Children

I know I mentioned now previous post that I have had 2 miscarriages now and appear to be unable to have children, and the theme of children has been weighing so heavily on my mind.

On the 2nd miscarriage, I didn’t find out until I was in the doctor’s office at my 10 week ultrasound. The 1st indicator that anything was wrong was that the technician wouldn’t focus on the baby. She spent a long time with the wand on my ovaries. Then I was told the foetus had no heartbeat. It looked like I’d miscarried around week 7. She looked at me and said how sorry she was and how sorry the doctor was and how sorry everyone was and then they asked me leave by to leave through the back door.

I was advised to wait it out until the miscarriage happened naturally. I waited a month. Nothing happened. I still had morning sickness, I still was very sensitive to smells. Nothing had changed and yet I felt like a vessel for dead dreams.

I got my blood drawn to see if Hcg numbers were decreasing and they were still on the rise. My body hadn’t realized my loss yet. My body was working so hard to build something that was already broken. Already gone. That had barely been.

Eventually the doctors advised that I go in for a D&C to have all of the material removed since it didnt appear to be happening on its own. They felt this would jumpstart the process of getting things back to normal.

I wasnt sure what normal was anymore. The deadness inside of me had spread. All of my thoughts were focused on how my baby was dead and I was just a living coffin. How motherhood seemed so close and yet so far away.

My mother had never wanted children. But then she got pregnant with my older brother and decided to keep him. I was an accident that happened while my mom was amid a messy divorce with my brother’s father. My little sister was the only baby she had intended to have.

My sister found out she was expecting her first child 3 months into a tinder fling. She has 2 beautiful little girls now and doesnt want any more.

I have some friends who got pregnant in highschool. Their eldest children are nearly out of the house now. Its crazy to see them the age that we were then and to wonder what kind of decisions they are making and how closely they match the ones we made then.

I can’t stand to hear about pregnancies any more. The jealously and heartache I get is so hard to deal with. It makes me feel bad about myself that I even have those selfish thoughts. Other people’s joy should not feel like a slap in my face. And yet I feel the sting on my cheeks.

Fewer and fewer women are having children in the United States. I have some friends who have chosen not to. And I understand the perspectives. When your own childhood was difficult, when ou had no rolemodels for parenting, when you just dont feel the urge or need or desire, why make that choice?

The media is riddled with stories of how difficult parenting is. How you dont sleep, how over all happiness is decreased. How mothers are gettting the economic short end of the stick due to both biological and socialogical factors. The metrics don’t lie and its not exactly selling the idea of families.

Women are told that if you have babies too young, it’ll ruin your life. And if you wait too long, you wont be able to have them and if you are able, there is a significantly higher risk for birth defects. Even if you nail the timing (which I guess would be somewhere around the age of 25), you will be stunting your career, lessening your happiness, be financially wrecked as you spend over 271K (on average) to rear a single child that you wont be able to support through college. You’re giving up vacation and me-time and basically everything you ever wanted to care for a screaming, helpless leech for the next 18 years. What a sales pitch.

I think about how many families I knew as a kid that had one parent working and one at home. The economy doesnt really work like that now. Now both parents need to work and mom is too tired to make your sack lunch, read you a story, and clean the entire house.

We would roam the streets of our neighborhood unattended until either dinnertime or sundown. Gangs of kids on bikes or rollerblades just doing kid stuff. How it was normal for me to get off the bus, walk into our house, and lock the door behind me because mom was at work until 7 and I was on my own. All of that now would be called in to CPS or the police. The world is a different place.

And then there are the people who live in fear. Fear of global warming, pollution, religious end times, drugs, war; you name it.

We arent doing a great job of selling motherhood to young women. Which is fine, but I don’t think its a big shock that the average reproductive rate in this country is at the all time low of 1.8. We arent even replacing ourselves.

I had my D&C in September. I have not had another period since and am looking down the barrel of Asherman’s syndrome. I hear a little voice in my head that says: fuck it. Maybe i should have let my high school boyfriend not wear the condom. I don’t think it would have “ruined my life “.