I never doubted I wanted a child. It was a sure confidence, cultivated through babysitting my cousins and generally being more excited to visit friends of my parents with small kids than with kids my age.
They felt like warm little puppies cuddled in my arms, they were charmed by me, my long hair, my ability to sit through the same Disney movie without flinching.
I worked hard at building an approximation of the ‘stable’ life I thought was needed for a child, and then I tried for a child at 37.
I got pregnant over Christmas, after a few months of trying. And then, six weeks later, I had a miscarriage, the very weekend we had invited my parents over to share the news. I went and was sent home from three hospitals, to nurse my powerful cramps so that on Monday morning all the OBGYN had to do was to look at a clean uterus.
I then went through fertility treatments, and two years to the day of the morning I started bleeding, I delivered my daughter.
I had been religiously taking the pill for 15 years before conceiving and, in those brief months free of any hormonal intervention, I experienced a libido I never experienced before. I finally understood what it meant to be inhabited by the desire for fucking, and not by the desire for connection to another human being by means of copulation.
It felt powerful, ancient and alas, it was short lived. Because of my miscarriage, the fear of missing out on conceiving a child had me surrender to the high-intervention path that medical professionals pitched to me. I did not trust my body because it had betrayed my baby.
I self-injected hormones, spread my legs for the slimy, cold, ultrasound wand more times than I care to remember and sat in fear, in fear of being the one woman, of those four or five sat next to me in the waiting room who came out of the process with no baby in her womb.
Every time I sat in the fertility clinic in Friedrichstr. I could not help being irked by their logo. Or logos, as they apparently could not settle on just one. There was a green apple, with a robotic-looking sperm circling around it, and then there was the stork with a baby dangling in a handkerchief from its beak. They were both rather clumsily designed but most of all, what kept on unsettling me was that it promised a result it could by no means guarantee. The baby at the end of the injections, the baby after the waiting and hoping and sharing and hoping and checkups and hoping. Some of us, statistically, would go home empty handed.
That was what kept bugging me. What if it was me? It had to be someone. And, in a totally warped use of statistics, I had turned my acquaintances into a representative sample: every pregnancy, every delivery within that small pool of women meant that someone, statistically, had to be left empty-handed. The dread that every new pregnancy announcement brought me was sincere, and warped.
I exhausted all six rounds of insemination. I moved to in vitro fertilisation. We had 3 embryos, transferred one, froze two. It did not stick. We went through the second round: eighteen eggs, 1 embryo viable and transferred. Two weeks passed and I did not feel any different, my boobs, so sore with my first pregnancy, signalled nothing.
I did not even want to do a blood test at the clinic. But then I did, because I was told I had to. And while I was walking in the street, one random day, the clinic called and said that yes, indeed, I was pregnant.
I did not rejoice. I was scared stiff. I asked my then husband if he would be ok if I had chosen to terminate. I was supposed to take methylfolate pills in a specific quantity and I messed it up one day and I felt I had already failed my embryo. I wanted to have a do-over. This would not be the first time that I felt I was messing up, that I needed to go back and do it again.
I did not know it then, not fully, but I was scared stiff. Scared of losing this baby too, scared of damaging her with anything I ate or drank, or didn’t eat and didn’t drink, or because I petted a cat at someone’s house.
When she was big enough to kick, my placenta, placed right between her and my belly button, muffled a lot of her movements and I felt a dread set in as the day progressed and I could not get to the 10 daily foetal movements I was told to look out for.
I felt powerful and at peace only a handful of days of those long ten months. And then it was time to deliver her.
Not enough water, I was told. And I dutifully complied, checked in, took the pill to be induced.
And so it began. And only the day after, while being wheeled downstairs with strong contractions I realised that the only way was through. I did not so much pass through the threshold but crashed against it.
Despite all my efforts to surrender my body and my agency to the health establishment who was (supposedly) better than me at keeping my child alive, I was thrown back into my body, my very pregnant body, and I was the one that had to reach into myself, and find the courage to own my birthing experience.
And while I did that, and it went in a blur and it was empowering, and I felt a quiver of the power I had been able to summon to bring my baby into the world, once again I retreated and cowered behind the hospital guidelines, the convention. I still was not ready to own my experience.
Once at home, I still allowed my fears, the doctor’s voices, the scientific articles online, to talk me into compliance, into listening to everybody but me.
I see now that the compulsion I had to buy all the newborn gizmos, was, again, an effort to distance myself from my responsibility, to delegate. I surrendered my power, deferred to experts, all while thinking I was an informed mum.
I wish I could say that I had an epiphany. I wish I could say I stood tall and was the mythological Mother, protecting my child from the world. But I did not. Before surrendering to myself, I surrendered to the realisation that nobody truly knew what mine and my child’s best interest really were. That not my partner, not my family, not our doctors, could deliver me from the pain of caring so much for a human being AND not trusting myself to know what was best for her.
I felt a sort of confident mother only when I was alone. My voice was not strong enough to not be submerged by those who thought they knew best, or at least their opinion needed to be front and centre in my head.
I wish I could pinpoint the time when I felt I could do this. All I can say is that, in the realisation of how alone I felt in my caring of this human being, in the acknowledgment of how much was at stake, I became fearless.
I am not doing it perfectly, and I often feel I am not living up to the mother I would like my daughter to have, and yet I love her so fiercely that I have no qualms: I will learn and try and apologise and humble myself in front of her as the mother who fucking tried. Every day.
And this is the surrender I am willing to embrace.