Monday, June 16, 2014

Dreaming

I've been feeling emotionally pretty steady, but my subconscious is working hard. I dream about children almost every night.

Last night's: I had two children. Small Boy was 6 and the other one was maybe 1 or 2 (in real life, Small Boy is almost 5 now.) Small Boy asked if he could take the baby for a walk and I said "Sure".

He returned later without the baby. I was panicked and started searching the town, running up and down streets calling out, crying, looking all around. In the pit of my stomach I knew the baby was gone and we'd never find (her? I think it was her.)

In my dream, I didn't blame Small Boy at all -- I blamed myself for letting him take the baby, for not thinking it through well enough when he asked.

Sometimes I comfort myself by thinking about this: there's a decent chance that my secondary infertility was caused by the c-section. I never had lining problems before. The two miscarriages due to SCH, that's an implantation problem, which is something I also didn't have before. It seems likely that my uterus just reacted really badly to being swabbed out after the surgery.

I have finally accepted that the c-section was about as necessary and inevitable as they come. See also: obstructed labor, impacted fetal head, obstetric injury, obstetic fistula, stillbirth, maternal mortality. I am goddamned lucky. I needed a c-section, and I got it, promptly. I spent the months after Small Boy's birth angsting about breastfeeding and PPD, not dealing with grievous injuries and the death of my baby.

If while I was in labor someone had said to me: hey, I'll cut you a deal. You give up your future fertility, and I'll guarantee you that Small Boy will be healthy and happy and everything awesome.

I would have taken that deal in a second. I cared about nothing at all more than getting him here safely.

Maybe I did take that deal; I just didn't know it at the time.

Everyone rewrites narratives until they find one they can live with. Maybe this is mine: that there is no world in which I got to have Small Boy and another baby. The price of Small Boy and his truly enormous 98th percentile noggin was my future fertility. It's a price I would have agreed to.

In Sandman, Death once tells someone who -- upon dying after a long span of time -- says "I did pretty well, didn't I?" and she says "You got what everybody gets: a lifetime."

Maybe I got what everybody gets: a family. This is mine. Railing about wanting a different one makes no sense, because if it were a different one, it wouldn't be mine.

I guess it's realizing that wanting more family for me really means wanting a different family. And I don't want that.