Baby Blues

I carry the guilt around, an albatross I don’t know how to discard. I have spent most of the last 20 or so years beating myself up for being a terrible mother during my childrens’ formative years. It weighs on me, and I wear that weight badly. Sometimes it manifests itself in strange ways.

I’ve been thinking about having another baby.

Ask any parent what they remember from their childrens’ lives and they’ll say mostly the same thing: the milestones of talking and walking, the first day of school, the birthday parties, the times when they were happiest.

I remember most of those things, but I also remember the divorce and depression that followed. I remember missing birthday parties because I couldn’t get out of bed. I remember my parents and sisters stepping in to fill the holes in their lives I created when I was too wrapped up in my own pervasive sadness to care for my kids.

Another baby. I’m 55 years old. My kids are 27 and 24. I had my tubes tied in 1998. All signs point to “no” here. Oh, there are many more reasons to say no. But still, I think about it. I obsess about it. To feel that joy again, that feeling of having a life growing inside you, to do it all over, it seems like an absurd idea, but here we are. Why the hell would I want to have another child now?

I don’t know, is the easy answer. But it’s there. The feeling has lingered, hovered, rolled around itself and manifested into something that finds me tossing and turning at 4am after dreaming about my kids as toddlers.

I see all the pregnant women at work and I feel a stinging jealousy. I watch friends with little ones play with their kids, hover over them as they work on school projects, and I want to do that, too. I want it all. The little smiles and sweet milk breath, the colic and teething, the first words and first broken hearts, the ear infections and school field trips. I long for it, yearn for it.

When I was a young mother and my kids were moving through stages and milestones rapidly, I would mourn each passing phase. Time flashed before me, I couldn’t grab onto each moment tight enough to feel like I was holding on to something solid. As we moved from Barney to Power Rangers, from Raffi to pop punk, I had a hard time letting go of things. I missed the times that were, and couldn’t keep my head in the time that was. Maybe that’s what I’m feeling now, wanting to have a baby. It’s just nostalgia grabbing my hormones and shaking them up a little.

But it’s probably more than that.

The need to do it all over again rises out of that guilt I have over my less than stellar parenting. The guilt that is so ingrained in me, so much a part of my being, that I no longer try to separate it from who I am. It has become who I am. Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the mistakes I made, the way I was mentally absent so often, the influence all this must have had on my kids.

I separated from and later divorced the father of my children when they were very young. The depression that followed was deep and thick; I slogged through it the way one would walk through a foggy marsh. I was there for the kids, sort of. I went to their basketball and baseball games, I threw them birthday parties, I took them to Disney World. But I wasn’t there. I wasn’t completely present. And by the time they were really in their mind-shaping years I was so broken, so distanced from reality, there was no way I could be the mother I needed to be.

Thankfully, I had a supportive family standing by to help out. But this time in my life is one I look back on with regret; what if I could do it over, do it right, pay more attention, be more present, be a better influence.

Except it doesn’t work like that.

Depression is a hell of thing. It reaches down to your very soul and changes you from the inside out. I remember thinking all the time, this is not who I am, this is not who I am. I am better than this. But it would not let me go. It showed itself in weird ways. I became withdrawn, I spent hours and hours on the internet, I retreated into a world I had created that was just for me. It was easier to be alone with my darkness than to share it with anyone, let alone my young children. I stopped caring about me. I never stopped caring about my kids, but it became harder and harder to act on that care.

I kept a journal for both of them when they were infants, black and white composition books in which I scrawled stream-of-consciousness ramblings about the lives around them. The news, their families, what I wanted out of life for them. What I wanted, I wrote, was for them to be good, loving, empathetic, caring people with kind hearts and good souls. The journals drift off at some point, then stop completely. I didn’t grow bored with them, I didn’t get tired of writing, I just had nothing to say to them except, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for being absent, I’m sorry for not being there for you, I’m sorry for not pushing you harder.

My kids did turn into the adults I hoped they would be. They are kind and wonderful and you’d think that alone would ease up some of the guilt.

I wonder all the time what they remember of their childhood, if they remember the birthday parties I missed, if they remember me not getting off the couch for days on end, if they recollect any of the things I keep as tokens of their youth.

I assumed my “baby fever” was me wanting to change things, to be given a second chance to make things right. But no matter how right I would do it with another child, it wouldn’t change the way I raised my existing children. I can’t make up for lost time with them by devoting my time to a younger sibling. It just doesn’t work that way.

I don’t need another baby. I can’t have one, anyhow, and if pushed I probably would not bring a child into a world where Trump is in power and climate change is going to be a lasting, terrible legacy. There are a lot of things to think about here besides my psychological reasons for wanting to reproduce again.

This guilt I’ve been carrying like a weight took on a life of its own and burrowed itself deep inside me. Once embedded, it became difficult to remove and I didn’t know any other existence. Thinking about having another baby is a way to finally relieve that guilt, so I thought. I became so accustomed to harshly leaning into myself, I don’t know how to react now that I’m thinking maybe I don’t owe it to myself and my kids to be constantly guilty. While having another child would certainly allow me the opportunity to be a good mother, the time has come to admit that maybe I already am.

Thinking hard about this has been cathartic. It has enabled me to let loose my grip on the guilt that has plagued me for so many years. I never allowed myself to think I could let go if it, I just assumed it was something I would carry with me my whole life. But the baby fever has made me realize that I don’t really need the redemption I was after.

Despite everything that happened, despite the divorce and depression, despite the times I wasn’t mentally present, I did ok. My kids are what I hoped for them to be: caring, thoughtful, kind adults. Maybe I can let go of the desire to have another child. The baby fever is just a means to an end, a way to work around the albatross, to finally let it fly free.

That fever will subside, just another obsessive thought I’ll eventually lose for a different obsessive thought, like going vegan or constantly contemplating my means of death. I know deep down that I can’t have a baby to make up for the past. And perhaps I’ll know now that my past doesn’t have to be made up for.