Real American Woman, ch. 6

September 14, 2013

Of all things to argue about, why does it have to be this? About children? The one thing that’s helping me make it through all of this dread and terror and uncertainty? Children? That’s what Jeff and I have to argue about?

Pinterest has been helpful to me. Skimming through the home decoration and children’s pages, thinking about ideas for nurseries and monograms and cute announcements and games and parenting, as odd as it seems, it’s actually helping. It’s like telling myself that I will be okay, that I will make it through this surgery and I’ll be fine, I’ll have children of my own one day, without needing a surrogate mother for them! Jeff and I have settled on names, as well: Victoria Louise, for our grandmothers, and Ronald Wesley, for our fathers. These things we can agree on, the little things like the nursery styles, the names, the parenting, the dream house we want to raise them in… But talking about actual children, and having them? Why is it that we have to argue about that, when everything is still so unsure?

I know I have school. I know I’m already at risk of not graduating, just because of how long I’ve been here and will be. I know we don’t have the money right now. I know we don’t have a lot of things, but damn it, if our parents made it, then so can we! His points are valid, but why does he have to be so damn hard about it? Shutting me down without a second thought, and then reminding me that he’s “trying to be nothing but supportive” to me in this time. No! He doesn’t even realize how much that hurts, to just shut me down completely. Am I not even allowed to daydream and wish, when I don’t even know if I can?

Next year is not asking too much, I don’t think. It will be my fifth year of college, leaving me with two left. If we started trying next year, then I’d have a one-year-old during my senior year. If not then, I could possibly hold out until my senior year, and then be pregnant through the last semester. But that’s three years… I’ll be 24, and I’d have it when I was 25. Then if we have a second – which I would really like that, because it is absolutely terrible to be an only child – I would be 28 or 29. That’s so much later than I hoped for, so far away… My worst nightmare as far as children go is that I’m going to be like everyone else in my family and be an old maid before I have children, in my thirties and right as menopause starts to kick off. Between childbearing and that, I really would lose everything – my voice, my body, my drive, my passions… I’d become obsolete, a stay-at-home mom, a wallowing woman… I don’t want that. I want to be able to be healthy and active with my children, to play games with them without getting tired in the first half hour, to go on vacations and be able to keep up with them and fuel their imaginations and thrill, to set a healthy standard of living for them that revolves around sports and family activities and love, so that we can break this chain of obesity that plagues my family names! Is that too much to ask?

I know part of this is just the terror, the worry… Another part of this is the cold I’ve been fighting off for the last three days. The last part of it is that I really do feel like I’m ready for my own family, instead of helping raise children who aren’t even mine. Caley… Natalie… Austin… Brennan… Vanessa… Lucas… All of them are my cousins, yet they’re my kids too. I love them like my own kids. I would die for them, as if they were my own kids. And as far as Caley and Austin go, they are my kids – it hit me so hard that day, each day, when they told me, on separate occasions, that their mom was not their real mom, that I was their mom, just because of all the things I’ve done for them since the day they were born…

God, this is hard. This is so hard… Why is this what we have to argue about? Why this?

The surgery is a week away. Can I even keep my sanity, if I’m not allowed to dream?