Boys

Can't live with 'em.  Can't kill 'em.  Oh, wait.  That's husbands.  Which used to  be boys.

A fellow blogger is having a complex pregnancy and amidst all the other unknowns she wondered if she would regret not having a boy.  (Maybe regret isn't the right word.  Maybe it is just whether she would notice none of those kids was a boy.) Sometimes I regret not having a hysterectomy when I was thirteen.

I am "along in years".  I have two grandsons and three grandaughters.  I had three girls and two boys.  I am an RH mother and I didn't miscarry.  I carried two boys and a girl to term with lots of medical intervention, but they couldn't hold on.  This is something you never get over.  I wrote about it in one of my fiction books.  The thing is, as medical philosophy regarding grief evolved, I was able to hold only the last little boy.  And all I could think was "I wish he was alive.  I wish I could make him breathe."  Truthfully, I am the kind of person so caught up in the inside of my head I never ever thought how unfair it was to my husband that two girls made it and the boys didn't.

But lately, when I see how he adores his grandson, it does cross my mind. And when he is up on a ladder, I always think, "If only. . . "  And when I have to hire a lawyer I also think, "If only. . "  And girls can be lawyers.  So you see, no matter what the outcome, there are always, would haves, should haves, and could haves.  And I know I would be saying that if I had three girls and two boys totally alive today about at least one of them for some reason.

It has sharpened my survival skills.  It has changed the course of my personality, my thought processes, my attitudes about "Faith", the entire tenor of my marriage.  There are bound to be unspoken resentments on both sides after all these years, but in this case, I had some spoken words to listen to  that put the whole situation in a much more glaring light.  But whatever.  It's what happened.  Lots of ways it could have been different, but it wasn't.  And I am okay with where I sit right now.  (Literally and figuratively.)  Maybe it is acceptance or rationalization or having the kind of brain that constantly puts a different spin on almost everything, everyday. But when it comes to motherhood, the joy it brings you is not based on any selective factors, and the pain it brings you is too horrible to notice the why.  You only know the hurt.  You don't think it is cuz of his blood type or the day the doctor scheduled the procedure or if it was you that made the baby fall out of the cart or a manufacturing defect.  You just hurt. And you think you are sorting  it all out over the years, but the truth is joy is joy and pain is pain, and usually most of us are floating between those two poles every day.

Why would I ever say, "Don't bother analyzing your feelings too much"?  I over analyze the living breathing shit out of every single thing in my life constantly.  It keeps me running. Grist for the mill.  Fodder for the soul.  What the hell else would I think about?  What to fix for dinner?

Photo attribution:  rialeephotography.com