I was minding my own business, sitting in the parking lot waiting to pick up my eldest after a lesson when Grief walked up and kicked me in the face.
“Minding my own business” is actually a lie because I was reading a book, and in reading a book one is never really minding one’s own business. “Do you have anything that addresses the emotions adoptive parents go through when they see their children’s siblings born and placed elsewhere,” I’d asked the caseworker a couple weeks ago, and she’d come through with an offering that very day.
I thumbed through the book with something less than great interest as in the intervening weeks the violent emotions had largely settled, or at least they had settled before I read this:
“Infertility is a loss — it is a loss of the imaginary or fantasy child…It is essential to realize that even if infertility is resolved, it doesn’t go away.”
And that’s when Grief kicked me in the face. Fucking Grief, always sneaking around and waiting for an reason to kick you in the face.
I held it together ’til the children were safely delivered over to their father but not one second longer. Irrationally this grief focused on hair, which must surely be the least defining characteristic of any child. My home-brewed daughter has long, thick, glossy-brown hair reminiscent of my childish tresses while her outsourced siblings bear their mother’s blond waves. Sobbing, I could not shake the picture of my might-have-been family, all of whom had my eldest’s hair; the imaginary middle child a sweet brown bob and the youngest, a sleek Don Draper. Not only did they share the same hair but also the same attitude. Instead of wild dashes from one frantic activity to the next, all the children from my body would have been like the first: Studious little people who’d prefer reading to running, dreaming to dashing.
They would be perfect, I thought, and how perfect would it be not to worry over an often-irresponsible other mother and the placement of her subsequent children. How clean it would be. How tidy. Reeling from the kick, “tidy” seemed like the characteristic most to be desired from one’s children. Tidy was king.
On the night I made a flying trip to pick up my son at the request of his mother I’d intended to drive straight home. Instead we were sidetracked by hunger and a pressing need to pee; thus in my first hour of life as the mother of a first-grader and two babies I reluctantly shepherded them into a restaurant and helped them deal with pancakes, bacon and the potty. “Your children are beautiful,” said an elderly woman the next table over, “but they all look so different from one another.”
They are beautiful, aren’t they, I answered, and bit my tongue on the rest of my response, which would have been and they don’t look alike because they all have different fathers. I’ve loved squiring around lovely yet non-homogeneous children, and as they’ve grown I’ve appreciated their disparate looks even more, watching in amazement as some new piece of an often unknown genetic code gains expression. Nine-hundred-ninety-nine times out of a thousand I can celebrate the unknown. But that other one — oh how it hurts, and how much more might it hurt them were they to learn of it.
When Job cast his eyes over his new sons and daughters, replacements for the ones lost at the hands of a punitive or capricious God, did he love them without any question?
Or did even he occasionally think of the ones he lost?
——
–The book I was reading and another on the same topic with a title that blows my mind.
Your strong to do this. To have such a difficult situation as a family. You truly love your children. We all often wish for what we don’t have and overlook what we have that others don’t. But sometimes we need reminded that others never got to have their own children. At all. They wanted too. They tried. But the situation or the circumstances never allowed it. Feeling your body betray itself is ugly. Now that I’m 47 and my life would allow children and my heart is ready, my body says no. At least you have one. Not trying to one up you on the pity party. At all. But want you to see in the right light, what you have. And it’s good. Be sad. Life is fucking hard. But let it happen for 5 minutes and love what’s in front of you.
That sneaky grief. It just finds any crack it can, doesn’t it?
I think even Job got kicked in the face a time or two.
I have a myriad of health problems that I have accepted could very well render me unable to have children. Your blog has help me strengthen that part of myself that, despite struggling to remain optimistic, is urging me to make peace and embrace alternate paths to potential parenthood.
Times when you have moments of doubt make you seem more human, not less. By being candid, the things you write become more approachable to people who are at all stages of what you are going through.
Some of us don’t get the “perfect” family. I didn’t get the little girl and the matching little boy I dreamed about. I got a son with a laundry list of physical problems that seemed so daunting I never considered having another child and by the time it crossed my mind again, an early menopause set in and ended that dream.
But I do think we get the family we need. The family who needed us. The one that is actually perfect for us even if we don’t realize it.
And somehow it doesn’t erase that grief. That pang. That “what if?” Not being in control of something so simple an so basic never really leaves you, I think.
“Instead of wild dashes from one frantic activity to the next, all the children from my body would have been like the first: Studious little people who’d prefer reading to running, dreaming to dashing.”
I read this and had to laugh. This almost never happens IRL – they all end up different most of the time. Don’t mourn a fantasy that most likely would never have been.
>>Some of us don’t get the “perfect” family.
Make that “most of us” and I have to agree. I have yet to see one.
None of us has the “perfect” family. I had three stepchildren the first, and three stepchildren the second time I was married. Certainly, blended families take a little more work, coordination and attention to detail, but at the end of the day, it is what we make of it. (Ever tried scheduling Christmas and Thanksgiving around two other bio mothers and their extended families? It’s not for the weak, I’ll tell ya.)
Then after we divorced, my son’s father remarried again twice. The parade of child and adult companions was almost constant and it concerned me about those effects on my son. It turns out that he’s quite thrilled to be part of so many different families and have so many half- and step-siblings. He will be 21 next week and I’ve lost count of the step-children in my son’s father’s life.
So, yeah, it’s manic and it’s frustrating and it’s not “perfect”, then again, what really is? We wake up every morning and tend to our responsibilities and hope for the best outcome.
I don’t know the answer to your question, nor can I feel the loss of what might have been. I have, by choice, two children – a boy and a girl. I’m a green-eyed blonde with fair skin. My children are both dark haired, brown-eyed with swarthy complexions from their father who’s of Italian descent. While I felt pangs of sadness when I was out alone with the children and strangers asked if they were adopted, I don’t know the feeling of have an adopted child. I doubt my love for them would be less then if they were my own, no matter what their looks were. You may long for what might have been and feel the loss but you never seem to love any of your children more or less. The love you have for each is equal but different.
Also, you have no guarantee that your own children will be alike in looks and or attitude. My kids are so different, no in looks so much, but in their attitute, personality and body type. Many times I wondered if one or the other was switched in the hospital because of the marked difference.
I marvel at your ability to mix your kinky life with the poingnency of your trials with your children..I don’t think could I have to compartmentalize. I am sorry for your pain