experience pregnancy

I have did this. Twice. It was a lifelong goal for me ever since I first knew what pregnancy was. I imagined it would be a magical time, full of intense bonding with the baby, along with unbelieveable changes in my own personality which would somehow transform me into that sort of person which is a MOTHER.

It didn’t work like that. For me there were no bells, whistles, fairy dust, etc. It was pretty cool watching the babies kick, though. Bonding to my babies didn’t happen until well after they were born, and I CERTAINLY never got any God-given wisdom suddenly explaining how to do this Mother shit.

Somehow, it all worked out, though. My kids are the greatest! I know I’ve done a lot right with them, because you don’t get kids that great if you’ve screwed EVERYTHING up.

I’ll never forget being pregnant, though. For me, it was a lot of fear that I wouldn’t be good enough. That I couldn’t handle this. I thought frequently of giving my children (unborn) up for adoption. I’m really glad I had the chance to experience them inside me.

I could have been a mother other ways (adoption, etc.) but in this lifetime I’m glad I had the chance to experience this part of motherhood. It humbles you.

i love kids dont get me wrong, i just dont want them at a young age. i got pregnant with a guy who didnt love me and left as soon as he found out and claimed it wasnt his. i loved the feeling just not all the negative feedback i got from it.

I hate to say it was not worth it. It sounds like I hate children or something. To the contrary. I love children. I want children. Lots of them. But having an early miscarriage (almost too early to tell) at a young age with a lover who didn’t even care about me much less the fact that he came that close to having a baby has caused me a lot of emotional problems. All I remember about those couple of weeks is being tired and nauseous and moody all of the time. I was in denial about the whole thing. That and that the night it happened, I tried to talk my lover out of sex because my woman’s intuition and my ovulation calendar (that was back when I was dumb enough to use rhythm and the “pull and pray” methods of birth control) told me the odds were in favor of me conceiving a child, our child. I told him that. He basically told me there was no way I could get pregnant (with the great precautions we were using? Of course not! How could it ever happen?), that it was all in my head, and that he’d see if he could borrow a condom from his roommate. He couldn’t.

I’d be close to seven months along right now. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about it, picture me being a young single mom trying to do it all, picture the life my baby would have had and how I would have done everything I could do make sure he (maybe she? but my gut tells me it was a he) had everything growing up I didn’t. What’s worse about situations like mine is people telling me how lucky I am. If I were thirty, married, and had a six-figure income people would mourn with me or at least pretend to care. The only thing worse than that is people assuming that because I was young, single, and unemployed that I must have had an abortion. I didn’t. I am pro-choice, but I could never make that choice.

I am starting to put all of it behind me. I still have many more chances to be a mother. One miscarriage does not mean I cannot have children of my own one day. I know personally a woman who had four miscarriages and has four living, healthy children. I know of a woman who had seven miscarriages and still has two healthy, living children. It sounds encouraging in theory, but I don’t know if I can go through it emotionally again, and I pray I never have to. So I don’t dwell on it. I am on the Pill until the day I am ready to bring a child into the world. In the near future I will be a stepmother to two beautiful children. And one day many, many years from now I will see my baby again in Heaven. I believe that with all of my heart, soul, mind and body.

I hope that one day I can experience a happy, joyous pregnancy complete with morning sickness and strange food cravings and baby showers and cigars afterwards. But my first was one of the darker parts of my life. I hate to say I know how it feels to lose a child, because obviously losing a child you’ve been raising and gotten to know and given birth to is a lot worse, but in a way I have lost a child.

RIP Nathaniel Joseph M. or Elizabeth Faye M.