While catching up on all the commentary and tons of great photos following the Nashville blogging community’s Holiday Blogger Meat-Up at the Mothership last weekend, it quickly became obvious to this reader that one young man had definitely made a big impression on the ladies. So much so, in fact, that his mom was later seen apologizing him getting, shall we say, a little handy in the boob department with some of those smitten females, heh. He really is one of the most adorable little round headed babies ever.
Anyhow, all that hangin’ out with precious little babies stirred up a little motherly instinct and baby lust in some who attended, discussed earlier this week (I’ll not repeat where since she was having second thoughts about posting such stuff as it was :) – which I should probably be having second thoughts about right about now myself). But I can’t really say that I didn’t get a little of that myself just looking at pictures of all the cuteness. Babies and children are adorable, no doubt.
And in recent weeks elsewhere at another spot I hang out a lot, there had been some questions posed about one’s reasons to have kids or not, which I didn’t really get involved in at the time. But I’d been thinking about that stuff anyway – and listening to the biological clock I used to be pretty sure was broken ticking – for a while now.
ne important thing about all this is that originally, kids were never NOT supposed to be in the picture. I grew up fully expecting I’d have kids someday and never thinking anything different. Arguing with my mom on dozens of occasions when there was resistance to whatever teenage scheme I was trying to push and get permission for, I got told time and time again that I’d understand when I had kids of my own.
But that day never came, even though at one time, it was most definitely supposed to.
Though I have not lived in a small town in over 20 years, somewhere deep down in this jaded city dweller’s heart, I am still a small town girl. There was a small number of us that left for college elsewhere after high school, though several of those that left did eventually return. Most of my friends and acquaintances, however, are still there and never left.
Consequently, when I find myself back home, two things always happen: one, I’m reminded that they all think I’m crazy to have stayed in Memphis. I think this is just me, rather than others who left town years ago – if I’d remained in Murfreesboro/Nashville instead or gone permanently to Knoxville/Maryville, I don’t think the issue would be quite the same. Memphis, however, is like the big bad awful city of crime and other negative things to most of them, and I just won’t even go further into that right now or this post would be 50 miles longer and go off on a whole other secondary subject. Let’s just say Memphis is bad and scary to them, OK to visit but they wouldn’t wanna live here, and leave it at that. So therefore, I’m crazy for staying here, especially for 20 years.
The other thing that inevitably happens – and I don’t even have to be there in town, if there’s someone here in Memphis or anywhere else that I went to high school with, it always comes up – is that my high school sweetheart’s name comes up in conversation. Sometimes it’s directly asking where he is and what he’s doing these days (I do know, although there’s no logical reason anyone should expect that I would know that). Sometimes it’s just brought up as an offhand comment or remembrance that has nothing to do with me; sometimes it’s a little more involved with me, like, “Remember when y’all went to (wherever) with us?” That kind of thing.
It’s like this parallel universe there, where my name and his will always be inextricably linked. They see me, they think of him too. I wonder if they do the same thing when they see him (which is much less than they see me, in general – he’s been several states away for many years now). I am guessing that most of them do, if not all. I think they probably don’t ask him about me nor mention me at all though. Probably mainly because so many of them wanted to string him up and tar and feather him when we split up, and after all these years, they’ll be pleasant to him, no doubt, but they’re still holding a grudge. They’ve got my back, even though I never asked for it nor expected it, nor have felt it even necessary for a couple of decades.
It’s a little bit odd that this word/name-association continues after all these years if you look at those still in my hometown, mainly because many of them are on their second and third, and even a few on their fourth, marriages. And some of them have married folks that I never in a million years would have guessed they’d have wound up together. Those people have become mentally disassociated with their past lives and past relationships, in the minds of others around them. This type thing doesn’t generally happen with them. At least I think so. But all of them see each other all the time; I think that’s the difference.
The difference with me is they don’t see me but maybe once, twice a year if even that much. And actually, admittedly, I’m kind of guilty of the same thing – even if I don’t say anything about that person from the past, I see so-and-so and I immediately think of whoever it was they were with way back when.
I don’t know, maybe we ALL do it, and I just don’t know this. Maybe everyone, in the back of everyone else’s mind, is inextricably linked with whoever from their past, in some weird small town way. I just know I’m the one, and seemingly about the only one, who always gets asked about him, or he’s mentioned when I’m around. At least I never hear anyone else get asked some of the things I do, or hear their high school sweetheart’s name dropped every single time like always happens to me.
But that might be, I’m going to guess again, because I am just about the only one left who has never gotten married or had kids. There might be one or two others left, but I’m probably the only one who actually is seen at some hometown functions from time to time.
And that’s the other thing about this whole dynamic. Besides thinking I’m crazy (maybe the better word here is “eccentric”, heh) for never leaving Memphis in all these years, it’s that it really, really kinda bugs them that I’ve never gotten married and/or had kids. In fact, I’d go so far to say that it has often been thought, and also probably verbalized, that I “ain’t been right” since aforementioned HS sweetheart and I split up – solely because I have never gotten married and had kids, and exacerbated by the fact that I have chosen to remain in, god forbid, Memphis for so very long.
Has this ever actually been verbalized to me? Nope. But I know it’s true, and furthermore, the bottom line here really is the fact that they blame HIM for me having never gotten married, not having children, and not living happily ever after.
I suppose there is some logic there because, at one time, that was exactly what was SUPPOSED to happen. It was not only all practically planned down to some of the smallest details, but we came dangerously close to blowing off all the traditional and formal plans and running off to elope, get married a few years before planned. Somewhat fortunately in retrospect, we were both too drunk to drive – the discussion taking place at a college football game between his school and my school – and upon sobering up the next morning, the immediate urgency of the nuptials from the night before was all but forgotten. And can I just add – whew.
Because while I appreciate the friends I have who would not only fight to the death for me but hold that grudge for me for all these many years, I know that marriage would have been a mistake. Granted, it took me a few years to come to terms with that conclusion, but I know that relationship would not have survived intact to today. We’d have been divorced before either of us turned 30, no doubt. In fact, the person he did end up marrying, he divorced, though they later remarried (and are married still, far as I know).
Like I said, though, when we were still planning to get married eventually, we had everything planned out right down to various wedding details, the cars we would drive (he was a car nut, so that was muy important to him), and had picked out names of at least firstborn male and female children. (I know, it’s sickeningly sweet, ugh.)
He has a son. It just so happened that his wife’s maiden name is the same as the name we had picked out for the firstborn male child. It threw me for a moment when I’d first heard, yeah, but I had to get over it pretty quick. Under the circumstances, it’s not like I could be really angry about THAT.
For many years after, I kind of took some pride in the fact that I had gone on to have a life that had a few adventures and such, and certainly doing and seeing things and going places that someone in his position couldn’t really do. He was one of those people so bright he could have gone to college anywhere, and ended up giving up the college education he was in the middle of, and a doubtless promising career after graduation, in order to work full-time to support the family he had within barely a year of our split. I can’t say I fared much better with college seeing as how I kept dropping out, but for a long time I was still in and out of school, and certainly doing things and going places that I couldn’t have if I’d been a working mom with a baby to raise and a husband at home in my twenties.
For a long time, I thought, well, I wound up having a life, and he didn’t have one. That was, of course, coming from a still pretty bitter and resentful, and still fairly young girl in her twenties who maybe needed to feel that way for a while to be able to move on to something else where things like that didn’t matter. I’m not particularly proud of all that residual bitterness and resentment, but things between us ended on a pretty ugly note, and that’s probably really kind of an understatement. All of my friends wanted to kill him at the time; some of our mutual friends were pretty angry with him at the time, though maybe not quite as homicidal. The last time we were both in the same room 20 years ago, he himself admitted to one of my friends he was scared to death to try and talk to me – which, if you know me, that’s pretty laughable, I’m the easiest person in the world to talk to.
In any case, yes, it was ugly when it ended, and may be the only ended relationship of my life that I ever truly walked away with this huge upper hand, even though my failure to marry and have children later has rendered me “irreparably damaged” by well-meaning friends who I love very dearly. So for a long time I was happy I’d had this “big life” while he’d had “no life”. And then I got over myself after a while, and grew up, and none of that mattered anymore and was all but forgotten.
Well, obviously – my allegedly grown up self can now recognize – he probably had the life he wanted. And he certainly has something I’ve never had, like a family of his own. A child of his own.
In that regard, I’ve got to wonder – sometimes – who really missed out.
When pondering such issues (which I really don’t do often – nay, I mostly try to avoid this direction of philosophy!)… well, it probably doesn’t help matters, in my mind anyway, to have to remember that I pretty much wasted my twenties, and most of my thirties. It was sort of an accident, almost as if one day I was 21 or 22 with alllllllllllll this time ahead of me to do whatever, and then all of a sudden, I’m pushing 40. And where did all that time go?
Well, a good nearly seven years of it was spent with the Freeloader Ex, who I moved down here to Memphis with in the first place. Well, seven years if you count the four years we were actually a real couple, plus the next three years we spent as roommates with occasional delusions that everything might be all right and we’d be okay as a couple again. His extreme drug and alcohol problems kind of kept taking care of those delusions time and time again, which was certainly all for best, all things considered.
But the first couple of years we were together, it wasn’t like that yet. His problems had not evolved to what they eventually became. I don’t know that at the time I was really active thinking marriage and children at that point, with him anyway, but I still always figured that eventually I would, indeed, one day have kids.
Before I ever even got to the point where I was thinking in that direction, though, something came up that forced the issue. We had been together probably less than six months at that point, when we learned that he might indeed already be a father. The child was already born and the mother was requesting a paternity test. Stress, stress, stress.
In the course of a conversation about it all one afternoon, that’s when I learned that it was his intention to never bring any children into this world – or at least not any more children, if this child turned out to be his. He didn’t want to be a father, didn’t want to have children. Not with me; not with anyone.
Well, okay. I spent the next several days being bothered about that, as well as being kind of puzzled that it was bugging me so much since it hadn’t really been an issue or even a thought at that point. And it wasn’t so much that I desperately wanted to have children and soon. And at that point in time in my early twenties, I didn’t really feel like I was ready to make that jump yet anyway. But it had never ever occurred to me that I wouldn’t ever have children of my own, someday. And at the time, having just started a new life in a new city with someone I was really in love with at the time, I certainly hadn’t been looking to leave that relationship anytime soon.
I struggled with it for a while until it got to the point where I knew the decision was going to have to be made. Should I stay or should I go? If I stayed, then I was settling for never having children. Should I stay, or should I walk and possibly have children and a family of my own someday?
You know how that turned out – I stayed. And eventually, I actually convinced myself that I really didn’t want kids anyway.
And I love kids, I enjoy them. I spent years being “favorite aunt” and godmother type to dozens of my friends’ kids, some of whom are almost grownups themselves now, and that’s always been really cool.
And yes, at that point of my life it probably would have been a bad idea. We had a few really good years, and then a few years that were a complete and utter nightmare as his substance abuse problems escalated. When we finally made the mutual decision that he was moving out (albeit before I was going to have to just kick him out) – once he was gone, I felt like I’d been run over by a few dozen trains. Putting my life back together again wasn’t easy, but god, it was such a relief to be rid of all that craziness and negativity.
But you just don’t expect that what starts out as a fairly normal relationship and a pretty good thing is going to turn into something as horrific as that did. I get angry with myself sometimes for not having been able to predict what would happen. But in reality, I couldn’t have.
I dated a while, even ended up in another long-term relationship that wasn’t bad at all; we just never really belonged together in the first place. Some more shorter relationships after that, none of which ever really stuck, save for one; and in that one, had things gone in that direction, I would have ended up being a stepmom, which I would have been pretty cool with had that worked out.
In any case, for that entire time I was still pretty certain I really didn’t want to have kids of my own anyway. And as a family member or two or three made a point of pointing out, I was getting a little bit old for that kind of thing anyway (oh, yes, thanks for reminding me).
Then around my mid-thirties – 34, 35, 36 – three things happened. First, I had a routine test turn up bad, and spent the next eight months under a cancer scare and dealing with the possibility that I might well be having a hysterectomy before it was all over with. Fortunately, at the end of those eight months, all was well and I got a clean bill of health.
But it’s one thing to think you probably don’t want to or are not going to have kids. It’s a whole other thing to deal with when that choice is potentially about to get taken away from you without you having any say in the matter.
Second, I fell in love with my best friend, someone who had been pretty much right under my nose for well over a decade anyway. In the old days, I had been with Freeloader Ex, and his significant other at the time was one of my best, longtime girlfriends – and, in turn, he and the Ex had been close pals. NOW, it’s as obvious as the nose on my face that the wrong two couples were together at the time, and it’s obvious that there were already some pretty deep feelings there on both sides. But the timing would have been bad; and chances are, had a relationship evolved at the time, it never would have lasted. When the time was right, the time was just right. Four years later, we’ve had ups and downs like everyone else – some of them maybe a little more extreme than a lot of people – but we’re solid.
So there was that, and I guess anybody out there who did find the right and perfect person for them knows that when that happens, strange things happen. Like, even though you may have just felt absolutely certain for the last 15 years that you just really didn’t want to have kids, have a family – that hmm, maybe it would kind of be nice to have those things after all, maybe.
Though in our case, it really is starting to get kind of late. His mom had his youngest brother when she was in her forties, and older than I am now. And he loves kids, is great with them, would be a terrific dad. It’s still a possibility, certainly, and not only that but there’s the adoption and foster options too, especially older kids that they have such a hard time finding adoptive or foster homes for. But we’ll be okay, too, if it winds up just being us.
The third thing that happened around the same time as the other two, though, was undeniably the most bittersweet and the hardest to swallow.
I wrote (joked) about the detox effort with my ex a few weeks ago, in a short post That was close to seven years ago, and the next chapter of that little story is that we came very close, once he started getting clean and sober again, to getting back together again. Prior to his going into rehab, we talked about it some, and basically mutually agreed to talk about it again later on down the line, once he had gotten through rehab and gotten his shit together again. It was not the time to be discussing such things when he needed to focus on getting straight. I had made the arrangements for him to get into residential treatment, with some financial help from a family member, and drove him down there, a few hundred miles away, and let go, for the time being.
That future planned talk never happened. In the end, when it came down to it – when the answer was going to have to be either yes or no – I’m 99% certain my final answer would have had to have been no. The water that was under that bridge seemed way too deep, and I guess the feeling was mutual. It just wasn’t supposed to happen.
I wasn’t prepared at all for what did, though. He went back to college while still in rehab. Eventually, he graduated, and even went on to get his master’s. Which was great, fabulous, of course.
He also got married, and had a child.
Yeah, well, it took Mr. Edge (Not of U2) about a month to talk me down from the cloud of anger and venom and bitterness and resentment and all manner of rather violent wanting to go kick his ass to Timbuktu and back, or worse, over that little bit of news. I was so mad for weeks I was practically spitting not only proverbial nails but proverbial poison darts, dammit. My outrage got crazy and twisted enough that Edge – who dislikes him intensely and for reasons that mostly have little to do with me and are more about leftover garbage from what was their friendship of the past – was almost taking up for the ex, in the face of all my venom-spewing. I was picking apart every little incident and occurrence from that past relationship and tossing all kinds of evil theories out there, and poor Edge would be saying things like, “Look, I know you’re angry, and you have a good reason to be, but I was there, remember, and I really don’t think it was that way,” or “I really don’t think he meant it like that.”
And eventually he said, “You’ve just got to let this go.” And he was right. No matter how angry I was at this person who’d insisted he was never having children, we were never having children – and no matter how much a part of me really wanted to just pick up the phone and scream that he’d “robbed” me of my twenties and any dream I’d ever had of a family and children, and how dare he have a child of his own after that – no matter all that.
He might have been the catalyst, but it was ultimately MY decision. I made the choice to stay, knowing what I knew, and I stayed for years. It was on me, totally.
That’s not to say it doesn’t have the potential to still sting a little. If my mind goes wandering in that direction, which it doesn’t often, I very quickly remind myself it was my choice. End of story, fini.
I regret some things I didn’t used to, I guess. One thing I DON’T regret is having helped him get clean and get his life back together and back on track when I did. He hit bottom a bunch of times in many years, some of which I witnessed and some of which I wasn’t around to, but that last time – which was the first I had heard from him in over five years – I knew if I didn’t do something, he probably wasn’t going to make it. So I did what I felt I had to do. Presumably, he’s still alive, safe, well, and these days pretty successful. No regrets.
And me, the whole kid thing’s not much in the forefront of my mind, if at all. Something, like some of the discussions and questions posed in recent weeks, I’ll get to thinking things like, “Well, you know, I don’t know.” Deeper than that I suppose, in truth, but that’s the Cliffs Notes version.
Or I’ll be talking to or hanging out with my mom, who is, like, the coolest. With the exception of the teenage years, which were kinda tough on both of us, we’ve had this really great relationship, and especially so since I’ve been an adult. We don’t see each other in person as often as we once did, but whenever we do get to hang out, we have a great time. And we’re really, really close.
And I guess that’s when it occurs to me most, to think – well, maybe I HAVE missed out on something here after all. What my mom has with me is something I’m quite probably not going to have the opportunity to have.
Not going to lose a whole lot of sleep over it, no. But yeah, it’s there. At least a little.
So, obviously the latter part of this week has been kind of uncharacteristically deep in thought and serious, ugh. But like I said, sometimes I write just to get it out of my head and be somewhere else. And now it is. At least, until and unless writer’s remorse gets the best of me. Then again, I’ve always been pretty much an open book and could care less.
So I’m done with the deep and serious this week, everyone will doubtless be glad of that. Blondes shouldn’t ever, ever think this much, it makes our head hurt, heh heh.
Deep thought moratorium officially begins. Now, pardon me while I go see what Britney Spears has been up to for the last 24 hours.
