The Other Side of Mother's Day
This is my 8th Mother’s Day with my twins. I am so grateful for their wonder, creativity, love, and kindness.
But I remember the years before they were born when just the mere sight of children made me cry inside—at grocery stores, going out to eat, while rolling out my garbage bin. The struggle to have kids became so painful that I couldn’t even go to my nephew’s third birthday party. I knew I would just vacillate between anger, jealousy, and grief throughout the excruciating two hours of celebrating this wonderful boy whose first words upon seeing me were always, “Aunt Vanessa!” said with such glee, exuberance, and innocence.
Infertility is a real struggle and more people than you realize experience it—privately, silently, and painfully. We hardly talk about the miscarriages or the monthly disappointments when you again start to menstruate. Why would we? It’s so much easier and more pleasant to talk about babies and the weather.
But for me every month, it had been as though the flow was pouring straight from my broken heart itself. Then the next month we would try again but before we had time to recover from the grief of last month, our hope was dashed again. When hope dies, there is just pain and despair.
Can you imagine getting on your bike, riding half a block, and then getting hit by a car? Then imagine getting back on again and being hit by another car before you reach the end of that block? What if this happened to you over and over? Would you question whether something was wrong with you? That was me for three years. I got up on that figurative bike more than 30 times, each time with a little less hope and increasingly more fertility drugs and assistance.
After a while, I was just going through the motions. If this had been you on a real bike, I’m pretty sure you would have abandoned riding all together by the third or fourth incident in as many months. What maniac would choose the highly likely chance of increased pain every single month over and over again? That is how much some of us want parenthood. That is how much society sometimes brainwashes us with its expectations of marriage and motherhood for anyone born with a uterus.
For me, I wanted to see flickers of my father in my child(ren); to know that even though lung cancer took him all those decades ago, he would continue to live in the generations to follow. The likelihood of that faded with every month. Would I be ok without any of those flickers?
Don’t get me wrong. I have always loved and wanted kids even before his passing. I was a mother’s helper when I was 9-years old--changing diapers, the whole shebang. It was my jam. I love my twins with all my heart. But it took us a lot of time, money, advanced medicine, and soul searching for them to get here. I loved being pregnant with them. Some women aren’t as lucky as I.
There’s always adoption, you say. Yes. But that also takes a lot of time, money, and effort…not to mention the psychological burden of infertility is still there. And somehow that burden always falls upon the woman. For so long, I wondered what was wrong with me that I couldn’t conceive on purpose when so many people in my life and on TV can do it by accident, without planning, or by merely sneezing…or so it felt.
I have known for a long time that life is not fair. I lost my dad when I was 10. It took a while for me to climb out of that one. This one was no different.
So, just like you shouldn’t ask a woman how far along she is because she might not actually be pregnant, you shouldn’t ask her when she is going to have a baby. Seriously, please don’t. First of all, it’s really none of your business. Secondly, she wasn’t born to meet yours or society’s generic expectations of her gender. And finally, she might actually be trying harder to be pregnant than you can even imagine or it might actually be medically dangerous for her; so support her and help her bring other joys to her life instead of pestering her with an unwanted question.
On this and every Mother’s Day, I celebrate all the mothering souls (Thanks, Bunny.) who do not have kids, by their choice or not. I celebrate those mothering souls who have not given birth to kids but treat them as their own. I celebrate every mothering soul no matter how you came to be.
It really does take a village.
