As I tried to maintain my positive, pleasant and cheery tone for the empathetic nurse on the other end of the call, my voice died – under the cracks of pain – to hear her say, “I’m sorry, you’re not pregnant. It didn’t work.” I hung up before she could hear me lose my breathe to sorrow and tears. (note to self: I’m in awe of my ability to consider the feelings of other’s while I fall apart. Where does that come from?) I catch my eyes in the mirror; they are beating and pulsing, hidden beneath red veins and salty liquid. I pity myself that I don’t have the luxury to grieve and come undone in this very moment. Three minutes later, I join a staff meeting zoom with 106 strangers, at my new job. Five minutes later, I’m introduced and asked to tell them about myself. The meeting lasts an hour and as soon as it’s over, I release the hold of my frozen smile, click “leave meeting”, and I allow myself to fall apart.
Over the last five years, I’ve acquired a scattered online (slightly obsessive) collection of thoughtful baby names, articles on motherhood secrets, YouTube videos on non-toxic baby products and Amazon lists full of natural birthing books from every home birth documentary I’ve ever seen – all without any baby in sight. The audacity of hope…yet never once could I have imagined I would try so hard and fail so easily to be what I thought was my human right. I’ve never been matronly or even submissive. I’m a goal-orientated, career-driven, free spirit bundle of shy, awkward and humble energy. I explode over everything I set to mind. I am relentless in my pursuits; I am a quiet storm. This type of “failure” is new and foreign to me. So…after two failed IUI attempts, one natural pregnancy resulting in miscarriage and one failed IVF attempt, I have to ask questions I would never want to ask myself: what if I am never someone’s mother, what is motherhood and – why is it important to me?
My life, I am grateful for indeed. I have a loving husband who is also my best friend, a lucrative career, the respect of smart and kind people I call “friends”, healthy plants, living parents, a 102-year-old sassy grandmother and a healthy mind, body and soul. Where is the void that a child or two would fill? Unconditional love, is what my heart answers…but is that fair. To place such a burden on a child, who is soon to become a jaded adult, cannot be fair. If by exploding my love and energy onto another human life, I seek reciprocity of any kind…I have failed the meaning of “unconditional love”. To exist, to simply breathe, is to be worthy of unconditional love. I should find this inward love before I find my child.
There are so few examples to set my imagination on fire or help me see what life could be, without a child. What happens to a childless woman in her later years with no children or grandchildren to visit her? What happens when her lovers die and she has replaced all her plants and pets, four-times-over? Who does she love, and who loves her? Who holds her as she dies? Who finds her when she dies? I choke on the thoughts, because they have never been part of my imagined future.
“Dar a luz” is a Spanish saying “to give birth”, directly translated it means “to give light”. That’s what I want. I want to pass my light on to someone who comes out of me via the strongest kind of love two humans have ever embarked on, the audacity of hope…The relentlessness of our love has brought us to try, try, try try and try again, no matter the heartbreak, our souls will fortify the cracks with a faith that God will breathe life through us. I want to have children – and help them find their light, help them shine their light, help them be the light – and then teach them how to pass on their light.
My pursuits to motherhood have been devastating thus far, to say the very least, but there is a very real genetic-spiritual-female impulse that pulls me out of bed, rises me to my feet, kisses my husband with salty tear soaked lips and says “yes baby, next month, we’ll try again.”
“The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” – Pablo Picasso