Spring Reawakening

content warning: abortion.

The sun is bright, we’ve had some gorgeous days in Toronto this week. I barely got outside this past winter. It could have been prime writing time, but I was somewhat pre-occupied… with morning sickness.

It’s a misnomer, I found out – it’s all day, ever-present, often deep into the disturbed, restless night. The “sickness” part of the diagnosis (self-administered) is descriptive though. The thick exhaustion, the somewhat frightening disconnect I felt with my nauseated, aching body. The inability to soothe myself except with perogies and RuPaul’s Drag Race. I screamed once upon opening the fridge door and seeing a head of lettuce – something about the earthy quality of those bright leaves had become unbearably, viscerally intrusive. It sounds dramatic. It felt dramatic!

It was part of the battery of pregnancy experiences I had thought I understood prior to “pulling the goalie” and saying yes, it’s time, let’s do this motherhood thing. I’m 37. I have loved babies since I was a child. Being Filipina, there were always so many cousins. My brother, born when I was 14, slept with me for months: I happily kept his bottle on my nightstand, cradled him and sang him to sleep. I feel strangely confident, holding infants – as if I can speak to them with my touch, and soothe them just by expressing how delighted I am that they are here. I nannied for a short time after completing my Master’s. An easy gig for me as I job-hunted for something in my field.

Beyond babies, I connect with children. I was always playing teacher, playwright and director for my siblings and cousins. I wonder now if I was a Bossy Rossy 😛 but I loved creating fun, imaginative worlds for my younger relatives and myself. The children I babysat asked for me back over and over, as I never felt it good enough to sit back and wait for their parents to get home. We played and danced, put on shows and read books. I love everything about the unfolding of a child’s world; their developing sense of themselves, the unfiltered curiosity.

In school, I studied the brain, communication, child development, and the ways that development can stray from the norm. Through jobs and volunteering, I began to work with children with disabilities: Autism, Down syndrome, cleft lip, other genetic disorders. My ease with children eradicated any doubt I would go into pediatric work. Sometimes the challenges were daunting, but I felt I could connect to these kids the same way I always had, through my loving presence.

I remember comparing internship placements working with adults who were losing their capacity for communication, and working with children who were profoundly disabled. Many people ask me if it’s sad to work with disabled children. I found the adult work much harder and sadder. To me, there is nothing sad about working with children – it is so hopeful, and joyful. Children are children: they are whole. Every new skill is a gift, no matter how simple and easily taken for granted it may be by the able-bodied and able-minded. Every new connection with the world and people around them a gift to the rest of us, witnessing their unique personhood come to life. With adults I was always keenly aware of my clients’ sense of loss.

So I have filled my life with children. I embraced my friends’ kids (pre-pandemic), played happily with nieces and nephews, and am so grateful to have found work that allows me to nurture kids and support their families.

Why did I wait so long before having my own?

I don’t think it was the children part I wasn’t ready for. I know I have yet to truly understand the sleeplessness, the exhaustion of daily caring, the responsibility and worry for the fruit of my own loins. But I never had a fear of losing myself to the grind of parenthood. To be sure, I’ve given myself a good, long stretch to enjoy my adulthood without dependents. 10 years ago, when my partner moved here to Canada with me – we agreed to damn biological clocks. We decided that rather than make life decisions for ourselves based on the fear of aging ovaries, we would be open to adoption and take opportunities to fulfill our ambitions (at the time, this included dreams of a PhD). On top of that we made sure to enjoy to the fullest our childless travel adventures and carefree social pursuits until we were good and ready.

It’s the motherhood part I have been working up to.

It’s the worthiness of being a mother to a child.

It’s the forgiveness of an abortion I had at 19, freshly enrolled in university; finally on a path to fulfilling the expectations of my parents, with the sharp, wide potential of my learning brightly laid before me.

I had no regrets. It was a non-question. I couldn’t give up my education. It wasn’t about shirking responsibility… because I felt so responsible. In fact – I still do. I think I made a bargain with God that I would do everything right, help every child I could, take every opportunity to excel if I could trade motherhood for school and the chance to create my life for myself. I’d only just tasted the freedom of leaving home, like many young adults, and my daily choices were now mine alone. I had no regrets, but I lost all belief that I was worthy of motherhood. I had given up that chance. What mother chooses themselves over their child? In the most extreme of ways?

When your worthiness is destroyed, you destroy yourself. It was unconscious, subterranean – but my worth became about my achievement. School. Grades. Work. Being an incredible SLP. Grinding multiple jobs. Hustling for a permanent position. Applying for PhD studies (a whole other story of rejection). Never stopping. Never resting. Never slowing down long enough to see beyond the story I told myself: I wasn’t ready for kids, I don’t see the rush. Maybe next year. I have to have a steady job first. A house. Savings. Be a manager. Be more established. Tick more things off the bucket list. Get obsessed with working out and exercise. Telling myself I needed a strong, muscular body before I could carry a child. The truth being  it was another way to drive and punish myself, achieve that mythical level of perfection and excellence that maybe, just maybe, I could trade back for my chance at motherhood.

But I’m here now. A pandemic happened. The moving target of my precariously placed achievement markers fell like dominoes, and all the DOING had to stop. There was nothing left to do, which leaves you with the very difficult task of just BEING. With yourself. Talk about nauseating.

There were no more ambitions I could fulfill to convince myself I deserved motherhood. In fact, the sudden standstill of the world hit my body like a seatbelt saving your guts as you screech from 100 to zero. I couldn’t outrun my destruction any longer. My body, which had frustrated me with longstanding pain that I thought I could exercise/yoga/clean eat into submission, screamed for rest. All I could do was crouch on my mat, forehead to the floor, and breathe through the panic.

And breathe.

And trust that I could get through the day.

And learn in the stillness.

This pandemic has unrooted, stripped away so many things. We’ve had to stand naked with ourselves, as a society that functions on the flimsiest of machinery – the driven churning of buying and consuming, climbing and having and doing and fighting over scraps. I couldn’t ignore my body anymore, in the stillness and confinement. This brown, female body that has acquiesced to all my betrayals. This body that is one of scores, sacrificed contemptuously in pursuit of myriad false markers of worth.

But though I have betrayed my body, my body has never betrayed me. She whispered back, as soon as I was quiet enough to listen. She knows how to heal. She is worthy of it. She held me as I broke, dismantled by the dismantling of my illusions and ambitions. She asked for my trust.

I’ve been piecing myself back together. In so many ways – each a different unraveling and rethreading of the cloth. Discarding the fraying edges, where I stretched myself ragged to convince myself that one day I’d deserve to be a mother. Or even just to be alive, to exist – without incurring a debt.

The bargain is off; it never was on the table.  My body entrusted me with this new life, and whether I needed to be forgiven or not – I feel like I am. Because I’m only now ready to trust in my worthiness. I had to choose myself in order to be the mother this child deserves. I had to get here, this way.  Morning sickness, pandemic and all.