R.He was shining in the bathroom in a dark book store. However, I can see blood on the toilet paper. I wiped more to make sure I was not just seeing things, then stood up, and grabbed the porcelain sink so that I wouldn’t drop.
Suddenly, I understood. I didn’t want to lose my child. I wanted to be the mother of this child more than anything I wanted in the world. I will do anything I seek to keep it alive. The problem: There was not much that I could do.
Another few minutes passed, then slowly got out of the store and to the street. On the sidewalk, I closed my eyes. I took a breath. I opened my eyes. The Earth was still firm under my feet. I didn’t feel pain. I can inhale it and exhale. I said to myself. I will be a mother.
This is when I wrote my fiancé, Rob, and I told him about the blood. “Go back to the house,” he wrote quickly.
“Everything is fine,” he said when I entered, moved forward and gently grabbed my hand between the comfort of his hand. “Why don’t you call the doctor?” This is how I did. I can no longer think of myself. I was a robot.
He was nine at night and the doctor was not in the office. I called the answer to the answer and told the woman on the other side of what was wrong. I heard her writing while thinking: Can’t you get a doctor?
The woman’s voice looked annoyed. As if she was just trying to overcome her outlet. “The doctor will call you,” she said.
“Call me again?” He came out like screaming. Rob’s hand was on my back. “When? How long? Do not understand? I don’t want my child to die.”
The next thing I remember: The doctor was on the phone, and he quietly asked me questions. How many blood there? What is its color? Does the blood fill one plate per hour?
I said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” After that, “I am sure it’s nothing.” I am still not sure why this. My mind was so badly that the words came out of my mouth.
“It’s okay, this is my job.” The doctor’s voice was nice. “The blood is normal. 20 percent of women test a discovery in the first trimester of pregnancy. I put on a plate, and if I fill it within an hour and then call me again. Don’t hesitate. Meanwhile, try to get a rest.”
After she was hung, I cried on the shoulder of a robe. I was sure that our child will die, and all my mistake will be.
INot as if I didn’t know how I got here. A year and a half after Ivan and Zuji’s solution, I met Rob. We were still fragile from our divorce. Indeed, in fact, when we met for the first time, we called EXES because of the way our emerging relationship is chasing us. Another thing that chases our relationship? Sudden certainty that I wanted a child. now.
Rob was on board, but the schedule was different from me. As in, he had no one. In the end, though, we reached an agreement, and I assumed stupidly that once we reached the same page about when we have a child, everything will be sailing.
Now I was forty -four years old and pregnant, and ordered a full panic. It wasn’t just that I was sure that we would lose this child. I was sure that the death of our child would be a punitive: to abort the child, I was pregnant when I was 17 years old, to marry a person who did not want children to prove myself and a world that I was loved, and my travel and follow -up of my career and belief in adventures and believe that I could be anything I wanted to be, all in my time schedule.
I I didn’t always know that I wanted a child. In fact, most of my life spent thinking that I did not. But after a long period of my wedding to Ivan, I sat on the other side of my treatment and said the real thing that I knew at that moment: “The whole child’s question pushes me to the walnut.”
“Well,” she said. “On a scale from one to 100, to what extent do you want a child?”
I thought about a few seconds, which allowed my breath to fill my body and then relax when the air pushed his way out of my nose.
“The honest answer is 55 %.”
Obviously, I wanted a little more child than I did not want a child. There is no degree of analysis, meditation, books or conversations with friends a large transfer of the needle at 55 %. I have presented the positives and downsides lists. My conclusion was that there are many good reasons for having a child, and many good reasons for not. The best that I can have was that I wanted a little more child than I did not.
“There is going,” she said, smiling, as if this was all I need to know.
But was this all I need to know? Why did I take that I need to be a mother in order to be a mother after that?
I spent my entire life in the hesitation before choosing motherhood because, let’s be real, I was told that the life of the mother occurs in a galaxy far from life without children – one I will exhaust her, and a book about depression, and it is possible that you are upset with my partner if you are lucky enough to find one. I warned that I no longer get to know myself, before the house. I was told that these two sides of myself, the warring in my heart – the person who wants the children and the person who does not – should come out to death.
Did you really want a child, or did I not know what to do myself if I had no child?
toThe story of the one wholesale Ydia Davis, puts a dual negative in the words of what I felt for a long time. At a certain stage of Davis’s life, she realizes that it is not so that she does not want a child that she does not want to not give birth to a child, or not having a child. This was exactly.
“Some people may say that you should really want a child if you have a child,” I told my therapist that day.
“Who are these people?” She answered.
I ignored. I no longer know more. Parents and motherhood looked like something I should be 100 % sure if I had a child. Perhaps I should adopt a dog or improve my plants alive first. Perhaps I should show the children of children to my friends for the weekend. What should the volatile father do? Parents are the only thing in life everything or nothing. There are no verbs.
Before I leave my processor’s office on that day, I tried to say words loudly. I want a child. I want a child. I want a child. Part of me think that as soon as it is called, this would be true. All the female empowerment speech that I was dealing with for decades made it seem easy: “his name to claim it.”
I strongly wanted someone to tell me how to live. Another person to define the meaning of “good life”. But I did not know what to do the parts of the puzzle from the lives of other women. What can I say about my private life from examining their lives? What are the answers that their hopes and dreams carry? What paths did you carve for me? This did not help if I spent my entire life hearing the stories of anyone else about my grandmother Kitty and my grandmother Ruth. Hear how they gave up their children for men. Or worse: he abandoned their children for themselves. What if you were able to give up my child too?
Through fragments of wrong and guessing information, I began to collect a narration for those I thought I would be. I said to myself, I must be ashamed of women in my family. I believed that their minds were corrupted in one way or another. I thought they failed to develop their needs first. So I ran away, looking for foreign places and adventures, all to avoid the infection that I was sure that I would capture it if I allowed the sins to leave its fingerprints on me.
I blame the paths of the trauma, the bad blockade, the poor decision -making and the dependence on men for money and power. I didn’t want to rub their lives.
I convinced myself that what I inherited from the women in my family was a defect in the genetic code. A boom that would turn me out of my children as well. It was the only way to avoid what I saw in thinking because the curse was the lack of offspring at all.
That was my plan for the twenties and early thirties. After that, in the mid -thirties of my life, I started wondering about the stories that I was feeding on all of my life. What if you do not give up women in my family about their children? What if they are not bad mothers, but good mothers, or, at least decent mothers? If possible, I may also be well.
I no longer want to wander around the world. I feel broken. I didn’t want my future to have written before it was born. I wanted to understand whether the DNA is just a diagram of my life, or whether I can determine my future. I wanted to know if motherhood was really banned for me-or whether I could free a different path. I may get the agency and the ability to do things different from my mother, mother and mother in front of her. Maybe I can create the life I wanted for myself and my child.
What I wanted is a story I can live with – unfortunately free, without expectation and free from anyone else’s ideas about who and what I should be. I had a lot of reasons to cancel the participation of motherhood, yet there was something inside me that continued to attract me towards the desire of a child.
NAh, five years after telling the therapist that I was 55 % sure that I wanted a child, I was putting between my Rob arms whispering: “Remember what the doctor said?” I shook my head. I didn’t know. “You just need to rest,” reminded me.
But his words did not drown. Snot covered my face. I wondered if we could buy an ultrasound machine so that I could see that our child was swimming quietly in the amniotic fluid.
Or maybe I can go to sleep and wake up within six months, when our child was finally born. I didn’t know that our child would turn well. In fact, it’s better than fine. She loves to help her father grow pepper in the community garden. And its favorite thing is to read a book for me. But at the time, I felt crazy. Rob’s answer was wandering his body around me from behind and whispering that everything would be fine. This is how we fell: warm, fearful and pressure against each other.
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Extracted Mother’s symbol: My story about love, loss and myths
This constitutes usThe Random House published on May 6.
