I was fortunate to have been raised by parents who, for all of their flaws and inconsistencies, couldn't have done a better job managing the struggles of life and raising three children. My dad probably worked something like 100 hours a week and still managed to read my brother and I bedtime stories. My mother, who was left with the enormous task of taming two rambunctious boys 14 months apart, somehow maintained her sanity while showering us with love and raising our much younger sister. It was a tall order and us kids tended to not make it easy. As is the cycle of life, I never really appreciated or understood what my parents did for us growing up until leaving home and beginning the process of becoming an adult. And it's really only now, after nearly two years of trying to get pregnant and failing, that I'm beginning to understand a tiny bit of what it might mean to be a parent.
A curious thing happened to my memory over the long course of this endeavor to get pregnant. I can still remember the excitement of those first few weeks and months after making the decision to try for a baby. I can recall our optimism and the late night talks wondering what our future child might be. It's all still there somewhere but there came a point when the optimism and expectation was replaced with something else. At first it was confusion and frustration. We were reassured by friends, family, and doctors that sometimes it takes time and so, despite the frustration, we soldiered on. Eventually those emotions were compounded by miscommunications and arguments in which my partner and I struggled to express our own conflicted and painful feelings as those first few months turned into a year. Soon after that year mark (and probably sometimes before then as well) the optimism was replaced with successful and unsuccessful attempts just to remain present in the month to month ordeal of tracking ovulation cycles, beginning the process of figuring out what could be wrong, and hoping beyond reason that damn blue line would show up. The anticipation and expectation had been sapped from the process, replaced with a pall of unknown reasons and the specter of looming problems. At times, it's difficult to even recall what the initial optimism and expectation felt like. I still have the memories of it, I still recall those moments but it's like watching them through an old dusty window as if the lack of emotional connection leaves them in this strange detached place in my self.
When I was in seventh grade I began to experience a number of emotions that I neither knew how to identify nor manage. I couldn't shake an overwhelming feeling of wanting to be alone. I began spending most of my days cooped up in my room dwelling on god know's what and feeling desperately lonely. It wasn't until my parents noticed some of the more obvious symptoms of my depression that I found myself at therapy with a man I had never met asking me questions I had never answered before. I never did ask my parents what that experience was like for them, who they might have talked to or what they learned from it all and I think that had to do with the fact that I was acutely aware, perhaps for the first time, of the importance of my parent's presence in my life.
It's odd the places your mind takes you. In the midst of this never-ending path to create a life, I've been unable to shake this memory of my parent's faces when I left my therapist's office for the last time. There wasn't anything particularly special about that moment except that, in my mind, I have this wonderfully poignant and vivid image of my parents without any manufactured happiness attempting to mask the situation. They were concerned for sure (perhaps still a bit scared) but what I remember feeling from their faces was the warmth of their presence. They were there. They had been there at the beginning, they were there that day leaving the therapist's office for the last time and they've been there every day since then. And the only thing I can think of now, in this moment, is that I think I can do that. I think I can be good at that.
The first part of this experience ended with some pretty raw emotions drifting in a place somewhere between apathy and exhaustion which is neither a helpful or healthy state of mind for the having of children. Waking up mornings and finding that your living with a person that is completely foreign to you is a scary experience for two people that have vowed to live their lives together. You're forced to confront things never before imagined and ask questions that you may not want to hear answers to. And you know what, it doesn't always end up okay. Sometimes there isn't some magnificent plan (not least because if this is all part of a plan, then I have to interject that this is a horrifically shitty plan). I'm thankful that we never had to traverse the road of ending our partnership together. We've managed to come out of this in a good place and we at least have some answers and direction as to where we go from here.
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