Honoring the Wish

I want to make sure i do this clearly at least once during my mourning. It was always my wish to have children. It's been the single most important wish of my life, the driving wish. It infused everything i did, what career i chose, what i did with the "spare" bedroom (which was nothing), what i thought about when i went to the bathroom, what i did with my spare time. It controlled my free time, my thoughts, and my fantasies. And anything else was filler.

Okay, but that's not honoring the wish. I should try to honor the wish, so i know i did it specifically. I dont want to leave any healing stone unturned. But I'm feeling a little beyond the wish. It no longer holds the same value or meaning. I see it for what it's done to my life--controlled my decisions, blocked my happiness, kept me from living in the here and now, kept me from enjoying the present as if that were wrong. And it's funny that i say that because here i was thinking all along that my wish to bear children and be a mother encapsulated my happiness. So hoping for it was kind of making me happy because it kept me as close to it as i was going to get until it actually happened. And i did that to be happy, all along making myself miserable. MISERABLE. I mean, waiting to miss your period, then missing it for a day or two or ten, then thinking you're pregnant, then finding out that you're not--and doing that every month for 15 years is PURE misery.

What i really feel like doing is mourning all the little losses of those years--all the things i stopped myself from doing, all the things i wanted but didnt allow myself to have in lieu of the ultimate "have" i would be getting (beget). I just mentally checked out of my own life. I didnt take care of the little things i wanted, just waited for the ultimate want to appear. Waited and waited and waited. I didnt want to be in law school, once i discovered what it was all about. I didnt want to study nonsense those long hours. I did that for 3 years. In a twisted sort of way, the hope of having children, the hope of a future happiness gave me the will to put up with that. I didnt want to go to the small college i went. I had the grades to get into the college i wanted. I just didnt claim what i wanted. So long as i was to have children, no other want mattered.

I think i have honored the wish. These 40 days have been an homage to that wish. This wish to have children (and finally find happiness) helped me through a lot--through my parents' divorce, through school, through bad jobs, through every little thing that didnt go right. It kept me together all these years.

But now it's time to also acknowledge the shadow side of what it's done. It's kept my life on permanent hold, kept me from actually attaining happiness (when there was none being attained through the one avenue i thought), kept me on a painful monthly emotional roller coaster. And this i did for 15 years, hoping and waiting that each successive month would be different than the last, until i started to pray that God would take me off this emotional roller coaster.

Well my prayer has been answered now, maybe not in the way i expected, but what am i going to do ... balk?

What i see now is that for the first time in a long long time, i actually have real hope of happiness because i realize, finally finally realize, that having children is not the only way. This is an obvious and logical conclusion, i agree. I've even thought it before (shocking, i know). But i've never been able to feel it or believe it. I've never been able to give up the hope, the certainty, that having children was the best way to ultimate happiness for me.

I still dont know what that looks like or how to define happiness specifically. Is it in writing? In praying? In doing good works? In baking? In adopting? Who knows. But at least now i'm willing to allow myself the opportunity of finding out--where as before, no other form of happiness was required, developed, or sought after. Children were it. But children are not it.

I am.