It Was a Complicated Mother’s Day

But one day my bitter pill will go down a lot easier

This holiday wasn’t always complicated for me. I have a mother… I’ve got grandmothers and aunts and an older sister that was a second mother to me. I celebrated them before I was old enough to have a family of my own, and I still do. But like with everything else in life, things happened, and emotions around motherhood did not stay simple. Not for me.

I had my first miscarriage at 21 years old. When I found out I was pregnant, I oscillated between excited and scared, honestly spending the majority of my time in the territory of petrified with a frequent stop in hungry. I was so young. I had no health insurance. And though I was married, I was the only one working a steady job (or two, much of the time) and had no idea how we were, or more accurately, I was, going to make ends meet.

I was doing everything I could to scarcely make rent and eat regularly, and I was becoming increasingly unhappy in my marriage to boot. A very poorly thought out, hastily decided, unequally yoked in nearly every conceivable way, marriage. And then one night I started cramping. I ended up being evaluated in the emergency room, and an intern’s prescient removal of my IV and the catheter left in my arm that sprayed blood all over the sterile white room and up the wall ominously foretold of things to come. I was sent home with fluids and told to wait it out. The cramping ended days later in a loss I would not have the wherewithal to process for years to come.

My fourth miscarriage wrecked me. The symptoms were old hat, putting my body through a grinder and seasoning the recipe with a sprinkle of postpartum. I was weary of the rollercoaster of hesitant excitement that always ended in profound sorrow and disappointment. I didn’t think about names this time. Nor did I start mentally planning a nursery. I tried to put the positive test out of my mind altogether. I barely indulged my ravenous hunger, and I allowed a rivulet of melancholy to break through the dam early this time.

When the carnage started, it was no surprise, and I did my best to ignore the physical pain of it all. I went to work. I cooked supper. I took a shower. I stayed up all night blankly staring at the wall. I cursed the wall and its audacity to remain standing while I crumbled. I was incensed by my traitorous body. I quit eating and seized every chance to secretly torture myself. I was angry at everyone, especially at God. I mocked every deity I’d ever heard of. I lashed out at my family. I decided I deserved it. I resigned to it. I believed lies about me that I told myself.

I was suicidal. I collapsed within myself. Over and over. Over and over. Would it ever be over… When the fog of postpartum lifted and the sun broke through the clouds, I limped out of the whole ordeal. But it wasn’t a temporary limp. It was chronic.

I went to see my OB/GYN. When she wouldn’t give me a hysterectomy because I was in my early 30s, even though she had diagnosed me with endometriosis and polycystic ovarian syndrome, I looked for a doctor that would. The practitioner I landed on had struggled with endometriosis for years, and she knew the hole I barely clawed myself out of four times. She agreed that Lupron Depot, an injection that essentially facilitates a medical menopause and thereby resets the reproductive system, did not help me. She agreed to do the hysterectomy. My ovaries were covered in adhesions that were beginning to fuse to my colon, so she took those, too, and doing so had the benefit of avoiding a future resection. The parts of me that regulated sex hormone production, the parts of me that medically made me a woman, the parts of me that betrayed me, were gone.

The surgery’s success was serpentine. I was angry at these parts, and yet I was crushed by the heaviness of their absence. When the finality of it all sank in, the death of the possibility of ever having a baby, I found myself sedate and helplessly sinking to the bottom of another proverbial well. There was no air. Not in my lungs, nor my home, nor the wretched world. I had completely and utterly lost my faith. I was moving languidly between stages of an unspeakable grief. It owned me. My marionette of anguish, it forced me upright and burst through my insides with a puissant and merciless hand. Many nights found me on the shower floor on my knees after depleting the hot water, naked and shivering, weeping in agony to a godless void.

I would never be someone’s mother. I would never nurture and grow another human being inside my own body, would never feel them kick or hiccup, would never travail for hours to have a perfect little grunting, dimple-knuckled angel with eyes full of wonder placed on my chest. I would never be someone’s mother. And I wanted to. People asked me all the time if I had or wanted kids, and I told them the same lies I told myself. I preferred a life without children. I made peace with not being able to have children. I hadn’t decided yet whether or not I wanted children. All lies I tried to make myself believe. All lies I told others with dead eyes and a fixed grin. All lies. The truth of the matter is that I wanted children, and if I’m being completely honest, I would have been a good mother. That assertion is a dangerous one, though.

When I acknowledge I’d have been a good mother, I have to swallow a bile that rises in my throat, a bitterness toward women that have children but take none of the chances afforded to them to actually be a good mother. I become judgmental. I lose empathy. I become a less human, human being. I don’t like that side of myself… but it’s nearly impossible for me to extinguish, so I avoid the affirmation altogether. I am a good aunt, I have been a good Yaya, but a good mother? No comment.

No thoughts.

Pass.

Next question.

I am fortunate to still have my mother. I have had and still have steadfast mother figures in my life. But this holiday, nevertheless, reminds me that my own womb failed my children in the worst possible way. They never even got to experience a minute of life, and it was something I could not give them. The irony is that now I am finally truly and madly in love with a real man. A kind, empathetic, protective, nurturing example of a man. I know him to be a devoted father and grandfather, though now I am a little old to start a family, and he is several years my senior. He is a Daddy. He puts his children before his own safety and health, before his own comfort, entirely before himself. And though he wouldn’t want to have any more children, it is a gift I wish I could have given him.

I am 40 years old now, and I have been considering whether I am leaving the world a better place so much more than I used to. Questioning whether I am imparting anything of value, whether I have touched the lives around me for the better, or whether when I depart this realm I will sink beneath the surface without making as much as a ripple. So when I tell you that I broke when I received this Mother’s Day card from my nephew, at what he said within this mindfully handmade treasure, please know two decades of longing has had an exodus in two days of tears that haven’t lent themselves to warnings or pleasant facial expressions.

I don’t necessarily know what I’m doing most of the time, but I try with him. Try to listen and advise and point him in the direction of his parents’ sage advice. I try with all my nephews and nieces, but I honestly didn’t know how they perceived me. I figured I was a background actor in this family. I had no idea I was a character in the script.

I guess I do better than I think I do at nurturing and mentoring these beautiful human beings in my life. And I have been fortunate beyond words to watch them grow into young men and women I admire and respect so much.

Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise, one day I will make one hell of a Yaya for a family that’ll annex me in. It won’t always be a complicated Mother’s Day. I’ll wake up to grandkids playing with my long, thick gray locks, next to the man I love, and all will be right in the world. He’ll make us breakfast while I tickle tummies and braid hair and greet giggles with a grateful heart. Until then I will have dogs and love my nieces and nephews like my own, with all the tenderness my heart can hold.

And as made apparent to me on Mother’s Day, they will, too.