Where Does the Love Go?
1.
A fiction: I’m walking down the street. A little girl with chestnut curls holds my hand. This tiny hand is warm, fingernails dirty from play. She brushes those curls off her face with the other hand and looks up at me with big hazel eyes “Mommy,” she says if we are in the States–“Mamá” if I am raising her in Spain. This is a fiction I thought would be non-fiction, for all my life.
2.
As I’m about to step into a bath, I catch my reflection in the mirror and wonder what it would look like to see my belly swell. What it would feel like to have movement inside that is not my own. To keep another heartbeat inside. I stand, curving my upper body downward, fingertips instinctively brushing on the softness of skin over my belly button, the other palm pressed against the small of my back. The imagined balloon deflates.
3.
A few years ago, I was on the Oregon coast – moody temporal skies and icy winds to match my internal weather on that particular day. I was grieving an ending to a hoped-for love affair, and a friend gave me a heart-shaped rock to throw into the ocean as a symbol of “letting go.” Throwing the rock into the crashing waves felt like a powerful release. Letting the roaring waves take my rocky heart into its belly, away from me. No longer mine to hold onto. I felt better…for maybe an hour. Until I realized that, of course, throwing a rock into an ocean–beautifully symbolic as it was–is only a superficial letting go. I would have to grieve for a long time (as my therapist added, “you might have to throw many rocks into the ocean”) before I felt an internal shift. So, too, have I realized that having one conversation, or writing this, will not tie up the grief of not having biological children. It will likely be a grief I work through for the rest of my life. I cannot tuck the grief to sleep, as I might have a child.
4.
A dog is being scolded by her owner and she backs her soft fur into me and stays there firmly. She may or may not understand what sparked the reprimand, but she feels she must have done something wrong. All I want to do at this moment is hold her, protect her, as if to tell her, it’s going to be ok, you’re safe here with me. And I feel her fear so deep in my bones that I wonder if it’s the younger version of myself I am speaking to–or the child I never had. Maybe both.
5.
I am at the stationary store in Barcelona. Only 22. So many years ahead to let life happen, there is no urgency. In Spain, the stationary options are infinite compared to those in the US. On this day, I am looking for fun letterhead to use to write to my then-boyfriend Jonathan, a soldier who was stationed in Iraq. Anna, my “mother in Spain” (“We must have been mother and daughter in a past life,” she once told me) pulls a sheet of paper that has teddy bears and bottles in faint pinks and blues “Para decirle: quiero tener tus bebés!’” and we laugh, but in that moment I do think I’d want to have his babies. I receive a letter later that week from Jonathan, where he tells me his favorite names for his future children. He asks me what mine are. Isabel, Monica, Josephine (after my great-great grandmother); names that could be easy in Spanish, French and English, I write. Khyber, after the Khyber Pass, what my sister’s name would have been if she didn’t come out a girl, and one I have long saved for the child I thought I’d have.
6.
In my mid-thirties, now. In Barcelona, again. At Anna’s dining room table, lingering after la comida one late afternoon, Anna’s friend–an “intuitive”–was Mercedes her name?–tells me, “You will have to make a decision in your early 40s whether or not to have a child.” She pauses. “It doesn’t fit your lifestyle.” She says it so matter-of-fact, like a journalist reporting a news story. I haven’t stopped thinking of it ever since.
7.
I wish I could tell you I didn’t like dolls as a child. That I was drawn to something less prescriptive, expected, gendered. But it would be a lie to tell you this. I loved dolls – specifically my American Girl doll Samantha, my cherished Christmas present, the year after we’d moved–again– after my parents’ divorce. I have a photo of me clutching her tightly with a toothy smile splashed across my face that wasn’t so easy to find during those days. Zipping a dress over her cloth back, reading to her before bed, taking her with me on any adventure. To be a mother–even of a plastic constructed thing that made no sound–enlivened me.
8.
People talk about baby fever coming on suddenly in one’s childbearing years, but I had it when I was a child myself. When my little sister was born, my grandmother Odette and I jumped up and down like kids on a trampoline in her Barcelona apartment when we got the news. I am told I held my sister closely and often, as if I wanted to protect her, that I taught her everything I could. I pointed at picture books over her crib. I mothered her, they said.
9.
I am 35 when I ask my gynecologist about taking a fertility test. What would you do differently if you knew, she asks. Join Match.com, I half-joke. But I didn’t join Match, or any dating site. One friend told me her meticulous plan for having a child on her own. Another friend went to every Jewish singles meetup, not for romance, but to find her partner in parenthood. My aunt at 35, fresh off a breakup, decided she would have a child on her own. It turned out her neighbor also wanted a child, so they agreed to do it together. I was inspired by these stories, but I couldn’t find myself going any of these routes–on my own, settling for Mr. Good Enough, or knocking on my neighbor’s door. I began to question that primal desire that I thought was so deeply a part of me. If this was what I wanted more than anything, wouldn’t I have made finding a partner a priority? Frozen some eggs? If I really wanted this wouldn’t I have made those compromises/choices? A question that haunts me.
10.
“You’d be the best mom” they say. I smile and don’t reply: single, with no savings account, a penchant for a nomadic lifestyle, chronic anxiety and asthma, am I really a good candidate for motherhood? I think I’m having a heart attack when I’m having heartburn. Sometimes the wind rustles and my heart begins hammering–I am sure I am being followed. I can’t stay at a party more than an hour before feeling dread. If I wake up in a panic in the middle of the night thinking I heard the door creak open… how would I comfort a child, telling them that there are no monsters under the bed convincingly?
11.
“You will never know a greater love than being a mother” we non-mothers are often told–a nudge to take the plunge. To make it happen, no matter what obstacles there might be. The tantrums at the grocery store are irritating, yes, but when it’s your child, it’s different, they say. I believe them. If I don’t have my own children, I will regret it for the rest of my life, I hear. Regret. Regret. Regret is the word that swims in my head like a fish in a bowl with water that is slowly dwindling away.
12.
Where does this reservoir of love go? Maybe the love of my life will have children? I’d welcome being a stepmom. Maybe my siblings will. Maybe I will eventually adopt. Probably, I will have two dogs and one cat.
13.
My beloved father brings her to me. I think we are in Barcelona but everything is out of focus except for this little girl who has my beige eyes and hair, wears tiny pearl studs in her ears, a maroon dress I’ve seen in pictures, and a smile that masks pain. She is dulce and I desperately want her to know she is loved. I open my arms wide and beckon her to fill them. I hold her and say: “Everything is going to be ok, you are enough as you are.” It’s only when my body thaws into consciousness and I feel my eyes wet with tears that I hear what the dream was trying to tell me: to mother oneself, is a place to begin.
