After writing that title, I’m having pleasant wisps of memories of watching The Last Unicorn on VHS on the tiny t.v. in my college dorm room. Unrelated, to be sure, but slightly comforting, like a side hug.
I’ve been wondering lately if women experience pregnancy, childbirth, child-rearing, etc. differently when they know they’re having their last baby. I certainly didn’t know. I spent my young adult life trying desperately NOT to get pregnant as my partner and I learned the hard way that we were spectacularly fertile. You know how birth control is 99.99999999% effective? Apparently I’m the reason for that .000000001% deviation. I’m also prone to miscarriages, which actually worked in my favor when I was whoopsie-pregnant at 18 like an utter idiot.
My partner and I also decided to go the old-fashioned route and not find out the gender of either kid before they were born. My son came first in 2005, and when I was pregnant with his sister, we decided that, if Kathryn had been another boy, we’d consider having a third to try for a girl.
All that to say: I never foresaw a fertility problem down the line, and wasn’t sure whether my second baby would be my last. Truthfully, remembering back, I don’t think I gave it a single thought. My doctor had determined that I had low progesterone, which was likely the cause of my prior miscarriages, and so the pregnancy, while healthy, felt a bit fraught with the weekly doctor appointments to receive injections. I was thrilled to get her to full-term since her brother had been 5 weeks early and had a short stay in the NICU.
Those babies (BABIES! HA!) are now 18 and 15, respectively. Life has changed dramatically since their births, but after over a decade at the current status quo, things are as calm as they can be. Their dad and I co-parent well, and Nathaniel is settling into college life in his freshman year.
Chris and I have struggled with infertility due to what he refers to as his “self-defensive vasectomy” in response to reproductive abuse in his first marriage. Unfortunately, funds which, in hindsight, would have been much more productive going towards IVF, paid for an unsuccessful vasectomy reversal, and here we sit. Super fertile folks, by all accounts, stymied by the overwhelming cost of fertility treatments in a country in which healthcare is part of fucking CAPITALISM (which I realize is a whole other discussion but WHAT THE FUCK America).
I know it’s difficult to feel sympathy for two people with biological children who simply can’t seem to have children together. I get it. I’m also staring down the barrel of 44 and realizing that, at this point and without the motivation of burning desperation on both our parts, it just ain’t happenin. I can accept that - have to accept that - because the alternative is digging a hole and laying in it ‘til I’m dead, and Chris has made it clear that that won’t be an acceptable response.
I know I can’t go back in time - and believe me, I’d change some shit if I did because wouldn’t we all? - but I wish I’d enjoyed my last pregnancy more. Really taken time to enjoy the experience instead of getting slightly annoyed by the hiccups emanating from my womb which threatened to make my bladder give way on road trips.
I wish I’d known how few years I’d get to enjoy waking up with my children on Christmas morning. The last time I got to experience that acute joy was when they were 5 and 2. The Christmases since have been marked by logistics and frenetic rushing, trying to make sure everyone has adequate time with myriad loved ones.
My kids have never come home to me on the bus. Those hazy afternoons spent breathlessly running in the door after school, backpack flying, grabbing a snack, and flopping onto the couch for some down time hasn’t happened in our house since 1998 (which was the last time I would have done it as a teenager when my parents owned it).
I don’t get to walk my kids to school. I never have. I fight at each end of the day against 40-odd miles of shittastic traffic (4 times a day - down and back and down and back) to arrive to work (in the morning) or at home (in the evening) exhausted and nerves jangling.
I realized in conversation with Kathryn a week or so ago in an embarrassing, hot rush of tears that I’ve never felt as if she and Nathaniel were ever really “mine.” I carried them, gave birth to them, and my body fed them, but my time with them has always been borrowed. The fine line between fighting over them and fighting for them felt like an immutable tide.
I look at my husband every day with the rush of love reserved only for him, a love somehow heavy and light at the same time, the type of love I beg my children to wait for, to never settle. My eyes catch his and I drift in the languid autumn colors I could remember the rest of my life if I went blind tomorrow. I wish, I wish, I wish that we could sit on a lazy Saturday morning, him with his tea and me resting a cup of decaf coffee on my expanding belly, pontificating over whose features might appear once we meet the little bundle. I wish I could watch him rock our baby…Sit next to him in an old school auditorium while our elbows brush and our child finds us in the crowd with a wave of excitement and relief.
Those things are not for me. They’re for other people - my parents, my brother, my kids’ father, even Chris - but not for me. Objectively, I know that moms come in many different forms, and the necessity of my brand of mothering is not inherently less than another’s, but I struggle to feel whole in that role.
I wish things were different. I wish I was different. I wish I’d been different.