When I was little I used to get excited when my birthday month rolled around for several reasons. One: Its my birthday coming up soon! Two: March is always a beautiful month and I love the early days of Spring so very much.
When my Dad died, it hit me like a ton of bricks. It was, and still is, the worst day of my life. This March 4th, instead of gloomily looking at old photos, I was laid up after a rather nasty fall down the stairs. A fall that produced no broken bones, but various heinous bruises that would make you shirk. They make me shirk. I couldn’t walk around for nearly a week, had to stay in bed, and watched a lot of movies. I guess I was too tired to reminisce.
March 4th comes and goes as it has for a million years. It’s only been the last 3 that I’ve had a hard time recovering and getting into “birthday/Spring is here” mode. I find that I wake up in the mornings feeling down and unmotivated. This year’s set-back, falling down the stairs, has added to a general malaise that seems to get harder and harder to shake. Or maybe it’s because I’m in the belly of the beast and it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
This year, in particular, I will be 35; which means I’ll be 40 in 5 years. A recent doctor’s appointment added even more brain teasing fun. She said, without pushing, that if I wanted to have a baby, I need to do it now. I grumbled and she replied that while it’s not impossible to get pregnant in your late 30′s, it is harder. I can imagine. The difficulty of babies in general, has been why I’ve avoided it so long. It’s not that I wouldn’t want to create a kick-ass human being who looks like me and AJB, it’s that it’s going to be really, really hard. It also means giving myself up for someone else.
I’ve met people who say that it’s not totally true that you have to give yourself up for your kids; that you can still concentrate on your work and yourself, you just have to find a new balance. My worry is, I won’t be able to do both; I’ll end up spending all my time on kids, forgo my career, become fat, and end up bitter.
Do I feel like something is missing from my life? Yes. It has more to do with my career and art than kids. I feel like I should be doing more, have done more. I feel bad about not really knowing if I want kids because I love kids. I love my nephew, my little cousins and every baby I see in the market. The missing pieces of my life stem from not really doing what I set out to do or not being able to figure things out the way other people do. It stems from the month of March, the big 3-5, my Dad’s death, and realizing I should have had kids when I was 25. Except, I just wasn’t ready. At 25 I was floundering even worse than I am now. No car, no career, a stupid boyfriend I’d never want to breed with, I was living in a junky apartment with 3 other people…Then again, had I just bit the bullet back then, I’d have a ten year old who could help me carry equipment on shoots. Fuck. Of course, my life would be very different now. I might never have succumbed to pressure and entered cosmetology school which means I never would have met AJB.
As usual, I’ll bounce back. I’ll pick myself up and carry on. All those other things? They won’t go away, but eventually they’ll be behind me. Having a baby means taking a leap of faith that everything will be fine and even if it’s not, I’ll deal with it. I hate not knowing. I want to make sure I’m getting the most out of life. You know, more bang for my buck. Am I? Not this week.