Not-yet-mother

Yesterday I had a night of vivid dreams. I hadn’t dreamt in awhile. Just before I had to wake up, I had a dream in which my mother was present, as well as a female cousin of mine. As I saw my cousin’s radiant face (which really was the face of a workshop facilitator I recently met who I really liked, I later remembered), I told her that I found her stunning, and as I noticed her belly, I gasped in joy and congratulated her on her pregnancy. Very quickly it became apparent to me that she was not pregnant, and what followed was a moment I wish we – my mother, cousin and I – could share in real life: the three of us held each other and cried.

I don’t know how to interpret dreams. On occasion I would check a website called DreamHawk which provides interpretations I have found helpful and intriguing. And I don’t remember what I was crying about in that dream – was it about the inappropriateness of the question (which in real life my mom has offered spontaneously to several different women, and later regretted), or was it about unresolved pain that I have for not knowing whether I would ever be a mother? I have no idea…

Upon waking up and starting my day, this dream reminded me of something recent: the stories shared by other women following my latest breakup. In a conversation after our separation when it was all too clear for both that we were not going to be together, neither now, nor forever, as we had hoped, my ex-partner told me that he didn’t think I was ready to be a mother a year from now (a timeline we had initially discussed when we were madly in love with each other).

I imagine he based his judgement of my preparedness to be a mother on the reality that for two months during our rather short relationship I was overcome by severe anxiety. I had a very hard time maintaining normal functioning no matter how hard I tried, and how many hours I put every day to do meditations, yoga, TRE, emotional processing and what-not. He had also mentioned a previous conversation in which I had told him that I didn’t have the patience to stop my dog at every step to train him, therefore my ex said, “How could you think you are ready to be a mother?” (or something like that, I don’t want to claim I remember exactly something from 3 months ago).

My ex never raised his voice at me. He promised he would never hit me or touch me in a way I didn’t want. But this thing he said about me being a mother, I thought, was the most cruel thing he could tell me, knowing how much I wanted to be a mother. The rational part of me knew he couldn’t possibly know what I would be ready for or not in a year, or even tomorrow. The emotional part of me was mad as fuck. I had a lot of “fuck you”-s for him for awhile.

One of the hardest thing about this break up was precisely my fear that I have now lost the opportunity to be a mother. It’s not that I’m old, I know. And as I write this, it no longer makes sense, but at the time I was as if hit by a hurricane – I had thought that I had finally met someone I could have the kind of family I want for myself and for my future children, I thought I had made clear that I wanted family and kids in the very near future, and that with this person we could have it all. I also felt deep disappointment and desperation: all the self-work I had done the previous years, all the communication skills I had gained, and I couldn’t make it work! Not even with someone who was more self-aware than any of my previous partners. I had no hope left.

If anything, unlike before, I showed my pain to the people who cared. This most difficult time brought me closer to my mother, and I felt for the first time that she truly heard and saw the pain I still carry from my childhood wounds. There were friends who offered their time, listened to me, kept asking how I was; my therapy colleagues… My favorite grandma from the village where my youth center is didn’t stop calling me even though I wasn’t picking up the phone nor returning calls for weeks, and cried with me when I finally told her what I wad been going through.

In all of this I heard several stories similar to mine: how men told the women close to me that they weren’t fit to be mothers. Forty-something years ago a boyfriend of my mother told her he couldn’t imagine her as a mother because she liked to party a lot. Even earlier baba Lenche (my favorite grandma) had a lover tell her that her heart condition surely would prevent her from birthing… They both underlined with pleasure how wrong these people had been, giving birth to and raising two children each.

In the months since I notice I have let go of the death grip of my wanting to be a mother. Don’t get me wrong, I have not given up, nor stopped wanting it. And yet, for the first time in my life I have been able to explore and enjoy myself as someone who is not lacking anything. That’s huge for me. I’m no less of a person for not having a relationship, family, or children (I had tortured myself with this for so long). I have SO much. I am so much, mother or not.