An ex boyfriend sent me an email today saying he was having a child, not having quite planned it. It – the email – wasn’t completely out of the blue – we are amicable and usually kept in touch once or twice a year – but it was still a surprise for me to read that he was going to be a father, as I didn’t even know explicitly that he was seeing anybody. I mean, of course I expected him to have a relationship; everyone moves on, the world keeps turning, etc etc. But I know he’d been going through a rough patch the last year or so; he was finally in therapy but still drinking pretty heavily, so I guess I just thought that maybe he was working on his psyche more than his loins, if I may be so blunt.
He said he was scared but that he was already overwhelmed by love for his unborn child. But he also said that couldn’t help but think that we should have been braver, that this should have happened a long time ago. When we were together, we spoke fondly of having “cubs” one day, though never seriously, and we weren’t together long enough to ever get to that point anyway. It was a relationship of extremes: we had a lot of fun but we also lied to each other a lot. We went from having a ton of sex until we stopped having sex completely. We distrusted each other absolutely and annoyed each other constantly. We tried to sleep with each other’s friends. But we could talk all day and all night about philosophy and calculus and poetry. We loved going to the Tesco in Dundrum at 2 in the morning, back when it was still open 24 hours. We were, I think, the best and worst for each other. That was never going to be a good environment to have a child.
And I had been wondering why, last night I had a dream about another ex boyfriend’s child. I’ve been having these really long, vivid dreams lately, and last night it was that I had in my arms H, the daughter an ex had when we were together. He got some random one night stand pregnant, and then he met me. “I might have become a dad”, he told me a few days after my birthday that year. At first I didn’t understand.
In the end, it was H that dictated the outcome of our relationship; he was a continent away and could not, did not want to leave her. I got that; I never held that against him. It was just how things were, and the only way things could be, but it still broke my goddamn heart.
In my dream, the mother leaves H with me to babysit. She is three, still a toddler (in real life she is nine now), but completely self-aware and old beyond her years. I wonder out loud what is up, as her mother is going on a night out with a girlfriend, and she shushes me and goes, “Elizabeth (the friend) is still here”. She’s in my arms observing everyone and everything, including me. I can still feel the heft of her in my arms. In truth, I had never seen her, and never will, so all I have are these dreams. But there was a time in my life when I thought of her as my virtual daughter. Presumptuous, I know, but I loved her father very much, and would have wanted to be part of her life if I could have.
In this life, I have decided not to have children. It’s not something I was always sure of, but then neither was I ever absolutely sure I wanted them in the first place. I kept waiting for it to happen the way that I saw it happen to some of my friends: the almost desperate desire to get pregnant; the miscarriages and heartbreak; the frozen eggs. Instead I watched them have their babies, and change, and then I realized I did not want to change like they did. I had felt like a child myself for so long, and only recently have become comfortable in my own skin (or at least as comfortable as I have ever been). Having children seemed to me like a cheat code to instant maturity; a mushroom that made you grow bigger. I didn’t want to force that on myself.
And that’s not even getting into the state of the world these days.
And that’s not even getting into the way parenthood affects men vis a vis women.
But the thing is, it does make me sad; there’s no getting around it. The reality that these men that I had loved at certain points in my life going down paths that they didn’t expect, but took nonetheless. And that I will never be able to go down that path myself. It probably would make me sadder anyway to have children; in ways I wouldn’t be able to understand or admit to myself. But my exes keep having accidental children, and it takes them farther away from me, turns them more into strangers, into ghosts. And maybe that’s the loss that resounds with me the most: not the breakup; that lives in its own separate plane. But that, as it turns out, they are real people after all, and not just some entity I conjured up. They’re fathers and partners and live and breathe, not just words in an email or blurry photos from old-model cameraphones. And yet, for me, fatherhood will turn them into phantoms more than anything ever did.
doloresappreciationsociety 