Now I want them. It's really all I want, and it's especially all-consuming after having had a precious little all-too-short taste of that want, that dream, coming true.
I mentioned in a response to a comment on this blog last week that it was a combination of meeting the right person and reaching an age where the ticking of the biological clock becomes deafening that really created this want. There's also something else that really triggered it, though, which I recently thought of. For one short night in the summer of two years ago, I thought I was pregnant, and it changed everything.
Luckily for my self-reflection purposes, the whole experience was captured in an email I wrote to my Twin, excerpted here. (Yes, this is an "excerpt" ... we are known for our pages-long emails as well as for our four-hour telephone catch-ups. We really are two halves of the same spirit, if not the same egg.) So if you'll allow me to borrow from my electronic correspondence archives, I'll share the story.
But before that, a question: When did the want start for you? Was it always there, or did it arrive with the situation (meeting the right person, getting to a certain stage in your life, blowing out a certain number of candles on the birthday cake ...)?
***
And here's the email:
So ... part of the reason I didn't write back last week is because I had been feeling kind of bad for a while. Not really properly ill, but wiped out and well below par for about three weeks. Twice last week I came home from my class and just got in bed and slept for the rest of the afternoon. I also hadn't been eating very well – certain things that I usually like were totally repulsive to me, like fish, fruit, yogurt, and cheese (but not chocolate, oh no, of course not!). My aversion to some foods was so bad that I felt nauseous if I even smelled them, like a ripe banana Gilles was eating about two weeks ago (imagine his look of surprise as I barked "get that thing out of here or I'm going to throw up!").
I also felt nauseous and dizzy during everyday activities, not to mention that I was having hot flashes and a general feeling of warmth most of the time, uncommon for me as I'm usually cold.
The thought may be crossing your pregnant mind that some of these symptoms sound familiar ....
On Saturday night, after we returned from a little outing in Bern and I collapsed into bed, I started thinking, hmmmm, it seems like a really long time since I've had my period. And then, since I don't properly track it [my, how things have changed since], I started doing some math and obsessively poring over my calendar. [Imagine a long and boring description of my period detective methods.] And although it should definitely have arrived by now, I have no period and no signs of PMS but plenty of signs of ... other things, I realized as I obsessively began to Google early pregnancy symptoms.
Oh my god.
As you may recall, I do have that very bizarre and unheard-of (at least to a certain waiter/poet/musician) contraception method [that would be an IUD; the reference is to a guy we know who had no idea what one was!], and as reliable as it is, it does have a 1% failure rate (thanks again, late-night Google!). I awakened Gilles and told him what I was thinking and we had a wonderful discussion and then couldn't sleep for hours. Had I been in my open-24-hours home country, I would have hightailed it to the nearest pharmacy, but as we are in la Suisse ... no such luck.
Nevertheless, I woke up at 7 on the dot, when the shops at the train station would be opening, and ran out for a test. I was certain it would be positive – my only disbelief was due to the miracle chance of it happening despite the IUD (as well as that feeling of "I can't believe this is happening to ME!") – but hey, each year, for every 99 women for whom the IUD works, there is that remaining one who receives the happy surprise ....
It was negative.
And I was disappointed.
It was very strange ... it was the first time I've taken a pregnancy test that I actually really thought would be – and that I actually really wanted to be – positive. I've taken my fair share of "well, that was stupid" tests and "so why haven't I had my period for three months?" (not so unusual at the time) tests, but never one that I really felt would be positive. And definitely never one that I wanted to be positive ... even despite our administratively less-than-ideal circumstances at this particular moment, as well as the health risks to me (ectopic pregnancy) and a fetus (birth defects, miscarriage) from the presence of the IUD during early pregnancy.
What struck me the most was the complete lack of ambivalence I felt – actually thinking I was pregnant, for less than twelve hours, even, as well as the conversation that followed, cleared away all of the major remaining lingering doubts or uncertainties I had. There are still choices to be made, definitely, choices that will by necessity demolish other choices that I might have also liked to have made (mainly travel-related), but I think I might be at the point in my life where I can totally understand those pregnancy test commercials in which the woman is completely overjoyed that the result is positive [as discussed here!].
As for when a positive might well and truly arrive, well, assuming nature cooperates [a little pre-emptive non-jinxing here, despite my erstwhile innocence – not that it prevented the future from being jinxed], it will be sooner rather than later; you'll be the second to know, and I promise it won't be at the end of a multi-paragraph email in which I describe all of my little symptoms, outline my oh-when-did-I-have-my-period calculation methods, and complain about the opening hours of Swiss shops!
And here's a final coda to the whole story: I got my period yesterday and Gilles can now eat bananas in my presence. I'm fine again.
***
So that's it, the night the want began. It was just a small seed then, but, oh, how it's grown since. One "let's wait until I get a job," one IUD removal, and one miscarriage later, and there's nothing to show for it.
Yet.
 |
| taken that day, in Bern. |
It is interesting you can pinpoint it so exactly, like a light-bulb switched on. For me it has been so gradual, more like a dimmer switch slowly getting brighter. I really was that little girl playing with her dolls wanting nothing more than to be a mummy. I have always wanted children in an abstract way, and going into childcare and loving the work has meant the desire has just rumbled away waiting until I was in a position to really feel it AND do something about it. I always knew when I met the right man that would bring it to the fore, but I never seemed to be with the right man! Whilst in my last disastrous relationship my best friend got pregnant and I felt so sad that I was not in a position to join her. Meeting Kitt just cranked it right up and marrying him, well, it has taken over everything. There is nothing else but desire for my child. I love your posts, they always make me think and often speak directly to me.
ReplyDeleteUgh the want. It has intensified so much since the misscarriage. I have always wanted children but losing one makes the want feel more like a need.
ReplyDeleteYou know, my situation was similar in that it was an 'accident' that really galvanized my want. I always had this vague idea that one day, *perhaps*, kids would be nice (in the same way that say, opening my own cafe or living in Paris for a year would be nice, a potential part of one of my many futures, one of the many ways today could have turned out). The truth is, throughout my 20s and early 30s I was too busy travelling and working in exciting places to contemplate it seriously. That, and the fact that during this same period I kissed my fair share of frogs, none of whom turned into princes, to say nothing of my estimation of their paternal capacities. Then, I met my husband. And it was all the gooey, romantic cliches you could imagine, including us both becoming domesticated to the real desire to co-parent our co-progeny. We started talking about the possibility seriously two weeks before I got a positive pregnancy test with my son Samuel. He was technically an oops baby, but seemed to uncannily answer a dawning realisation and yearning in both of us. My pregnancy with him lasted 17 weeks, to be replaced by a a want, a desire so strong that some days I feel it physically, in the depth of my still empty belly. Like heartatpeace, my want has become need.
ReplyDeleteI've always thought of the biological clock as an intense yearning, much like you have described. For me it was different. I literally woke up one morning, after a prescient dream, and thought, "Dear God, I'm running out of time." RUNNING OUT OF TIME!!!!! Naturally the yearning came later, but my manifestation of the biological clock looked like the sands of time...tick tock tick tock.
ReplyDeleteMy wanting started very suddenly. I started dating my husband when I was 19 and we married when I was 23. At that point I felt way too young to be a mom. I wanted to be selfish and enjoy a few years with just my husband. My mom's sudden death really changed my viewpoint. I felt like I aged years overnight. I think it was a combination of feeling like life is too short, and an unexpected maturity boost that fed the flames of my maternal hormones.
ReplyDeleteI like how you connected this false alarm to your current need for pregnancy. I also had a false alarm. I had all the symptoms and no period. I bought a PG test, hoping it was negative. Even said I would abort it. This was after I was married too. It was negative.
ReplyDeleteA few months later I told Bean I wanted to start trying. Six months after that I was crying over a negative PG test. Wow how things changed in less than a year.
Now it's all I think about.
False alarm here too! Except that for me, it happened soon after I moved in with my boyfriend (now Husband) and I had stopped taking the pill because it messed me up so badly. But we weren't ready yet, so I was grateful in a way. I knew I wanted to be a mother very much and there was no question that I wanted children and soon. But significant illness and then a whole bunch of life changes, including getting married starting shortening that time frame.
ReplyDeleteThen I had a chemical pregnancy and that was it. We hadn't been trying but after that negative test and NEEDED to have a child and that's when we started trying.
In response to your last paragraph, I think you (and all women who experience difficulties starting a family) give yourself too little credit. There is no doubt that miscarriage is brutal. The physical and emotional pain is something you simply can't prepare for. I know you don't have a baby in your arms or on the way, but you do have something to show for your journey thus far. It just that those things aren't the things we want to talk about usually. But when I look back at my own losses, I realize how much they shaped me, made me more determined, stronger, even kinder to others. I got something out of them even if at the same time I wanted to curse the Universe. Those scars, as difficult as they are, are ours, for better or worse.
Thank you, all, for sharing these beautiful and thoughtful reflections. I am grateful to learn more about you and how you arrived where you are today. And Warrior, I especially appreciate your relating what you see as the positive aspects of the journey. They are not what I have focused on to date, but if I dug a bit deeper, I think I could recognize some of what you mention - and will try to do so in the future.
ReplyDeleteMine came one spring. It was a scene not unlike your little cow. One spring I became hyper aware of all the baby cows, baby sheep, baby horses, baby kitties, baby people! and instantly I wanted one! It's still worse for me in the springtime but now it doesn't go away come summer fall or winter.
ReplyDelete