I was an impostor.
An ambivalent-about-children, world-class wimp playing the part of the patent desperate to fix her so-called infertility problem.
My acting was so convincing that I almost believed t myself.
So what was I doing in that drugstore?
Well, I’ve always been a failure at absolutes.
At 14, I swore to stay single until 30.
Now, more than a decade later, could I trust my impulse to swear off motherhood?
What if I woke up one day suddenly desperate for a child but unable to conceive?
Shouldn’t I act now to protect the me yet to come?
Nothing seemed missing from our life together.
“Larry, what do you think?”
“Should we have kids?”
“One would be good,” he answered.
“But do youreallywant to have a child?”
Yet I suspected that Larry did want to be a dad.
Could I say the same thing of myself?
You don’t open a bag of Cheetos for one tiny taste without ultimately staining your fingers orange.
“Hmmm,” she said.
“Let’s run tests to be sure.
I know how much you want a baby.”
I wondered how she knew before I did.
Still, I said nothing to dissuade her.
Emotionally, I might have been in the “Maybe I’ll have a baby someday” phase.
Physically, it was “Now or never.”
Left mute by my unexpected situation, I allowed the deceit to continue.
Clearly, they didn’t see the real me.
Had I secretly saved my Barbie Townhouse for someone other than me?
Or was it merely failure that made me stubbornly carry on?
During the next two years, I endured two in vitro fertilization treatments and surgery to fix my uterus.
My body and psyche were bruised.
“I’m fine with just the two of us,” Larry said, after each disappointment.
He was supportive, but I viewed our ordeal as mostly a solitary one.
After all, success or failure depended on me.
We’d had a good thing.
I was beginning to hate myself for ruining it.
I took out my anger on the clinic.
I silently cursed the hideous medications and threw imaginary darts at the “inspirational” wall of baby photos.
then “Oops!”
when she opened my chart.
I was seething but said, “No problem.”
Yet the clinic was also the only place I could hide.
My previously hip neighborhood had become an erstwhile Disney World, teeming with strollers.
Nearly every phone call from friends included a pregnancy announcement or gripe about new parenthood.
Hadn’t they known it would be hard?
Maybe I’d never be a mother, but at least I’d done my homeworkperhaps too much.
Not after the years I’d logged at the clinic.
One day, I even asked my mom how she’d felt during her hardworking years of my childhood.
She swore that they were the most precious part of her lifeand I believed her.
A week after that, I stared amazed at not one but two tiny heartbeats.
Thirty-one weeks later, I was thrilled to give birth to healthy twin girls.
I’ve endured tedious coffee klatches and felt the pain of preschool social dramas.
What I couldn’t have known is that all the hard stuff is only a fraction of the picture.
The other partthe love, the kisses, the “You’re the best mom ever!”
declarationsmake me happier than anything I could have ever imagined.
Photo Credit: Fancy Photography/Veer
