"Coming Out" of the Crib

After an entire decade of trying to get pregnant, I have finally come to terms with the fact that it is never going to happen. It's a good thing, too, because I'm due to have a complete hysterectomy in less than a month.

For ten years I chased the baby dream. I tried Clomid, artificial insemination (x3), acupuncture, Robitussin, ovulation predictor kits, fertility herbs, standing on my head after sex...ad nauseum.

I wasn't one of these women who never had the maternal instinct, or someone who even knew from the beginning that they could never get pregnant because of (fill in the blank.) It would have been infinitely easier if I knew, for instance, that I was born without a uterus, or my fallopian tubes were deformed, or, hell, even that my husband's underwear was too tight.

No such luck. No, my problem was a wonderful variety of "unexplained infertility." Everything was working fine. There was no reason whatsoever that I could not get pregnant.

At least that is what the doctors said. Everybody else (successful baby makers) had their own cure for my infertility woes: just relax.

Just. Relax.

Those two words made me want to beat some body's head into the wall.

Just relax.

Here's how it would go:

Me: I am only part of a woman. What if my husband decides he wants his own children and leaves me for a whole woman who can have them?

Expert in baby making (insert friend, sister, mother, coworker): Honey, you are too uptight. Just go get some wine, go out on the town and it will happen.

Me: O.K. I will concentrate on relaxing. Wait...what? What do I do to....relax? Am I doing something wrong? What, exactly?

I thought a lot about relaxing. What exactly did they mean...relax? Was I not relaxing enough? The thought made me nervous. Oh no! I'm not relaxing enough! This must be fixed immediately! Now....what do I do?

I tried fertility yoga and transcendental meditation, which told me to focus my energy on my womb, and to visualize the nourishment of my body going there. As I did exercises to increase the blood flow to my womb, I tried to visualize...what? A red glowing light in my womb? A green seedling sprouting? A screaming baby?

"Just relax" was one of my favorites, but the reasons why I was failing to get pregnant didn't stop there. There was an entire litany of reasons why it was my fault that I couldn't get pregnant. Here is a sampling of a few:

"Just adopt. You'll get pregnant immediately."
"Stop thinking about it...then it will happen for sure!"
"You aren't praying enough."

That last one devastated me. I'm not praying enough? I am not close enough to God to have a baby? I haven't paid my dues? I mean, Jesus Christ! What the hell?

I sum, it has been a long, terrible journey
Despite the fact that I have a wonderful husband, there were many times that I felt utterly alone. I mean, lets face it; most men just don't have the "baby instinct" like us women, and many times this caused a considerable amount of resentment to build up towards a wonderful man who has stuck by my side and put up with so much more than many men would.

I guess that is finally what snapped me out of it; I am incredibly blessed in that I found my soul mate. I had to look at what I DO have, and not what I don't have. But even that wasn't enough for a while.

My husband does not want to adopt a baby.

To put this in context, it should be known that he and I argued about getting a dog for over five years until one day I just brought one home. It was an expensive dog, at that. It may have been a cheaper dog if the "dog war" had not lasted so long. And now we both love her to death, and she is the sweetest dog in the universe. Really. She is like my baby. My husband could not see that having a dog fulfilled the "Mama" instinct in me, but after we got her, he understood.

So naturally, and with the dogged (pun intended) encouragement of friends I tried to compare the adoption of a dog to the adoption of a baby. Surely he would love a baby the way he loved that dog. I mean, our dog transformed him from a hardened, official "dog hater" into a man making boo-boo, doo-doo sounds. If there had been a national registry for people who hated dogs, his name would have been on the list, and yet he was rendered helpless by our puppy's baby noises. He had never had a dog before, so he'd hated them until he got one and realized that they were wonderful. He hasn't had a baby before, so surely the same thing would happen. He would fall in love with the baby immediately.

Why was he being so closed minded? His insistence that we not adopt a baby was a huge bone of contention (ha!) for quite some time. I resented him still.

See, it took me years to get over this idea that he didn't want the baby as badly as I did, and so because of this, even though I truly loved him, in the back of my mind, in some ways, well...he kinda sucked. He was keeping me from my dream! If only he would agree to more tests, more treatments, more surgeries....

We are school teachers. We don't make a lot of money. We can't be like Celine Dion and try in- vitro twenty times. Everybody said that if we wanted a baby badly enough, we could save the money. I could work a second job. But wait...wouldn't a second job stress me out? Wasn't that, you know, one of the initial reasons why I wasn't getting pregnant to begin with?

Suddenly I realized that everybody else was applying the same standard to me as I was my husband. There is only so much I can do, only so much I can give, and only so much I can accept. The expectations that other people had of me were just too much. I had done everything I could, and so had my husband. In truth, he had done so very much, and he had loved me in spite of it all.

As the years went by, I found myself becoming happier with my life without kids. I enjoyed the routine I had with my husband and I looked forward to the things that we did together on a daily basis. I began to think about how different life would be if we had a baby, and I could really see how having a baby at this point in my life might make me miserably unhappy.

Five years ago, I wanted to spend time teaching a little mini me the important things in life, but now I just want to enjoy my life as it is. So secretly, I admitted to myself that I didn't really want to have kids any more.

But I couldn't get off the hook that easy. Every time I meet a woman there is this screamingly loud unspoken question: do you have any kids? It is terribly uncomfortable; I know they want to ask, but they don't know how to time it, exactly. For all they know, it could be a very touchy subject, or, God forbid, I could be one of those mutants who never wanted kids to begin with. So I try to bring it up first, and I feel obligated to explain how long we tried and how I really wanted kids and how it was devastating. And it was.

I absolutely hate this, but for a while I even tried to spin the discussion in such a way to infer that it was kind of my husband's fault because he refused to go tens of thousands of dollars in debt to produce an offspring.
These are arguments that are easy for people to understand, and as such, create sympathy. If I were to say that we tried and that I was over it, then the United Motherhood Front would serve as judge, jury and executioner. The prodding would begin again....

"Well, don't you still want one? There is really nothing like a little baby."
or
"Babies are a gift from God."

And it is true that I am omitted from certain events and friendships due to my lack of children. Motherhood is a big club that provides friendship and support and something to talk about. If you have no kids, sometimes you have very little to talk about with those who do.

We don't get invited to community events because we are that "weird couple" who don't have any children. In fact, people in our neighborhood do not even speak to us. I guess they assume that something is wrong with us since we have no children. Sometimes I think it is the people in my neighborhood that have something wrong with them.

I once heard a mom say that she had her baby when she was 23 and hasn't had her sanity since. This makes sense to me.

Moms laugh and think it is cute when their babies wipe doo-doo on the wall. To me, only a baby could get away with that; if it were a 35 year old man doing that, would it still be cute? And having been a teacher for so long, I have dealt with everything from parents who don't want their children to mothers who will insanely defend their children no matter what. They are so divorced from reality when it comes to their child that their child LITERALLY could have murdered someone and they will say, "He really is a good boy...he just made a mistake."

While discussing the behavior of a child with one such mother, I was asked whether or not I had any children of my own yet. When I replied that I did not, this mother inferred that I could not really understand kids and that I could never feel the empathy necessary to be their teacher, since I was not a mother myself. Outraged, I shared this story with a couple my fellow female teachers, who said, "Well, being a mother DOES make you a little more understanding." Yes, they were mothers, too.

Good GOD, what was I missing out on? Motherhood must be great! That is why mothers around the world are doing everything they can to make sure our planet is a better place for their children. You know, like reducing greenhouse gases and being conscientious about our water supply. Stuff like that.

What? They are driving Hummers? They are watering their yards in the middle of the day while it is raining? They are tearing down old houses and building McMansions?

Oh.

It is a miracle, but they have no guilt about these things. But they sure as hell want me to feel guilty because I don't have any kids. It doesn't matter how much we tried, how much we gave, how much it wrecked me physically, emotionally, spiritually and financially; some people will still say that we still didn't give enough. They say that two people like us owe it to society to at least adopt a poor unfortunate child.

"Coming out" about not wanting kids anymore may be as hard as coming out about being gay. I don't know...I might get some serious flak for writing that. I'm not gay, but I sympathize with those who are. For whatever reason, no matter how hard they may or may not have tried, they are gay. Friggin' get over it, already.

So I admitted to myself that I no longer really want children. The time has come and gone, and I'm over it. Above, I detailed the many brick walls I slammed into along my journey, but now I am in the process of finding ways to shirk the heavy loads of guilt that society tries to heap upon me by coming out of the "crib" and saying: I don't want kids any more. Friggin' get over it, already.

Now I am finally OK with things and the doctor recommends that I have a hysterectomy. At least now, when questioned by mothers, I can blame the hysterectomy for not continually pursuing pregnancy and I can let go of the guilt and years of resentment and finally be at peace.

In a cruel twist of fate, I finally found out last month the reason why I can't have children. I have a somewhat deformed cervix. During the many tests I've had to determine whether or not I have uterine cancer, my doctor told me that my cervix curves upwards at a 90 degree angle and that I would have never been able to get pregnant without in-vitro. Why didn't our fertility specialist catch this? He never did the same kind of tests.

I don't have cancer, but have enough of a precancerous situation to necessitate having all of the baby making equipment removed, and having it done the old fashioned way. You know...being cut open.

So that closes the door permanently, and I'm OK with that. Everybody else needs to get OK as well.

The other day, a mom asked me, "Who will take care of you when you get old?" Since I won't have any children around and I am the youngest child in my family, this is a question that has bothered me from time to time. I responded to the woman that the same people that take care of her would take care of me; I will live in assisted living or a nursing home. It is sad, but a fact of life. Many children do not have much to do with their adult parents and find it very difficult to stomach when their mom or dad become disabled and so they stay away.

Having children does not guarantee happiness. When someone you know is infertile, please remember this before you espouse your views on the awesomeness of being a mom. The best thing a friend ever said to me was that if I had a baby, things might never be the same between myself and my husband again. She said that it may not turn out the way I think it would, and at the very least, things would change. She said that sometimes, things change for the worse.

So I am happy with what I was dealt in life, and I am at peace with the decisions I have made. How many other people can say the same thing?