I wouldn’t recommend reading this post if you are easily offended, I am about to let forth a poisoned bile filled spew of anger and indignation.
It is not often that I feel the world is unfair. I usually take things in my stride, knowing that there is a big plan and each day is just another step along the way. Lately however, at every mention of “Enjoy your time with each other” or “Oh you can borrow our kids!” or “You don’t know how lucky you are!”, I go into a blind mad rage.
There is only one person I know who understands this feeling. This utter gut wrench when you see other people with children and your insides howl “WHERE’S MY BABY?!” That person is my older cousin. No, No we don’t want to borrow your children. We want our own. Yes, we’d be quite OK with the sleepless nights, the smelling of sick, the infinite washing of clothes. We want it. We want the first day of school, the driving to ballet/swimming/football/whatever and the nappies and the potty training and the incredible joy of knowing that little person came from us. We want it for ourselves and every time you smugly say we can borrow your kids, I want to push you up against a wall, hold you round the throat and scream at you with my tonsils coming out of my mouth until you understand how fucking lucky you are.
If you have never been told, over and over and over and over and over and over “this year”, “Next year” “Soon ™”, if you have never had to wait to have a baby with a partner you love, never been through the trials of not being able to conceive, never seen your friends having children whilst you’ve been stuck in a dead end marriage and had your EVERY FIBRE screaming to be pregnant, then please, Shut The Fuck Up telling me to “Enjoy my time”. I AM ENJOYING IT!!! That’s the fucking point. I FINALLY found some one, it took me till I was 32 but I did and I found THE some one. And we both want children, we want to raise a family together. And it doesn’t matter that we’ve not been together that long. And it doesn’t matter that we’re living in different countries right now. What matters is we love each other and we are making this work. And yes, we’re going to do our very best to have a baby as soon as possible. Because we’ve both been waiting. Waiting and wasting our lives with twats of the opposite sex who didn’t want the same things as us but couldn’t acknowledge it. Then we found each other and now “waiting for the right time” can go fuck itself in the arse. There is no right time. The time is now.
So when my friend doesn’t tell me that she is pregnant with her second child, I am not entirely surprised. When almost all my friends talk about is their children, nieces, nephews and so on, I am not surprised. When I find myself at 2 and 3 year old parties feeling like a spare prick at a wedding, I am not surprised. I am sad. I am bereft. I leave early because I can’t stand to be there with nothing hovering on my hip and wondering where my baby is and when s/he will come.
I cry watching silly TV shows about Daddies and Daughters, and about parents and children. I couldn’t watch the recent Eastenders story line where a baby died and the mother stole her neighbours baby of the same age. I bore my man to death and put /even more\ pressure on him to move across the continent as soon as possible, because he’s not working his arse off to do that already you silly selfish cow.
I look at the small front bedroom aka ‘office’ aka ‘baby room’ and I can’t go in there. I avoid looking at the pile of papers and the crap dropped in there because I’m denying how much I want our child. I’m trying to carry on with the day-to-day and not break down in tears every hour. I go to my friends house and say thanks that the only other friend without a baby is going to be there. I promise myself if the talk of children comes up, I will not cry. But I do. And I can’t tell them how I really feel, how their platitudes make it even harder to deal with. I can’t tell some of my oldest friends in the world that I can’t be around them because seeing them and their children makes me want to rip out my insides. I can’t tell them that the inane remarks do not soothe, they add to the pain.
There used to be a phrase when we were all single, Smug Marrieds. Those couples who were so caught up in each other as to appear to be smug. I never really felt bothered by them. But Smug Families? Yeah. My inner bitch hates you. It won’t stop hating you until I am one of you.
