I had so many conversations yesterday that were floating around my mind as I lay down to sleep last night. But during a span of about 45 minutes, I kept stumbling into a similar theme – the first was about a friend who lost her 16 year old son, the second was about a man who sat hospice with his dying mother, and on and on in this vein.
Last night I dreamed of a dead rabbit and I woke this morning hopeful that the rabbit having died means our baby is on its way to us.
When asked yesterday, why in the world at 50 I would want to have a baby, I said that throughout my life 99% of the women I know had told me that having a child was the most wonderful thing that had happened to them in their life. One in California told me “children are a disappointment.”
I want to experience being a parent even though I know that the day the baby is born, is the day the mother starts dying.
Rachel, the day you’re born you begin the process of dying. It just takes some longer than others to do it. As for becoming a parent, it really is the hardest job in the world and it brings out the best and worst in you. It does teach you that it’s not always the mother’s fault if the child turns out “bad.” What I think I mean by that is, you appreciate your mother more, and understand things you never could before.
Thanks Alice – as I was flying back from Denver, I was thinking about my mother and how it is that all of my friends have always thought I had the “coolest” mother while I’ve always been more in tune with my father and more critical of my mother’s strengths and weaknesses. One of the things that was bugging me is recently I asked to borrow the family album so that I could take some digital photos, particularly as a lot of them were taken with a Polaroid and are now almost ghost like in quality. She was very reluctant to let me take the album and I felt like I always do with her, that she doesn’t trust me or give me credit for being a responsible person. But as I sat on the plane and thought about her, I felt like maybe she and I are just caught in an old dance – one where I want her to be someone else, and she wants me to know her. I thought about having a child myself and what I might feel like thirty years from now if I am still alive and how I might perceive how my child perceives me.