When I try to transport myself back to that time, that August of 2003 when I looked at my world through a clouded film, where my hips hung heavy with every step, where breath took an incredible amount of conjured up energy, I don't know where he came from. As that summer ticked so slowly by, I was in a trance. I had energy for only one thing, one person, and she was gone. I wanted nothing else. There was no joy, and even on the days where I tried to look for it, I could not see it. I wonder if I ever laughed, and I think I didn't.
People ask me all the time, all the time. How did you decide?
We did not decide, it just happened. I couldn't face it not happening. Now clearly the act of conception took some forethought, or at least some proactive action as a step in the direction of deciding to have another baby, but I honestly can hardly remember. I couldn't imagine extending this place I was in, this dreadful, stinking, pit of a childless hell I was surrounded by, by one single day longer than I had to. I could not imagine how I could survive one day longer than I absolutely had to.
And so that was the decision, I wanted the hell out of dodge and another child was the only way I could see doing that. I do not regret this.
2 comments:
This is me Carol. ME ME ME! I'm in it, right now. But at five months out, I'm still in it! And we've been trying since well before we were advised to. You're right, every day is like torture. Childless motherhood is really the purest form of hell. So Hawaii here we come. Hopefully I'll come back with life inside me again.
I felt not only a need to have another child, to give myself somebody to hold and love, to be a mother of a living child, I simply felt the need to create and nourish life . . . or to at least be working toward that to ward off the sickness, dying, and death that pressed in all around.
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