I’m not a teenager. I’m not alone. I’m not childless.
I’m in my 30s. I’ve been married for more than 11 years. I have 5 children with my husband. We love having a big family, our marriage is stronger than it’s ever been…but now I’m pregnant again and he does not want another baby.
He’s been very vocal since I was pregnant with #5 (who is almost a year old) that he wants no more children, period. I respected this. I took my pill every day. I’m not sure how this happened, but it did. I suspect it happened around the time I had the flu and nothing was staying down.
Regardless of how it happened, the truth is that it happened. And now he wants me to have an abortion. I told him it’s all fine and dandy until you’re the one thinking about it. It all comes home then, and I just can’t do it.
So, despite not being alone, I am. I am more confused and scared now than I was when I was 19, single and pregnant with my first child. I never would have expected this reaction from my husband. Four of our five were unexpected and it was always OK, he was always supportive.
Now he’s wishing I’d have a miscarriage because he knows I won’t abort. He keeps calling and emailing me to see if I’m bleeding and showing obvious disappointment when I tell him I’m not.
I am so alone.
When Alex was first born, I basically grabbed him out of the nurse’s hands. I didn’t want anyone to take my little son away.
And all he wanted to do was to be near me, to lie near my breast, feeling my warmth, trying to figure out this strange and exciting new world that he had just entered. It was so hard. He now had to breathe, and he had to eat, and he had to poo and pee, and he even had to put up with all those changes in temperature that kept happening all the time. And I could feel that. I could feel what he wanted.
An hour and a half waiting for the doctor to come and stitch me up (great details I know), where I blanked out on gas, and then me coming back to the world of the living and holding my baby again…
He was perfect. He had a perfectly shaped dome head with his long black hair and eyes that could barely see; but when he looked at me, I could see him focus, focus on me, and a complete helplessness and trust was in those grey eyes. He kept on curling his lip, just like I do, when he couldn’t latch on properly, which was often in those first days of life. He kept on screaming, and I had never reacted to anything in my life like I did to those cries.
All I could feel was him, his heartbeat, his warmth, and his love next to my breast. We would just lie there together, against hospital policy but the midwives allowed it anyway, mother and son against each other, not yet used to being two separate entities with two completely separate bodies. Lying next to me was an inseparable part of me, and lying next to him was what used to be his former complete world. He’d lie there listening to my heartbeat, and I could feel him relax, next to me.
My face looked like I had just escaped from Auschwitz, but inside my heart, there was a nirvana. I am excluding all those postnatally depressive thoughts that also quite often occurred to me, and the screaming and the fighting that went on after I went home.
No, that was different. Between the two of us, there was a complete sense of nirvana that nobody and nothing could break.
Time evaporated. Time became the three-hour sleep, eating, nappy change, three-hour sleep, eating, nappy change. How anybody could ever have being interested in anything else in the world was incomprehensible. Time was nirvana, and nirvana was love; there was nothing else that was needed in life but to lie there next to each other and listen to our heartbeats.
I had walked out of the hospital on the third night, and looked out on the world outside, and the cars in the street were still driving, and people were still smiling and talking and going to work and going about their business, and I wondered, I really wondered, how had the world not stopped and become some sort of gentle peaceful happy sleep that revolved around a three-hour clock? It had being raining for three days now, but as far as I and the woman who shared a room with me — a journalist at the ABC and nineteen years older than me, but exactly just as clueless with her child (oh the coincidence of journalism haha! But how would I have known then?) — the world was the monotonous coming and going of midwife staff, the monotonous hum of the air-conditioner, and of course, our little boys. Nobody had bothered to look outside.
I used to touch his long black hair and study every feature of him. I called him myshka-norushka. Sashka. Sanyuta. Shura. Alexander. My mother took to calling him Sanya, probably as a way of taking away the negative image of Alex’s other grandfather in her mind, but I never took to the name. Even these days, he’s only Sanya when he’s in trouble.
I watched his nose because more buttony and more buttony until it was a pointing-up button, and waited everyday for it to change into an elongated, big curvy thing, but it stayed a button. It became and stayed just like mine, a little long, but curving up, and even more buttony!
I looked at the wrinkles around his eyes, just like his, and his mouth, which was just like his, except for when he curled his lip, just like I always do. His fingers had a flat end to them, just like his father, just a tiny little miniature version gripping the middle of my maternity bra, while he suckled and went to sleep, content to be held near my heartbeat and my safety, love and warmth.
Alexander Vladimirovich…Alexander Vladimirovich Mi………….., I used to whisper, listening to the sound escape into the world during all those silent days while he slept and the world had stopped for nirvana. Vladimirovich…I wondered whether that even applied to him anymore. I wondered what in the world I was going to tell him when he grew up…That we were abandoned and left as good as dead? No, no, I couldn’t say that, that would be too cruel. But that question plagued my mind, though it could not break the nirvana, as I looked a little miniature Volodia lying in my arms and continued falling in love, with not just the one in my arms, but as hard as I tried to stop, the other.
My teachers called, asking me whether I was still prepared to return after six weeks, but time did not exist anymore. Of course, I said yes. I was not going to drown in the sorrow and the depression I was facing at the time as well, I would do anything to get out of this house, I was going to prove all those idiots wrong about their prophecies, all of them. I was still angry and my pride was still hurt.
But even that could not break the nirvana. Couldn’t break the peace and the complete oneness with the world, the complete meaning to life, that existed between the two of us.
Whatever happened, I was his mother and he was my son. And I would give my life to protect him. Some day in the future, I would have to let him go, to his friends, to his girlfriends, to wherever he chose to travel when he grew up, and whatever he chose to believe as an adult.
But that time was not now. For now, there was just nirvana.
I love my Ty Le’Mari, whom I’m expecting Feb. 4. He is such a blessing to me.
He is my hero. He saved my life, along with my parents. I have the greatest, most supportive parents ever. They have my back in everything I do as long as it’s positive. I didn’t really appreciate them until I got pregnant. I had them worried a lot. I ran away all the time. I was horrible, until I found out that I was pregnant. My baby boy changed my whole life around. I go to school every day, I try my hardest, and I’m passing all of my classes.
Ty is such a lifesaver. Sometimes, I cry, thinking about how much pain my parents had to suffer behind me and my stupid actions. It’s hard for me to say I’m sorry. I’ll show them with my action that I appreciate everything they’re doing and ever done for me. Little by little, they’ll see that I’m still trying so hard to change.
My little girl Rebeckah Nicole is now 6 months old. I love her to death.
She just gets so clingy because she is having separation anxiety even though I am with her 24/7 and she is teething. I get soo overwhelmed with school and taking care of her and I know she is just a baby and she doesn’t know any better, but I can’t hold her 24/7 like I want to and like she wants me to. She drives me crazy sometimes.
SOMEONE HELP!!!! I don’t know how to do the right thing without going insane and giving up on everything.
I thought I was prego, but sadly I am not.
As much as I want another baby, right now isn’t the ideal time to conceive or raise one. I’m unemployed, suicidal, and depressed beyond reason. I need to get a better grip on things going on in my life before I bring a child into it. I wanna give my baby everything it would need, even if that means doing it alone + if I’m going to have a baby, the least I have to do is wait until I know I won’t kill myself if I get overwhelmed.
I don’t wanna leave my baby alone in this world. I don’t want to abort. Don’t want to give them up. I want to raise them. So, after I get my feet on solid ground and I’m stable for at least 5 months, I’ll try again to have another baby. Hopefully, by then, I’ll be employed + moving into the apt I just checked out yesterday.
So wish me luck!
The minute I saw the little pink line, my heart almost jumped out of my chest. A baby…a tiny little life taking charge of my womb for the next 9 months…wow. What a thought! I rarely even entertained the idea of sharing my favorite chocolate…let alone my body! He stood before me with so much love and care shining from his eyes…but he wasn’t the daddy. No, the daddy was in another town, lying comfortably in the flat we used to share, totally unaware of his life that was about to be turned upside down.
He (my friend) sat me down on the couch and asked if I wanted something to drink. Clutching a steaming cup of Milo between my shaking hands, all I could think about was that little pink line. A baby…MY baby. Not planned, totally uncalled for, unthinkable if not for the pink line. But MINE.
For three solid hours, my mind was numb, my body cold and my mouth shut tight. He guided me to the bathroom without a word, slowly undressed me and carefully lowered me into the bath. Sitting down on the floor next to the tub, he played with the bubbles and waited for me to say something. I watched the bubbles float into the air, then gently fall onto my skin. Carefully, I placed a hand where I imagined that tiny body would be lying, and looked up at him. Then the tears came. First slowly and painfully sliding down my cheeks, then more intense and before I knew it, I was crying my heart out.
