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Posts Tagged ‘baby’

I’m afraid I’ll never have a baby of my own

Thursday, December 26th, 2013

Now this really is a secret I’ve never told anyone. Various parts are known to various people, but there is no one who knows this secret in its entirety. It has constitute parts, complexities, and it’s wrapped up with desire and fear and melancholy and regret.

The surface of the secret isn’t really a secret. I regret not having a baby when I was younger. I regret not taking the time, not making the time, not being able to convince my ex-husband that we should have a baby, that I should get pregnant and have a baby. People know this, they may not know my bone deep longing for my own baby, but the evidence of it can see it on me. It is written on my face and in my posture when I see other women who have babies or who are pregnant. It is there for those who look. I am filled with envy. It fills me up, completely.

I am a woman who as a child imagined her life in terms of maternity, who would day dream about what her children would be like, who has had the names of her first children picked out for decades. When my marriage fell apart, I grieved for the children I had imagined having with my husband and now would never get the opportunity to conceive.

And now, and this is a part of my secret that no one else knows, I’m frightened I’ll never get to have a child of my own. 32 isn’t old, millions of women have children in their 30s, into their 40s every year, but beside the fact I don’t have someone to father my phantom child, I have complicating factors.

I have, especially if I’m not taking birth control pills, long and heavy periods. So long, and so heavy, I’m occasionally frightened I will bleed to death. So long and so heavy, I have soaked through the extra long, nighttime sanitary towels in under an hour. I occasionally wake up covered in blood to my knees. I imagine my uterus like a water balloon, filling, filling, filling with blood, only to burst and drown me. No doctors can tell me why. I’ve had blood tests and ultrasounds and I’ve done my own research. My hormones are balanced, my ultrasounds were clean. I don’t have fibroids or a thyroid issue, I just have blood and fear and disgust.

I am disgusted by the blood, and frightened by it and frightened by the possibility of the disgust of others. My husband was disgusted by me, not by my bleeding, my body, but by my fear. He was so angry that I didn’t want to go to the doctor, didn’t want to be told my options. I knew my options, birth control and if that did not work: a hysterectomy. A hysterectomy closes the door on a baby of my own forever. It didn’t matter to him, he didn’t want a baby, but I did. I wanted and want a baby with bone deep, soul deep longing.

But how can I have a baby when it feels like I will never stop bleeding?

Nobody knows what it feels like to watch my hopes being literally washed down the drain while I shower. I watch the water at my feet swirl red and know it means emptiness and hopelessness. I am emptying out, liquefying and draining of hope.

Being on birth control helps. I no longer bleed for a month at a time, but I feel empty and hollow anyway knowing that it keeps me from even trying to conceive, keeps the possibility of a mysterious, magical, miraculous pregnancy from happening.

All babies are miracles, an alchemical mixture of two disparate people, who turn into new individuals who are both like and unlike both of their parents. I know adoption is an option, that I could love a baby not of my own body because all babies are inherently loveable. But I my secret fear is never being able to see myself in my child, of never being able to have a child of my body, never getting to experience the secrets of pregnancy because my body has betrayed me.