The Female Phenomenon of “Babies First.”

I met another one.

A daughter of a friend, not a patient.

A young woman to whom having a baby is so important that her mother calls her “mom.”

She can tell you the exact date the baby is due. She can tell you the exact date of the baby shower, the menu for said party, from the main course down to the finger foods.

Thanks to my offer, she can also tell you the entertainment for this large open-to-everyone-who-lives in the-apartment-complex party.

It’s my husband and me.

This pleasant young woman, like many I know as friends and patients, wants a baby more than anything else in the world.

More than getting married. She doesn’t seem to care about when she and her live-in — a definitely-a-keeper boyfriend — tie the knot.

She is a nurse and might want some more education to do that at a higher level but that is clearly not a priority.

She rubs her 6-month-or-so tummy in joyous expectation.

I am only two years older than my brother of blessed memory.

Seeing my mother’s toil with him 24/7 was plenty enough to help me decide that this was not a way to spend my adulthood.

This early idea was quickly frozen in my head. Even my grandmother’s later assertions that I would be a “big doctor” and pay someone else to do my “dirtywork” with babies could not convince me.

First, let me reassure you I am wildly heterosexual with a 26 year old delightful marriage to a very normal utterly perfect male.

It may seem in California as if such feelings are transplanted to America from south of the border. I do not think that the origin.

I remember in France certain regions that were like this, like the “Vimeu.” I always tended to hang around with over-educated urbanites.

This is how the human race survives.

If sex weren’t “fun,” or did not at least “just happen,” nobody would have any children and the human race would most likely vanish.

If little girls did not play with baby dolls, and take delight in the ability of such dolls, maybe they would not want to have babies and the human race would end.

We have a lot of traditions that seem designed to make life more adversarial — more “warlike,” almost encouraging people to kill each other.

Perhaps the most frightening one I have seen or heard of recently is the “Thor” hammer. An inflatable hammer that seems to “come alive” and speak when a (presumably male) child strikes things with it.

Lovely addition to a world where the airwaves are saturated with internecine verbal warfare between conservatives and liberals.

I want to believe that humans are capable of a higher love for their own species.