Teacher of Many, Mother of None
How my relationship with motherhood has shifted over time
I've mentioned a few times now that I'm trying to move away from constantly feeling like everything I write needs to be polished and come to a happy little conclusion. On that note, this one is sort of a downer. I won't apologize for that though because writing about sad but true events seems a lot better than just sitting around thinking too much. So instead please accept my utmost gratitude for spending some time reading my truth.
From Unwanted Child to Involuntary Caretaker
As a teenager when I was getting on my own case and asking myself what was wrong with me, I would frequently come to the same conclusion: the first thing I ever was in this world was abandoned, and this is how you turn out when that happens.
I do think to a certain extent that is the case. My biological dad has never been in the picture; my mom used to tell me frequently that even though she never wanted a child and many people told her to get an abortion, she decided to keep me. I'm not sure she ever straight up told me I should be grateful for this, but it did give me a complex at the very least.
My mom met my stepdad soon after I was born. In those first few years we were so impoverished we moved frequently. Still, my stepdad badly wanted his own (legitimate) child and my mom saw it as a sort of duty to give him one. When I was five, my sister was born. She was the first child I raised.
I still remember the song I taught her to get her to brush her teeth. I remember tucking her tiny body under my chin, embracing her with the entirety of my being, shielding her ears with my arms as my mom and stepdad screamed at one another. We shared a bedroom well into my teens because she "couldn't sleep without me".
My parents also frequently asked me for money for food and other necessities so my sister didn't have to live with the knowledge of how poor we were. I started working around the age of 12-babysitting, of course. Before I had steady sources of income, they would ask me for Birthday and Christmas money I had gotten from my relatives. I cared deeply for the wellbeing of my sister and saw myself as an accidental burden and the thought of saying no to them never crossed my mind.
As I grew older though it began to dawn on me how absolutely fucked the entire situation was. I still felt like little more than a mistake, but while my mental health was deteriorating quietly my sisters was exploding out of her. I felt so powerless as her depression became more and more evident and all her basic needs eclipsed mine. Why had I not been enough for anyone?
I did the only things I could think of to keep myself and my family safe: I worked hard. Not only babysitting to the point of having close to a full time job at 15, but also in school. As we grew older I became the smart one and my sister became the pretty one. I took this as a matter of fact at the time-my sister struggled in school, and I hated myself too much to see that we were both beautiful in our own ways.
My sister hated herself as well, and the pressure of "being the pretty one" caused her to develop an eating disorder as well as destroying her self-worth. She grew to resent me in her teens. As her mental health spiraled, my parents became more and more abusive towards her while remaining neglectful towards me. I was rewarded by many others for my obedience, something she grew to hate. She threatened me often with knives while I was left babysitting her. I refused to treat her the way I saw my parents treating her, but I was scared.
Fleeing the nest
By the time I was in middle school I was spending the majority of my time outside of the home. Between babysitting, clubs, and going over to friends houses I basically only slept there. Middle and High School are full of so many happy memories for me despite what was happening inside my family. I felt like even more than a burden-watching my sister unravel, I felt like a failure as well. Protecting her was my responsibility, and I hadn't.
Now I look back and think of course I wasn't, I was a child too, and only five years older than her. But my mom was also unwell and my stepdad highly immature and reactive. They all felt like my responsibility, to some extent. My parents actually used to call me their retirement fund.
So, I leaned into the only things I had ever been rewarded for: being intelligent and nurturing. I joined after-school programs that focused on academics. Because of my aforementioned obedient nature (or perhaps-gasp-because I was actually likeable and used to being neglected) many of the parents in the clubs I was a part of seemed to take a liking to me. Everyone looked the other way at the fact that I was one of the students there the most yet my parents never volunteered or participated in the meal rotation. I finally felt a sense of belonging, but I kept what was going on at home to myself, so there was a feeling of imposter syndrome as well. I began to realize how abnormal what was going on at home was by visiting the houses of my friends.
Babysitting taught me similar lessons. I was the oldest of seven cousins on my mom's side, and she was older than all of her siblings as well, so before I was old enough for near-strangers to trust me with their kids I babysat my cousins. Even they had very different home lives than I did, despite many of my aunts and uncles struggling with mental health and substance abuse.
Where the differences became most apparent was when I started babysitting for families outside of my own. To see the freedom these children felt, the mutual trust between parent and child I had never experienced, shocked me.
The Ultimate Escape (Becoming a Wife)
Babysitting taught me something else that was perhaps less positive and hard to shake: one of my best bets to a happier life was to become someone's wife and start a family of my own.
As my mental health began to deteriorate more and more throughout high school, being "the smart one" felt less true to me. The curious one, perhaps. But truth be told I was struggling at school, but my parents were too busy abusing drugs and barely handling my sister to realize. My epilepsy and FND were probably starting to really affect me at this time as well.
So I began putting all my eggs into the only basket that seemed to not have a hole in it. I had spent over half my life at that point caring for children and nurturing a calm demeanor against all odds. I had learned to cook, both to enhance my babysitting skillset but also because my mom struggled to feed us. Somewhere along the line I heard the phrase "the way to a man's heart is through his stomach" and I took that as a near-challenge. Cooking and baking became one of the only hobbies I actually enjoyed within my home. During this time I so often felt worthless, good at nothing. I was determined to be a good wife.
I had a series of much too serious relationships at a very young age. Thankfully I chose very kind and considerate partners who did not take advantage of my docility. When I came to college, I swore off dating. I would be the smart one. I would fulfill my duty as a first generation college student, the retirement fund of my parents, which at the time felt like two interchangeable phrases.
In that time I began to realize I had actually spent so much of my life raising other peoples children, I wasn't actually sure I wanted my own. This felt like some deep dark secret I couldn't speak aloud. I was doing pretty okay being the smart one, working 30 hours a week while also a full time student, and had gotten the first break from child-raising since I was five. I realized how little I knew about myself. In fact, much of what I had internalized over time didn't seem to be true.
The first summer I was in college I lived in a co-op, dedicated to my new free-spirited path in life. Tinder was just becoming popular, and I made an account, determined to date in a more relaxed manner than I had before.
Well, jokes on me because a few months later I met the man (then boy) that would years later become my husband.
There are a million reasons that we were right for each other, but that deserves to be its own blog post. The two most important for this story are that we saw value in each other outside of traditional husband and wife roles (we actually said partners for life in our wedding vows) and didn't want to have children of our own. We both agreed that as we got older, it was something we could discuss to see if our mindsets had changed. But in our early twenties we both knew that starting a family was far from a top priority. We wanted to pour into one another-and ourselves-first and foremost.
Forever a Teacher
My husband is also an older sibling who was given too much responsibility. He personally could never interact with a child for the rest of his life and be perfectly happy with that, which I 100% respect. Kids like him, and it freaks him out, haha. It's like people who are allergic to cats that somehow always attract their attention.
I, on the other hand, have alllways loved working with kids. Babysitting was FUN! Many of the clubs I was a part of allowed older members to mentor younger ones, and that was EVEN MORE FUN! Kids see the world through a different lens, and I've always found that refreshing.
Does that mean I want a child living in my house, depending on me consistently? FUCK NO!
So as I began to shift away from being the smart one (or the retirement fund) and began asking what I actually wanted from life, working with youth became one of the only solid answers I could find. And so I have. For several years now I've worked as an art teacher at a community center with kids of all ages, and it has been the most fulfilling work I have ever done.
When the Choice Was no Longer Mine
Something curious happened about a year ago when I first went to the ER for my epilepsy. I'd had two grand mal seizures back-to-back, which is very not good and in fact life threatening. So, the doctors made the decision to start me on anti-seizure medication immediately. It wouldn't be until a month or so later I realized this meant having my own child was now largely out of the question. Not only can several anti-seizure medications cause severe birth defects in children, coming off them has a risk of causing SUDEP (Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy). If that weren't enough, pregnancy alone can cause a persons epilepsy to worsen, and childbirth is associated with a high risk of SUDEP.
At the time I learned this information being a mother was a reality I had already abandoned of my own volition. That's the thing, though: I had made the choice for myself. And although I felt confident in that decision, it had always been a very nuanced one, and the reality where being a mother felt like the most useful thing I could do with my life had been very real during a very scary time. Because of this, my monkey mind would sometimes swing back to that reality and live in What-If Land before I brought myself back to Earth.
And back to Earth I would go. Sometimes all on my own. Sometimes with the help of my husband, who would remind me that he saw worth in me in so many ways outside of having a functioning uterus. Sometimes we would lament together about maybe in a different life where America wasn't. . . the way it is, or we weren't as impoverished as we were, that could have been a pleasant reality. Or maybe when we were older. But probably not. But maybe. . .
And now, even that distant maybe was gone. Not only gone, taken from me. This has filled me with a grief I have struggled to express. Most people who know me are aware I'm uninterested in having my own children. How do I backpedal and explain the complexity of this all?
In this blog post, it turns out
Maybe posting this out in the world will open up a door for me to talk about it more openly with people other than my husband and therapist. Maybe not. I'm proud of myself for at least taking this step in owning a complicated and messy truth.
Once again, many thanks to anyone who has read this far. Even though I said having a happy little ending wasn't the point, and it isn't, I wish I had one. Not just for myself, but anybody reading this whose struggled with similarly contradictory feelings on parenthood.
For me personally the brightest side I've been able to find is that not having children of my own helps me show up more fully for my students. Perhaps that could be a whole post on it's own. If this post resonated with you in any way, I wish you the best of luck on your journey.
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