Not the Charm, part 3

Not long before I got pregnant, I was at a park with some friends, and the subject of regrets came up. With my past, I suppose I could have identified any number of things, but what I said was “my one regret is that I didn’t have the daughter I always wanted.”

I’ve felt since I was young that I would be a good mother, and that I was meant to have a girl. I wanted a child of my own very badly, but until I could offer a child far better than what I had grown up with, I knew I’d have to wait. I waited through my marriage to Skip, I waited through my relationship with MG, and the stars failed to align themselves. Yes, my life got much better, and I had friends and stability and had grown up a lot, but I wanted to give a child the best shot at being healthy and happy and whole, and it just eluded me.

I was past forty and now, here I was, and I wanted so much to be able to celebrate and anticipate and plan like other women get to when they are happy to be expecting a desired and wanted child. Instead, I was confronted with this reaction:

“It’s the end of the world.”

He did what he never, ever did. He called his father. His father and he had a relatively short telephone conversation, the gist of which is that he was encouraged to tell me to seek an abortion. Believe me when I say that I am and have always been Pro Choice. But I wanted this baby. I had waited my whole life for this, and damnit, I was going to have this baby, and his opinion at this point in our relationship was next to meaningless to me.

I told him that I was going to have it, and that if he was going to bail on me, he’d best do it. I explained that I knew that it would be harder to cope with it later, and that I definitely did not want my child to ever feel abandoned, so if he was going to go, there was the door.
He chose to stay. I can’t say whether that was the best decision, but I also knew that I wanted to be able to say that I had given him the chance. I just had no way of knowing what kind of obstacle course he was going to put me through. I did know that we as a couple had no chance, so we never even considered getting married. All along the way, I can say that I was pragmatic and outwardly rational. I offered him an easy out on more than one occasion. He agreed to do far more than he ended up doing, but I was prepared to do this alone, so it wasn’t about manipulation. It was about keeping it something I could be honest about to the only one who mattered to me; the child I was going to have.

-- to be continued