Catch A New Wave
When I had nothing to lose, I had everything. When I stopped being who I am, I found myself. — Paulo Coelho
When I was first married, a lot of my friends were having babies. I was not in a hurry, and yet, not really preventing the surprise of pregnancy. The surprise, however, did not happen. For many years, I tried to make the dream of motherhood a reality in my life. It affected everything about me. I felt like a failure, and it seeped into my self confidence and worthiness. Everywhere I looked were happy, pregnant women with proud husbands by their sides. This image eluded me for year after year. I received little empathy for this empty space in my life that was ordinary in the lives of most others. In fact, I was fighting a battle alone and being asked the question, So, you do not want children?
This journey became a journey into self. I was faced with a grim picture of how I expected life to be, and I was denied it. I watched friend after friend have one baby, then two, and easily a third. There was a brokenness that, for the first time, I could not fix. Other people’s lives set sail, and I was stuck at harbor. In my mind, I contemplated who I was, and what kind of life could exist without hearing the word Mom. No one felt my pain. To see a destination and yet to never grasp it, is a loss that begets grief of what could be. I felt different from other women, singled out to be denied a promise of family and fitting into the desires of our culture that markets and teaches expectations and falling in line to roles established for us.
One day, I had had enough. The universe had other plans for me, and in my despair, I never heard its voice luring me to my path, different, yet equally intriguing and as mysterious as the nine months to delivery. I decided I could be happy without children. I ended a story that could not be finished. I stopped the pain, the disdain of self, and moved the picture of me holding my baby into the delete file. A weight lifted. A burden of inadequacy magically disappeared. Doors started opening, and my life was once again clicking in color.
It was in this acceptance and decision to live and love my own deck of cards, that I began to see the world through new eyes. Did I really believe pregnancy was a measure of becoming the woman I wanted to be? Motherhood is not carrying the baby and delivering it, rather it is the relinquishing of self to love and give of self to a child. To nurture and become a safe place, a nest of acceptance and hope for tomorrow. And in this epiphany, a perfect baby boy was put into my arms. A completeness in my life, where the expected was not mine, but the awe of extraordinary was. At the time of giving up, a new door opened, and I walked through it.
Although this is an acknowledgement to the many women struggling with infertility, it is also a musing to the novel idea that our expectations are not always granted. In this awareness, we must not hold to the dreams of yesterday, a denial of the imminent for the nostalgic, but search for deeper understanding and meaning in our lives. Many are facing this reckoning, no fault of their own, right now. In this uncertainty of life falling out from beneath all that feels safe, walk into a different reality. It is on the other side we see new horizons of peace and understanding.
On the day I walked away from despair, I also became aware of the despair in others. As we suffer in silence and begin to accept a misconstrued vision of self, we find no answers. We begin to chart a new course when we let expectations fall away and unfold a new beginning of who we are. So in these very dark days, do not give in to them, instead end them. On the other side is a new world to find love and meaning. It is my hope that in all that plagues our country, we can learn to live and work in a different way. That we realize we are capable of creating a new ending to our story. It is a mindset that carries us across the abyss. Ignore what we believed to be the only way to prosperity and happiness, and allow for a new and deeper understanding of life and meaning. My journey and my acceptance of disappointments and unrequited dreams has taught me that often, the door we never planned to walk through is the one that completes us and drives us to not fear opening the next door, and the one after that. So, if right now the world feels bleak, unconquerable, and unjust…it is. Accept it. Close the door. And open a new one. Embrace the evolution of the ebbs and flows of life, and know when to catch a new wave.
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photo@unsplash