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4/5/18 Maternal Guilt, In Short

Motherhood was never a driving goal of mine. Even as all my high school friends were off being impregnated by future absentee fathers, my only aspiration was to get out of my shitty poverty stricken neighborhood and maybe one day see the world.

Of course, youth + stupidity squashed those hopes fairly quick.

I wasn’t meant for motherhood. I knew it right away, although I couldn’t accept the bald truth of it. This is not to say that I did not love my first son – I have never loved any living human as much as I have my first child. Just looking at him every day broke my heart in different ways in which I had no idea how to handle. The overwhelming pain I felt in thinking that I wasn’t good enough to be the mother to this amazing tiny ball of perfection still lingers, 21 years later. Only in hindsight and more self-introspection that I care to admit, have I realized how much the absence of my own parents  affected my demeanor towards my son.  Of course, anyone on the outside looking in would say I’ve done a great job. How wonderful that he and I have such an amicable relationship.

They do not know that I walked away from him when he was 6 months old. That I thought he’d have a better life without me in it. They do not know that when he was a year old, I willingly handed over physical custody to his father and never legally fought for him because I was too scared that I would lose. The courts would see I wasn’t the right kind of “mom material” and I’d be deprived of any real communication or time spent with him. They do not know how much I drank (so much) while he was gone just to black out my guilt of not being the cookie cutter mold of what a “Good Mother” was supposed to be, that my status of Weekend Mom not only belittled my character in the eyes of others, but in my own as well.

But I loved him, albeit from a safe distance. In solitude, the ache of his absence would send me into fits of uncontrollable weeping. A handful of poems I wrote remain as a reminder of those times, but not one more than that because any attempt to  encapsulate my feelings about my life without his presence in it would spiral me further into a depression in which I was not keen to visit. Throughout the years, I never questioned that I still wasn’t worthy and constant arguments with his father (the “good” parent) didn’t help. The weight of my fears and doubts tempered any desire or attempt for the closeness I longed to have with my son.

However, as each year passed, as he grew into a young man and his childhood days receded as an ebbing tide, I accepted that imperfections and all, I was His Mother. I would like to say it was an overnight transformation in which I woke up and Voila, All Makes Sense and is Well and Good!, but that is not how life or personal growth works. I still wrestle with my guilty days, especially as I am now raising my two youngest in such a different manner. I find while I am spending time with them, running errands, singing songs, sewing up injured teddies – I am also ruing all of which I’ve missed from my first child’s formative years. However, I am also aware that even as just a weekend/summer mom, I tried the best I knew how to build a bond between the both of us. And as long as I am alive, there will always be room for improvement in that relationship.

We joke, we laugh, we text, we message.  We do have a better relationship than most. He has assured me time and again that he harbors no ill will towards me, that he never thought I was a “bad mom”. He has made it clear that I’ve always been Good Enough (and it makes him sad to know I felt any other way), which I still mostly struggle to believe. It is not something in which I’ve completely come to terms with, though little by little it sets in. He has grown into a man whom I am proud to call Son and I hope that one day I am the woman who he is proud to call Mom.

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The Missed Miscarriage

I’m on a few hours sleep right now. I am surprisingly alert yet I am also not sure how long this strikingly coherent state will last. In short, I am writing this before I lose the will and/or energy to gather up my loose thoughts before they roll away into the ether mist of the back bits of my brain.

I had a missed miscarriage. In case you are not familiar, it is when the fetus dies but the body hasn’t recognized the death. The mother-to-be will still feel pregnant, symptoms and all, but in actuality, isn’t. It was something I knew of, yet apparently didn’t completely grasp.

There was no amount of self-preparation that had me readied for the ultrasound technician to softly utter, “There isn’t a heartbeat.” Of course, I knew there might be a chance for loss of pregnancy. I just turned 40. We didn’t plan this. I had still been eating and drinking like a savage before finding out that my sickness was of the morning variety. So, yes. I repeatedly reminded myself that I could lose this surprise baby at any given moment. And that logic and rationality helped to keep my composure in the face of these nameless hospital personnel peering at me with saddened eyes. I cannot stand for the pity of strangers, so “losing it” or expressing anything other than reticent calm was  not an option. I let the kindly woman know that it was okay. I knew there was a chance of this happening. I’ve been preparing myself for something like this.

And when I saw the doctor to discuss how to deal with the dead fetus in my womb, I didn’t shed a tear. She shot it straight and listed my options. I could wait for my body to expel the tissue on its own. I could take some pills to force the miscarriage to its completion. I could have the surgery which would in essence be vacuuming up the no longer useful or needed remains of a new life that just didn’t make it. I sat straight in that chair, the absolute pragmatist, and asked which was the most cost efficient.

Ah. Pills it is.

After finishing up the talk with discussion of future birth control methods and “Don’t forget to make a follow-up appointment”, I left. No time for tears. Still have to drive home. Oh, it’s nice out. Maybe we can finish putting up the lights. What should we have for dinner?

It wasn’t until the pharmaceutical assistance kicked in that I understood and truly felt in my soul what was happening. Why did I choose this? What – was I some emo depressive teen locked away in my room with my razors and angst, needing to associate physical to the emotional, or else it didn’t matter? The cramping itself wasn’t the problem. It was the rapid expulsion of what could have been.

It was after 6 a.m. My husband was barely at work 5 minutes before he jumped in his car and drove right back home. He held me as I cried and apologized for ruining his birthday. He whispered Shut Up into my birds nest of bed head hair as I sobbed quietly, not wanting to wake our other two boys across the hall. He helped to mop up the blood and gross seemingly masticated chunks of tissue that was just falling out of me sloppily, with no warning or difficulty. Once my tears stopped, in between the sorrow of loss and the mourning of a life that would never be, there happened a void. A numbness, an emptiness that carried with it no descriptive or tangible explanation. An emotional black hole – an oxymoron.

After a while, the pain and bleeding subsided. I was physically exhausted, dehydrated, and famished. It didn’t take my body too long to recover. Water, food, rest. All is well.

But is it? While life as my family knows it has continued to move forward, I find myself swimming in reminders that Hey, we never planned another child. That this is for the best. Well, now we don’t have to figure out A, B and C. Things will be much easier financially. Etc., etc., etc.

Yet, all of these constant prompts do little to quell the ache. I will finish decorating. I will grocery shop and meal plan. I will do laundry, wash dishes, make vet appointments for our cats, eventually hang out with my friends and enjoy a dinner out with a nice glass of wine. And I will take care of my two little boys while doing my best not to wonder what it would have been like to have a third in our new house that still needs so much work…

Maybe it’s not the best solution towards recuperation, but it’s the one I’ve got.

Posted on by She Never Sleeps

Contemplating Motherhood

On paper, I am a married stay-at-home mom of two toddler boys and one college bound dude who I brought into this world when I was very young and oh so many lives ago. I am aware that I am not conventional (this month, my hair is blue/purple and my new thing is cat leggings). I never have been, I doubt I ever will be. I have lived a life my own with so many mistakes and dumbass dangerous decisions, I am really freaking surprised that I am not only alive but intact. But here I am, the harried homemaker, switching out laundry, making meal plans for the week, budgeting groceries, wiping asses more often than should be permitted for one’s own sanity, and essentially – making sure nothing/no one is set on fire and/or dies. Added to this, my husband has been trying to talk me into signing the boys up for the intro soccer program called L’il Kickers. I balked not because I don’t encourage sports but because I have an extreme aversion to socializing and making nice with the Status Quo parental units.

I needed a break.

So, I had dinner with my best friend tonight. It was perfect. It was too long in the coming and I always chastise myself afterwards for not making more time for just the two of us to catch up. The pair of us are both incredibly different people but such kindred spirits with far too many similarities in the oddest of ways. I mention this because over the course of our meal, we touched upon one of our bonds – our mothers (funnily enough – didn’t even realize Mother’s Day was this Sunday) and how they simultaneously screwed us up in comparable fashions.

Of course, as grown adult women who have spent the better part of their life “fixing” themselves and coming to some sort of peace with the neglect and abuse of their own parent(s) constantly under the influence, we exchanged childhood anecdotes candidly with a shared laugh here, a silent nod of understanding there. We spoke of the long road to Self-Realization, the oft stumbled through path of trying to figure out how to love ourselves despite our inclination to do otherwise. We joked that we were surprised how well we turned out, despite having the moms that we did.

We delved further past our maternal caregivers and spoke of how it affected our life choices. She admitted to never wanting to have children for fear that she’d not be an affectionate enough parent, as she was often the whipping post for her alcoholic mother’s rages while her sister delighted in the attention and favoritism that was left after all anger and violence had been spent. I mentioned that I was glad I only had boys because I didn’t know if I’d be capable of mothering a girl, that I would teach my sons to never undervalue a female and to never make a woman feel uncomfortable in her own skin.

These were a few of the things we spoke about and eventually the evening tapered off nicely. I gave her a warm hug, promised that we’d hang out sooner than later, and then I headed home. During my drive, I thought of my little boys. I thought of how happy and full of life they were. How affectionate and sweet. How they hated leaving any park or playground because they didn’t want to leave their “new friends”. And just like that, I knew that I was being ridiculously unreasonable about the soccer program. I realized that I was stunting my own children’s formative steps into building friendships and early socialization. I understood that even after all these years, after all the supposed work I had put into becoming a “normal functioning” human being, that I still wasn’t done. I was purposely already putting up a wall between myself and the activity aka the other parents – whom I hadn’t even met – because I was still harboring underlying fears of rejection and not being liked and/or accepted.

As my South Side cousin would tell me, “Dang Girl. Dat Shit got real crazy quick.”

I cannot let my own trepidation bleed into the lives of my children. I have fought hard to get where I am at today and now I know that I’ve still yet farther to go. But for my boys, they need to know that their mother always tried. That their mother may not have always gotten it right, but damn it, she tried. It is, the very least, any mother can do.