I'm living the life no one wants, least of all me. But it is mine and I am responsible for my own happiness and so I must seek the integrity and truth that are mine in the life I've been given.
At 52 divorced 17 years from my husband who cheated on me with women entrusted to his care, I can say that I am only now coming to understand that being a mother is the most life changing thing that has happened to me. Sadly, I am a mother to three children who died before they ever drew a breath, my Dear Little Ones, and to the millions conceived and dead in shattered hopes and broken dreams of over 3,000 monthly vigils held in tortured expectation of s/he who would never come.
I see and read in the blogs and books the term “child free” and although I have no living children, and have spent the last two decades carefully, neurotically and sometimes ragefully, trying to avoid the whole “child/baby thing”, trauma therapists call it selective avoidance, I find now that menopause’s “gifts” have forced me reenter the obgyn zone in ways terrifyingly similar to my infertility struggle days. And by the way, my friends with children are now sprouting grandchildren and I don’t believe I have it in me to not fain excitement about the children of the children whose conceptions, births and lives I systematically avoided for so long because of the unrelenting pain which them simply being kindled within my soul. I cannot live another twenty, thirty, forty years into becoming that old woman, bitter, tortured soul who smells of urine, lives with stray cats, in ceiling-high garbage, friend only to the condescending smile from meals-on-wheels.
Coming now to see more clearly that “child free” is not the truth of me, and that in the grief of them is my maternity for I have pondered them in my heart and carried them in the deepest recesses of my being, having been claimed by a love for them more powerful than any other I have known. Truly, I would and almost did on more than one occasion, give my life for them, sacrifice more of me than I had ever known. In my grieving now I pray for a softening of this mother’s heart of pain and the good guidance of others seeking to make their way through this unmapped, shrouded landscape of living into grief’s maternity.
1 comment:
Such a sad post. I hope you find peace with your life and that you don't end up one of those tortured old women.
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