Thoughts about children

One day, when i was in kindergarten, i was playing “house” with some dolls. I remember my teacher coming up to me and asking me about it.

“Are these your babies?”
“Yes.”
“Do you want to have babies when you grow up?”
“Oh, no. I can’t have babies.”
“Why not?”
“Because i’d die.”

And thus began my long school career of initiating parent-teacher meetings. I had a lot of strange ideas about babies when i was a child. Nothing pertaining to where they came from, at least not that i could recall.

All of my dolls were blind. They couldn’t see anything. I remember being very affected by Mary’s blindness on Little House on the Prairie; it might have been that, or it might have been that i needed coke bottle glasses by the time i was in second grade.

But from a very early age, it never occurred to me that i could have children. Later, as i went through a lot of anger (and a lot of therapy) towards my mother regarding the way she had abused me and my brother, i decided that i would Never Have Children. If my mother couldn’t control herself around us, as her mother before her couldn’t control herself, then i decided i didn’t want to risk continuation of the cycle of abuse.

Fast forward to one of my boyfriends. He said out loud that he didn’t want kids, but he got all squishyfaced around kids, and a lot of the things he said indicated he actually did want them. Since it was a really fucked up relationship, i interpreted it to mean that he didn’t want them with me. One day, while helping some friends move, i felt a strong gripping pain in my abdomen, waves of nausea, and long story short: my first miscarriage. I wasn’t certain about it at the time, having nothing to compare it to. My period was generally regular, but it was a few days late. So if it was a miscarriage, i wasn’t far in at all.

Fast forward to another boyfriend. We never talked about it directly, but he had told me that his previous girlfriend (who had died in a tragic accident a year before i met him) was infertile as a result of an accident she’d had when she was a teenager. The way he talked about it made me think he didn’t want kids. One night, after we had sex, i felt a strange glowing feeling. The next morning when i woke up, i felt very different. As the days and weeks went by, i realized i never felt alone. There was always the presence of a little girl with me. I realized she was my unborn daughter. I could feel her with me from the moment she arrived.

Call it woo, call it weird, call it whatever you want. I know what it was. She left me 5 weeks later, on Christmas Day. The relationship did not survive my breaking the news to my then-boyfriend. I hadn’t told him about my little girl up until that point – i wanted to be sure.

I’ve had endometriosis since i was 15. My first surgery was when i was 19, my second surgery was when i was 26. The first time, they didn’t have as good an idea of what to look for, and so they thought there was nothing there – they were only looking for “gunpowder burns” – little black spots. By the time i was 26, a lot more was known about endometriosis and they lasered off about a dozen dime-sized nodules of the stuff. That’s a lot of years’ worth of internal scarring.

I just turned 33 this year. Women with endo who wait until their 30s to try to have children often find they have a great deal of difficulty conceiving.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch the fibromyalgia issues. I’ve read conflicting things about that; some women find that being pregnant relieves their fibro symptoms, others find that it makes them hella worse. Every pregnancy is different.

There’s a lot going against me, with the idea of having kids.

Right now, i’m not opposed to the general idea, but i recognize it would require a LOT of lifestyle changes. First off, i’d need to have a job and insurance. We wouldn’t be able to keep all of our pets, and given that we think of them as our children? Giving them up would be hell for all involved. I don’t even like to think about it. We’d probably want to move back up north, to be closer to family; that, and i don’t want any child of mine to come within 100 yards of the GA school system. There’s just SO much involved.

So this has been a really really really hard year for me. One of my husband’s brothers, he and his wife are very pregnant, and i plan on being SuperAuntie with that child, letmetellyouwhat. I’m already making something for the wee one, something that’s a bit of a family tradition with my peeps. (No spoilers on what it is.)

That’s been hard, but the idea of being able to spoil their child rotten is a mild comfort in that area.

What hasn’t been easy is that another family member is in a relationship where there is a child on the way. I’m not giving details because if you’re not aware of who, you don’t need to be. It’s not my information to tell. But they have decided to give that child up for adoption. That has been hell in a handbasket. For the most part, we have tried to be supportive because it’s not our decision. We have some strong feelings on the matter, but right now the right thing to do is keep those to ourselves and be there for this person.

If we were in a position to do so (me with a job and not so many fur-kids), i would be offering to adopt that child in a heartbeat. But we can’t. And a similar offer from another family member has been rejected. And it hurts. It hurts so very much, i haven’t been able to bring myself to talk about it.

My husband is scared to try to have kids with me. Endometriosis is not supposed to be even close to a fatal condition, but due to medical neglect like wtf, mine very nearly was. I’ll spare the details, because that’s a whole other post. Oftentimes, i put up a front of being intentionally child-free, because it hurts to much to think about being child-free because my body just won’t let me. I live vicariously through people’s pictures of their own children, i look at baby pictures with a mixture of adoration and envy.

With my niece/nephew on the way (i don’t know when the due date is), it’s brought a lot of this up to the front of my brain. Before this, it was something we just didn’t talk about. It was too scary to bring up out of nowhere.

It’s still scary. And it hurts for a whole lot of reasons, most of which i’ve already talked about.