Mother’s Day 2009, a nod to an unborn son

This seems to becoming a pattern with this blog. This is yet another Mother’s Day Post, post-Mother’s Day. And yesterday was my third Mother’s Day.

Like last year, it was by no means, special. We had a lovely brunch with my grandparents, parents and my uncle. We passed the rest of the afternoon by my grandparents’ pool while Monster swam and my grandfather played opera over the stereo. It was very relaxing and I felt like I was reset and ready to tackle another week, and another round of job applications.

I didn’t get any presents, not like last year, where Monster presented me with beautiful paintings which are now framed above our bed. I’m okay with that, because I have him and my wonderful Fil and that’s all I need.

Even so, I felt like last year was more about me than this year. Last year, my son treated me to breakfast tacos after midnight and Fil took me on a long and wonderful date.  However, I understand why that wasn’t the case this year. Fil’s birthday was on Thursday (my parents got her an MP3 player and my grandparents got her a gift card, she felt so loved and has not stopped talking about it since then), my uncle’s birthday is tomorrow (happy birthday, Uncle J!) and there are plenty of mom’s in my family to celebrate. I was thankful for the free meal and the wonderful family time. Everyone doted on Monster (as usual) and our mother’s day cards got grandmother and mother quite misty. A success, I declared.

Nevertheless, I can’t ignore how exciting last Mother’s Day was, how good we all felt and how easy it was to ignore the darker side of things. We were four days from our move and busy buzzing around the house packing everything we owned. There was so much to do I nearly forgot to spend a little time reflecting on the loss of Michael, our unborn son.

I have designated May to be my month of rememberance. It was in that month that I allowed myself to mourn his loss and repair from the devestating physical effects of a miscarriage. It was in that month that I named him. He was the boy I saw in my dreams that previous March, the boy with fat thighs, drooly cheeks and no hair.

I know that I will probably have this problem in the future. That when Fil and I hitch ourselves to the TTC train again, we will probably experience a lot of misery before joy. We are saddened that he did not stick, because he was our first and last chance with WonderSperm, the worlds most perfect donor (he looks so much like Fil, down to his smirk and he has such a wonderfully generous heart that I hoped he would pass on to my child) and Fil’s cousin. If you don’t care to jump back, our chance to use him was cut short (literally, a week or more) when he contracted HIV from his promiscuous partner. We mourn the chance to have Fil genetically linked to our child.

But this post is not to mourn Michael, who will always have a place in my ever expanding heart. I am happy to have Monster, who fills the corners of my heart with so much abundant love it’s indescribable. For all of you mothers, Happy Mother’s Day. You are powerful and strong and wonderful in many ways. If you are in a dark place, or find yourselves struggling with the day-to-day, let your children squeeze in and do what they do best, love you.

To all of those who are struggling to become mothers, whether it be again or for the first time. Don’t let Mother’s Day fill you with bitterness and resentment. Look at it as a day for things to come, when your life will be filled with pink flowers and handprint cards.

Day 28: 11:11

Maybe it’s stupid to still wish for something when the clock strikes 11:11. But I do, every time.

And to think, somewhere in this past week, Michael would have been digging into his first birthday cake with a silly hat on. This post probably wouldn’t be about missing him, but about celebrating his birthday, the milestones he’d reached over the year of growth, and the wonders he’d already experienced.

Instead I’m left here, feeling hollow and empty, whilst on the cusp of my 20th birthday and my favourite holiday of all, Christmas. Somehow the glimmer of seasonal waning – from the bursting glory of life that is Spring and Summer, to the graceful, beautiful death of Autumn and Winter – holds serious sway over my emotional self this year.

I look back at my last posts in November, chipper and cheerful, blistering along through the holiday season without a glance towards my not-son. My brief breaths about him are short, undeveloped and mostly flippant in regard to the depth of my despair. To this day, Fil and I still haven’t seem to come to terms with it. Briefly, I think, we both realise how dark the last dregs of November truly are, the possibilty of what life would be like were he to have stayed.

Despite the love of my family, the warmth of my son’s adoration and the heat of Fil’s love, I’ve allowed myself to feel sorrow and regret. I think it’s something you earn, when the bad happens, and you bury it with so much good that by the time it’s eaten a hole in your heart, you barely remember it’s existance.

I think I said it best in my non-fiction piece, The Longest Road,

“Here I am almost a full year later, and instead of falling upon the crutches of old, stale wounds, I try to continue that warm bath of healing. We are just trying to heal. In that motion of life, the rocking of our boat on the currents of fate, we find it in us to start on that journey again. The longest road, yet untraveled, and out feet just barely at the start.”

In the end, I am not saddened by what became of my not-son, I am saddened by what has become of me in his loss. Sometimes, though it is hardly explainable, I feel like a not-mother, as if, in some way, I have been left un-wholed by him.

Day 27: Writing Crazy

In the 5 years Fil and I have been together, one of the pillars of conversation has always been more children.

In our head, we’ve made it with JT. He can put food to mouth, pee in the potty, use the shower, brush his teeth and get himself to school in the morning. He’s a functional pre-pubescent child-thing whose major physical adjustments are shaving his face and figuring out how to mask that fresh-from-the-grave smell that seems to cling to teenage boys.

No, I’m not saying we’re done with him. He’s far from ready for adulthood. But all the things that require 24 hour watch and maintenance have been done long before I came into the picture.

And even though we’re really nowhere near done with JT, we still want more. And even though we’re not in a financially secure situation, we don’t have a house, I don’t have a job (actually I do, but that’s for another day), we still want children, and we talk about it on a daily basis.

And despite all the things to be thankful for this year, I still miss the family we would have, were it not for Fil’s illness, were it not for the miscarriage.

I suppose everyone is allowed a little gloom in a time of happiness. Holiday Blues.

The Longest Road

This particular summer is hot, in Texas at least. In Pisa, a cool breeze gets sucked into this little place of miracles and ripples throughout like water. After riding gondolas in Venice and posing with David in Florence, the rest of my tour group stands eagerly in front of the Leaning Tower, pretending to prop up the drifting structure. The sky is so clear, a blue you see back home breaking the horizon as you travel west on 183. Around us children play on the grass, a vendor shouts about fresh coconut as a rill of cool water spills over slivers of shell, people haggle with merchants and buy hot dogs, and I stand idly by waiting to move.

After visiting the bapistry, we pour into the sunlight once again. The heat restored to our bodies after the chill of the dome once used for blessings. The new direction is clear as our tour guide steers us towards the cathedral, where girls are given shrouds to cover their bare shoulders and knees. I find myself wheeling mechanically towards the back of the cathedral, towards a sight familiar after the two or three churches we’d been in since our arrival to Europe.

A little platform is raised before religious icons and large electric candles are sold for donations. I discard another euro into the donation box and take a candle into my hand. Like every visit before this one, I clutch the little offering in my fist and shut my eyes, not to pray or ask God for anything, but simply to remember.

Michael, at that point, would have been fluttering against the underside of my ribcage, barely noticeable to me, but still pushing the boundaries and confines of my skin and – annoyingly – my pant size. Instead, the barren feeling had crept over my skin, the last feelings of him lost into the bathroom of Motel 6 where I delivered my son, prematurely, into my hands. That day, marked like a black smudge on the calendar, amidst so many more and previous perfect days. The longest road, an unexpected fork taken back to the start.

While I dare to mourn, all these dark memories threaten to creep into that candle of hope. But instead I think on him, on how he would have been, on the what-if’s of that maybe-little-being. And, wondering on first words and favorite foods, on hair color and “would he be like me?” I find a little hope inside me to light that candle.

When all is said and done, my candle adding to the warm glow of 25 watts, I make my way around the interior of the cathedral and outside again. Stumbling into the enveloping blue of the piazza, the raucous joy of life shakes me out of that melancholy daze. In rejoining life, I play around in the warm grass with an excited Italian puppy and buy souvenirs for my family, a slice of coconut for myself.

I return home, not changed, not altered in any momentous way, but it is a slow start towards healing. Here I am almost a full year later, and instead of falling upon the crutches of old, stale wounds, I try to continue that warm bath of healing. We are just trying to heal. In that motion of life, the rocking of our boat on the currents of fate, we find it in us to start on that journey again. The longest road, yet untraveled, and out feet just barely at the start.

Maybe I should have started a TTC journal sooner

Apparently there are quiet a few lesbian TTC blogs on the web. This is something I didn’t know until … well, 3 days ago when I ventured online for the first time to set up my ovulation chart. It’s nice to know we’re definitely not alone.

“We” are Att (the lovely blogger) and Fil, my wife of going on 5 years. (No, we are not married by any version of ceremony that exists for gay couples in the US.)

Fil: 28 years old, Monster’s (9 years old) bio mom, but daddy all the way, wonderful aunt/uncle, night stocker at grocery store, Jack of all Trades, obsessive compulsive, musician, ex-nurse, ex-Michiganite, badass turned soft by years of marriage.

Att: 18 years old, aspiring pediatric nurse, obsessive compulsive as well, violinist, proud Austinite, die hard mommy, and eagerly proud auntie.

And then there’s Monster, our 9 year old son. He’s got ADHD and some serious pre-pubescent mood swings. But he’s my wonderful boy, sweet and funny and cuddly and he’s all mine. Fil may have birthed him but I’m his mommy all the way. He runs to me when he cuts, hits or generally hurts himself. If there’s a homework problem or a word he doesn’t know I’m the first thing he points his little compass towards. He loves Star Wars, video games, dragons and all things Chinese or Japanese. He will eat sushi by the pound but can’t stand the sight of fish prepared any other way (except for fish tacos). He will order orange soda for weeks and then suddenly change his preferences and only drink Sprite. Like his mom (not daddy, but me) and grandpa (my dad) he has a crazy knack for history and WWII era things. He is so like me it’s hard to see the biological differences. He talks like me, loves the things I love, watches what I watch,  mimics my emotions and behaviours (not always a good thing) and tries very hard to spend almost all his time with me.

We are currently living with our roommates, Nk and Mt and their 5 year old daughter Big B (whose bio dad is a bum slumming it somewhere in Michigan). Nk is currently a couple months pregnant with their second child. We are presently moving into a 3 bedroom manufactured home (read: mobile home) in which Big B and Monster have to share a bedroom. For the past 2 months I have been doing “day care” for Big B (and Monster) and will continue to do so until both kids start school in August.

February 20, 2009:

Looking back on this post made almost 2 years ago, I am startled at how I rambled effortlessly on and on about how Fil and I were going to go forward with having a baby at a very financially unstable junction in our lives. We didn’t talk a lot about the sane, logical stuffs behind bringing another mouth into our expanding family. I deleted the majority of this 3 page post because I feel that’s not who I really was. I’m sure the night before, Fil and I had had a very romantic encounter and talked about babies and nurseries. I’m sure my head was filled with romantic ideals of our future family, and I doubt I took into account the space needed for an infant (you know, space we didn’t have in our queen sized mattress bedroom) or the money or the insurance. Later on I talk about these things in more detail, how we solved the insurance problem and the space problem.

I also really hate how I address the miscarriage issue. I feel like I did a dishonour to my son, Monster, by talking about him so little, and to Michael by talking about his loss in all the wrong way. I deal much more readily with the loss of him here, in my non-fiction piece with the same title as my journal.

I still feel the loss of him for every day I breathe. I was made unwhole by his loss and truly believe that no other child could fill the hole left by his leaving. I would never imagine putting that kind of pressure or stress on a baby to be the lost boy. Nor do I imagine anyone would do that after a miscarriage.

But now, I do believe his loss was for a reason. For our family, because an extra mouth would surely have broken us in times of great need. He would have suffered, I think, because we couldn’t give him the world. Not under those circumstances. I think it would have put a great tension between us and my parents, and we have needed them so much in these past years that I can’t imagine how life would have fared.

I will never think the loss of him was a good thing. I will simply take it as a sign that we were not ready for a child, and that when we are, our son or daughter will come.

Though I seemed so painfully naive at the time, I had the best intentions at heart. My argument remains solid, I want to have our second child before Fil is too far into 30. Our recent struggles have shown us to embrace life with wide open arms. I couldn’t imagine being a single mother, but I also couldn’t imagine not having a child with Fil. I think anyone can understand that need.