By the time we had been married two years, my husband and I had been to nineteen weddings. As of late October of 2006, I had been a bride, a matron-of-honor, a bridesmaid twice, sang four times, and knew First Corinthians 13:4 by heart. It was no surprise then, with the core of our friends married and settled in, that the holiday season brought The Next Step conversation from friends and family.
“We’re thinking that after this summer, we’ll really start planning The Next Step,” confided a friend. ”How about you guys?”
I shrugged as I mumbled something into a rather large glass of Cabernet.
“Have you and Mike thought about The Next Step?” asked my husband’s aunt. Her conspiratorial tone and gleam in her eye showing her eagerness to watch the family tree blossom.
I quickly learned I needed a collection of pre-packaged responses that I rotated through depending on the audience. The most well-received (and so most frequently used) were:
“Oh, no. I love children. Other people’s children. I love being ‘Auntie Mel’. I get the fun part. When they start whining and fussing, I get to give them back!”
“My children are the furry, four-legged type. I already live in a zoo!”
“I don’t think I’ve ever wanted children. Motherhood is a societal myth, I don’t need a child to complete me.”
My closest friends knew a different story.
********
While it is true that my husband and I were publicly and privately ambivalent to having children, a large part of our secret reluctance was my mental health. Prior to our engagement, I had been hospitalized and diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder and Anxiety Disorder that presents itself as agoraphobia, paranoid ideation, and panic attacks. We had been married only nine months before my second suicide attempt and hospitalization.
It wasn’t until that second hospitalization that my family even really talked about other distant family members that had problems with agoraphobia, alcoholism, anxiety, or depression. All these different but debilitating illnesses have a genetic component and lucky for me, I have it on both sides of my family tree. A biological child would likely develop some form of mental illness. I knew would never forgive myself if I knew I was responsible for another life plagued by this disease.
At the same time, though, I wasn’t exactly preventing that from happening. I hadn’t been on any form of birth control for years. In fact, I realized I had hardly ever had a pregnancy scare in the entire time I was sexually active. By June, my curiosity got the better of me and I mentioned this to my primary care doctor. She sent me to a gynecologist who specialized in infertility.
Dr. V was very kind and very direct. After a barrage of questions and some tests, it was determined I had a ‘hostile environment’. My body treats any foreign object in my uterus as an infection. My answers to questions about past experiences suggested that this had happened at least twice.
I felt broken. I felt defiant. I was as equally disappointed as I was relieved.
This news was one of the thousands of environmental and biological factors that started another depressive episode. I was hospitalized again two months later for a third suicide attempt. Once I got my bearings, my focus was purely on getting better mentally. I didn’t have the strength or energy to think about what it meant to not be able to have a baby. In fact, it seemed to be more proof that I was not suited for motherhood. During that recovery, I had days when I couldn’t even get up out of bed, much less walk my dog. He lay next to me with sympathetic eyes. He didn’t whine or fuss. Occasionally he brought a toy to bed. When I didn’t seem interested in playing, he entertained himself. I fed him. We have a dog door, so he let himself out.
How on earth could I be a mother when I could hardly take care of a dog? How would I ever handle a crying baby, a fussy toddler, a limit-testing teenager in one of these downturns? During these episodes, my husband would be a single parent. Adoption seemed less and less of an option.
After a very difficult and honest discussion, we decided to put the adoption conversation on the back burner until I had gone two years without a hospitalization or major episode. I found a support group, developed a comprehensive mental health recovery plan, my doctors found the right pharmaceutical cocktail that has keep me balanced for almost eighteen months. I’ve been busy saving my life. My friends have been busy creating it.
Now I’m surrounded by babies and children and expectant moms. I’m not so content to be ‘Auntie Mel’ anymore. On my good days, I don’t want to give them back when they start whining and fussing. On my bad days, I have to cancel plans because I know the over-stimulation may be too much for me.
My empty arms ache. My mind is sometimes so unwieldy my body aches more. I’m not sure I even know what The Next Step is. And I don’t know that I trust myself to make it.