the joyless
i am supposed to be coming up with something masterful to write for “the Mom class” tomorrow and i’m so vexed, so horribly, horribly vexed at what the instructor gave us for our first reading. an excerpt from “waiting for birdy, et. al.” in which the author actually relays this experience (in a nutshell)….
since the authoress is pregnant she has to stop nursing her two year old son. the son says the new baby will have to use cup since “the nursings” (what he calls mom’s breasts) are his and they baby can’t use them. and she’s swooning at his cuteness and i’m ready to smack her upside the head. then, Then, THEN she says something like….my son and i had two glorious years together nursing and now he’s just getting the swill from the bottom of the barrell because i’m pregnant.
WHAT?
and in the course of reading this crazy bitch i come to the very obvious conclusion that this woman has expressed no joy, no joy at all. not with her son, with her husband, or with the prospect of a second child. it’s all doom and gloom.
and all i can think of is psycho jen.
while i was pregnant psycho jen constantly accused me of being joyless. “you’re just not allowing yourself to be happy about this” she’d say. my, how fucking wrong she was - as usual.
i was so overwhelmed with happiness, constantly, every minute. i had to struggle to keep a straight face around people. it took us four years to get pregnant. four years - people get degrees in that amount of time and i couldn’t for the life of me get pregnant. we went through a year of BBT, six months of clomid, six failed attempts of IUI, and a failed IVF. i was cutting myself it got so bad.
then, in a rush of magic, she’s here. she’s inside, growing and working just as hard to get to us as we worked to get to her. and i was not going to waste one second on things that made me unhappy. i was going to make the vessel she was in as content and healthy as possible. i quit my job, i ate better, i drank more water, i laughed louder and longer, i hugged my mom a thousand times. joyless? no, never.
but i wasn’t advertising my utter happiness. we had stopped telling the masses what we were doing years ago. infertility is isolating. unless you know someone going through it, step by step along with you, no one will have a clue. they will just go pale, give you a glassy stare and say “gosh”. people stopped asking, and when they did we’d say - when there is good news, BELIEVE ME, you’ll know.
but we had all worked so hard for so long, and now the work was over. and i was beyond grateful. i loved all of it, every second. feeling sick? yeah, but I’M PREGNANT! can’t sleep? yeah, but I”M PREGNANT! the baby has hiccups nine times a day, usually between the hours of 3AM and 10 AM, yeah, but THE BABY….it’s the BABY that has hiccups. heartburn, constipation, hemorrhoids - yeah, but i’m pregnant. weird pregnancy sex, almost throwing up at the smell of mall chinese food, kicks and bumps and knocks and GOAL! she runs around the stadium and does a back hand spring and i pee a little in my pants, but i’m pregnant.
then…an angel of light is delievered unto us and she’s ours. and when she and i are sobbing at each other during that 4AM feeding, i never thought i couldn’t do it. i never questioned my ability to be good parent. i never had that frantic panic pregnant women get. i’ve gotten those calls, wails of fear and regret, “What was I thinking? I can’t be someone’s MOM! The baby is going to hate me. My husband isn’t going to help.” Well, yeah, nine times out of ten that last one is true. But not in my case. that 4AM crying jag - that’s normal - that’s hormonal - that’s temporary. we’re permenant, we’re family.
and i couldn’t wait to meet her, to see her, to nuzzle her, to smell her. she was half of him and half of me and how did that all work out? she simply rode in on fairy wings and made our wish come true.
how could anyone think i wasn’t happy?