confidence, how I put onion and garlic in every dish. Onions and garlic are cheap right now okay.

I want to sincerely give up this unbearable desperate dream of birthing a really fat chonky baby boy. My uterus can’t punish me eternally because her days are numbered. What’s she going to do after I turn 50? Huh? Murder me? She is going to be useless and powerless after all.

Until then, my white street cat lucky, who is a giant dingus, will have to bear the brunt. I tell my mom this is the only grandson she will see from me and she has warmed up to him. I am still keeping one foot between the door. I introduce him as my son to all potential dates. If they can be a good father to him, they can perhaps father my future flesh-eating monster child. Yikes!