Babies

I've found that it's something women don't talk about.  There isn't really even vocabulary for it, but this is the story of how a nest of baby robins turned me into a lunatic.

Under my deck is a nest full of baby robins -- directly over the path to my dog yard.  Mama robin and I came to an understanding early on about how I wasn't going to do anything threatening, and if she was busy with her babies, I would wait to walk under them until she was finished.  I started worrying about them fledging into a yard full of dogs, though.  Could I rig some kind of net to catch them?  Could I train the dogs to alert to falling baby birds?  Would I be able to build a slide underneath them without them noticing that would gently roll them out of the nest, across the yard and land them safely on the other side?  The devastating image of Midge running around with baby bunny feet sticking out of her mouth is still notably fresh in my mind...  But this all seemed fairly normal to me.

However, this weekend, my husband and I are pulling up the fencing to regrade the backyard.  He started using his tractor by the deck, and I turned into a nutter -- refusing to let him stress out the baby birds.  They're JUST BABIES.  And going on a tirade about it being a federal offense to disturb a nest.  And in the midst of this, I realized that I had turned into a loon. And it was about babies.

I'm too sick to have a baby.

I'm too sick to have a baby.  It's such a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to wrap my heart around. But it's true.  I can't carry a baby.  We tried for a little while, and I had early term miscarriages.  My body hardly lets me get out of bed usually, so this shouldn't have come as a surprise.  And I also can't care for a baby.  I can hardly care for myself, and that's not how I want to raise a baby.  I know this.  I know it logically, but it feels like someone took a corkscrew to my soul.

And I don't talk about it.

I talk to my sister about everything, but I see how much it hurts her when we talk about it. When she was pregnant, it was so hard sometimes to be around her.  I'd take such joy in her joy, and it would bring me such pain in equal measure.

When you can't have babies, sometimes everywhere you look there are only pregnant women.  It's like the universe is tormenting you.  Crack whores can have babies, but I can't.

And some days I forget about it all together, but those are usually the days that someone asks me when I'm going to start having kids.  Let's get one thing straight.  You should NEVER ask someone that.  Because if you have to ask me the question, you don't know me well enough to get an honest answer, so what is the point?

I've tried to stuff things in the hole this has left -- puppies, movies, crafts, hostas -- but it turns out that there is no bottom.  So I just do my best to live with it.  But every once in a while, I lock myself in the bathroom and cry.

And I know I'm not alone.