The day before I learned that I was pregnant, I had a conversation with my oldest friend during which I told her that I would never want to have a child. I always believed that having children was selfish. I didn’t believe that there was anything wrong with being selfish, but I was never able to get one parent to provide me with a non-selfish reason for having a child. Their answers ranged from, “I want someone to carry on my genes,” or “I want to see what our genes look like when they are combined.” Regardless of the response, they usually began with “I want” and included a benefit to the individual providing the response. I wasn’t about that life. My desire was to adopt or at the very minimum become a foster parent. There are so many children that are already here. I believe that if the real desire is simply to care for someone else, it doesn’t matter who they came from.
When I learned that I was pregnant, that same friend was the first person that I called. She told me that maybe I found the only way to have a baby without being selfish. I laughed.
During my deployment, I’ve had a lot of time to reflect. I know that I am sad and that I feel broken while away from my daughter, but why? Why am I so distraught for being away from a person whom I never imagined would exist? The answer: I’ve always wanted a child, I was simply afraid to have one.
I was raised by a single mother of two. Every day she gave and gave and gave and received nothing in return. She gave not just to her children, but to everyone around her. She had no help from our fathers, both of whom decided that they did not want to be in our lives and whom did not pay child support. She worked long and sometime odd hours, she had to, she had no one else to help her. I hardly ever saw her and though I knew that she was working that hard for me, I believe that I resented her for it.
I spent my life trying not to become my mom. Not because she wasn’t a good person, she was and still is a wonderful person, but because it pained me to see how the world put it’s entire weight on her back and expected her to hold it up. I didn’t know if I was strong enough to do that, but I also had no desire to find out. I suppose, deep down inside, I always believed that it was me who put the first weight on her back that ultimately broke her spirit. Before me, her life hadn’t been perfect, but she was moving forward. When she became pregnant with me, she dropped out of college and began on the path on which she is currently on.
By 6th grade I had already made rules:
- Don’t be too nice to people. Eventually, they will think they can walk all over you.
- Don’t let people see how soft you are, they will take advantage.
- Don’t flinch, if people know your fears, they will exploit them.
- Don’t let a man come between you and the people that you love.
I made promises to myself, the most important being that if I ever had children, I would never work so much that I couldn’t find time for my children. Now here I am, all these years later, a single mom, not receiving child support, living thousands of miles away from my only child. I am sorrowful not only because I have broken the most important promise that I made to myself, but because my daughter has to live with the consequences of me breaking that promise. I am also terrified that I will get used to being on my own again and resent her when my deployment ends and I have to come home and be a real parent again.
I have not yet found a way to cope with these concerns, I just keep going through every day praying that I will wake-up one day and not feel the pang of guilt. People tell me every day that I’m a good mom that only a good mom would care so much. I have yet to come to that same conclusion.
