How much of me wants to be pregnant because I can’t?
This whole pregnancy thing goes in waves. But lately I’ve been beaten in the face with too many “why her and not me?” situations that the whole “WILL CASEY EVER BE PREGNANT AGAIN?” dilemma is beginning to eat a part of my brain previously saved for saving puppies, playing sudoku and baking cupcakes.
My big attitude of “MEH” towards the whole topic was smashed to pieces over the last month when both of my parents and crotchety old grandma asked why Cody and I weren’t producing more awesome with our reproductive parts. They never had to worry about “when” or “how” with babies, they just popped in and came out when they wanted them to. Same with my grandparents. Then there was the lady on the plane.
“So when are you going to make her a little brother?”
REALLY?
PEOPLE ASK CRAP LIKE THAT TO TOTAL STRANGERS?
I know Cody wants more babies, and he wants me to be a mom to more babies, he likes the way I do things. Cody wants to get me pregnant more than any man has ever wanted to impregnate a woman in the history of reproduction. It’s really hard to tell him each month that my body failed at making us more babies yet again.
I want to be pregnant. I liked being pregnant, I liked having that bump, feeling a little person kicking the daylights out of my internal organs. I even miss worrying that I would pop her head open every time I crossed my legs because the little kid decided to LODGE HERSELF in my crotch early on.
I don’t want to be pregnant. I didn’t like knowing what every food on God’s green Earth tasted like in reverse. I didn’t like having to eat only to have something to barf up an hour later. I didn’t like constantly feeling like I had drank my weight in cheap beer. I didn’t like having to plan my life around when and where I’d be when the need to barf hit me. I also didn’t like paying so much freaking money on medicines that only helped me barf a few less times a day.
I want to have another baby. I like babies. I really liked my baby and I really love the little kid that my little baby is growing up to be. I really love my sister and I really want my little kid to have a sister or brother of her own. I like this whole mom gig, while I’m not alway at the top of my game, I feel I put forth a game worth performance.
I don’t want to have another baby. Newborns, sleepless nights, barf, poop, diapers, manners, teething, time-outs…I think you get my point. If I were to stop with the moosh she’d be 18 when I turn 40, plenty of time to become a doctor or an acrobat or something.
Why all this mess and confusion? Why such a teeter totter of emotions?
Because.
Life is confusing and full of sucky sucky trials with no instruction booklet.
In my church back home in Indiana I have watched 46 pregnancies in less than three years. I have watched over a dozen women be pregnant twice, AND THAT’S JUST WOMEN I KNOW FROM CHURCH. There are quite a few women who have a child the moosh’s age AND TWO MORE younger than her. I have watched even more women go through pregnancy on the internet. (To all the lovely ladies to whom I’m referring, especially the three dozen pregnant ones, I’m happy for you, this is nothing against you, please don’t take it personally. It’s just really hard for me. It’s not your fault you can get pregnant, so quit apologizing.)
Outside my church most women my age don’t have kids. Let alone two. Only in my chosen faith am I the lame duck. It’s not a commandment that women get knocked up young and often in the LDS religion, it’s just what seems to happen. Which leaves a lot of us women of the LDS faith feeling like we missed the booth where they were handing out fertility on our wedding days.
Which brings me to adoption. I have a fierce admiration for couples who choose to adopt and am always brought to tears when I see a new family made by the sheer awesomeness that is adoption.
But I have never felt like it is for me.
Just as you may feel that a tattoo, marriage, children or Law School may never be right for you.
I wish I just had an answer.
Sometimes I think I won’t get pregnant because I couldn’t handle it, two kids, the PPD, the pregnancy. But then I read that Dooce is pregnant and the bitter hag that resides behind my kidney thinks up all sorts of horrible things. (Totally jealousy talking Heather. Sorry.)
Sometimes I think it’s just not the right time. Law school. Debt. Thousands of miles from family. Crummy insurance. But then I see plenty of other women with no committed partner, no family, drug addictions, no real home, no common sense and no insurance get pregnant. (Not to mention the ones that aren’t even old enough to get a driver’s license.)
Sometimes I think I’ll never be pregnant again and should just move on.
Get over it, you know? Part of me is actually envious when women have an absolute answer to their fertility, either they don’t have the parts, their husband’s don’t make the stuff, or they’ll die if they try. How’s that for an absolute? But that’s not acknowledging all the trials and crummy stuff they have to go through when that news is passed onto them. Surrogates? IVF? Sperm donors? Adoption?
No one has it easy.
Sometimes I even think that maybe I birthed my fallopian tubes along with the moosh and have no reproductive organs left. But then my period comes and I’m reminded once again that “DEAR CASEY, YOU STILL HAVE ALL YOUR PARTS AND GUESS WHAT? YOU ARE NOT PREGNANT.”
I used to be optimistic that because my body birthed a healthy baby once, it could totally do it again. Nature didn’t screw up on me, my parts knew how to get pregnant and get that kid out in one piece.
I still am that kind of optimistic sometimes.
Other times I’m just plain ticked that I know DARN WELL that my body knows how to get pregnant but refuses to.
And then there’s that part of my brain that thinks “You did so well with the first one, why risk getting a dud the second time around?” Don’t roll your eyes at me. Enough mothers have admitted to me that fear of getting a different deal the second time around. (Sometimes even the first time.) While ultimately I would gladly take whatever child God sees fit to bless me with, I wonder what the heck I’d do if I had a kid with straight hair. How would I pick them out of a crowd?
I know my body can get pregnant. I know my husband can get me pregnant. I know that I could provide another little kid with a home, and love, and kisses, and snuggles and bedtime stories and songs and trips to the ice cream store and the best big sister ever. I know I’d do a good job even though I also know I’d second guess my decision every other half hour for the next, oh, until I die.
I’d try and do a really good job, the best I know how to do, if I could only get my womb on one.
making unbreakable - formerly moosh in indy. 