I have a phrase I’ve been repeating to friends, expressing where I am with my life right now. I have two modes: fun, or bawling my eyes out. It’s the most summarizing way I can explain where my head is at. I find myself running between being as outlaid, as real and alive as I can be, and falling apart completely, caving inward, when remembering what has happened to my family. I spend the majority of my time hovering around the former persona. Which is what brings me to the subject on my mind today. One of the biggest gifts Beckett brought my life is the capability to be true to myself, as an individual. Motherhood comes with immense responsibility. And it’s been my experience that good parenting usually comes with a shortage of personal time. I was a stay at home mother to Moira for the first eighteen months of her life. I spend time circling recreation activities for her and I drop her off at pre-school twice a week. Swim lessons, soccer, dance. I am a hands-on mom, and I don’t know one that isn’t. Parenthood is the most authentic obligation one person makes to another and a commitment like that takes up a lot of time.
But Moira is growing older, and much to our sorrow, there is no younger sibling for us to struggle to keep up with. She is still plenty of work alone. As I mentioned before, she has an activity nearly every day, and a personal agenda to boot. But she is perfectly manageable right now, and I have more opportunity than ever before during my five years with her existence tied to mine to consider what I want to do during my days. Writing. That’s something I have always said I would do “one day,” and I have been taking it seriously recently. But something else I have always loved to do is to travel.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know I wanted to be a mom. Motherhood always sat squarely at the center of my chest. But a human heart is a whole universe. Before I was a mom, I was someone who walked through the woods alone and imagined never leaving. Someone who watched the earth stretch below my airplane seat and wondered if I could see it all. Someone who has never come home from any new place and said I was happy to be home at last. I’d travel forever if I could. Before I was a mom, and still now after.
One of my very dearest friends lives a much different life than me. He travels for a living, and seeing the world isn’t so much out of the ordinary for him. He has offered many different times the opportunity to take a trip with him. “Anywhere you want.” he has always said. But each time I smiled and declined. That sounded amazing! But I was pregnant, or sure to be shortly, or just had a baby or whatever other motherly duty made something like that impossible. Maybe one day I had always thought. Recently, he made the offer again. And for the first time, it was perfectly plausible. I have no prior obligations. Moira would be able to stay home with her father comfortably. But one reluctance resounded in my mind. What about another baby? This trip would be in 2018. Tyler and I had not clearly discussed our plans for a future child. “Not now,” was how we both have felt to this point. But to plan a trip like this required a stricter timeline for keeping our family the size it is for now. “Anywhere I want” lays on the other side of the world and I imagine long days of fast paced adventure with a backpack on my shoulders, not a baby in my belly. To take the trip means pregnancy would have to definitively wait.
Beckett changed the person that I am. And this person takes hold of more opportunities. I do want another baby. But I know in my heart that right now, I still want that baby to be Beckett too much. I long for a child in my arms, but the child is not faceless. He has long eyelashes and sweet dark eyes. My baby fantasies are based on the boy I knew in reality, and I need more time with him first. I know with complete sureness that my heart would grow to accommodate a new little life in our family. And I hope that is in our future. I believe that it will be. But not in 2017. I have devoted five years to growing a family. I am going to take a few weeks abroad to do a little singular soul gardening instead, and then I can dive back in to mommyhood. I have the rest of my life to do both.
I intend to take the trip. I won’t say anything with absolution because I have learned in the hardest of fashions that there are no sure things in the world, and certainly not when they are many months away. But I will set aside the time, I’ll make the reservations, and take the time off work. And I will wait to have another baby. I have always said that I never wanted to have children after turning thirty. No real basis for it, just some sort of strange personal objective. I’ve had that hovering in my mind ever since Moira came in to being, a little clock in my brain. But I also never wanted to be the mother to a dead child. My timeline must be abandoned if I am both to take this trip and one day bring another addition into our family. We must make room in our hearts for new plans. I’m going to be true to mine, and make some alterations. Because plans will change. They will splinter and adapt and evolve. But the life we get to live will remain singular. And the only true plan I have now is to make my life mirror my soul as authentically as possible.
Leave a Reply