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One of the questions so often asked of women--after When are you getting married?-- just might be "When are you having children?" Once you have a child, you hear “When are you having another?� Unless, of course, your first pregnancy or firstborn child came with trauma, heartache or illness. Then somehow you are put into some sort of “How dare you!� column.
I heard it after my stillborn son. "How could you risk that again? Shouldn't you just adopt?" Well, as much as I appreciated that unsolicitated advice (NOT), it never ceased to amaze me that people would dare to suggest I should not try again.
It seems as if Suzanne at Mother in Chief is getting the same sort of "helpful" comments. Judgement. The "how could you" type comments and looks are so painful and, really, don't serve any purpose. Yet, so many of us who have gone through the hard times of either losing a child or having a sick child receive that look. We see it.
When TIC was in the hospital earlier this year--during one of his darkest days in the Pediatric Cardiac Intensive Care Unit--one of the nurses asked me, "So, why did you decide to have another?" The tears fell on cue. Her tone suggested that she couldn't believe that we decided to have another, considering things obviously hadn't worked out so well with the first one. I have often suspected that people have wondered that about us--not that it's anyone's business if we decide to have more kids. But especially as I waddled around the hospital for those six weeks, I often felt like I was being judged. And from the tone of that nurse's voice, I apparently was, even as I hovered over the listless body of my three-year-old son.
It hurts. It is uncalled for. We have a right to our family. We have a right to have more children. It is our risk to take. It is our family we are building. We are allowed to give ourselves permission to keep living. To believe in our family.
Suzanne says it perfectly:
We were still haunted by what was to come. But after his second surgery, we realized that having another baby was like giving ourselves permission to keep living. Our life didn't end when we had a child with life-threatening health problems. It had just become part of who we are. Even though our experience could never be described as normal, it's the only experience we know; it's our normal. There will always be life before and life after. But that doesn't mean we need to be totally defined by where we've been, what we've seen, the sorrow we've felt, the mourning we've done, the uncertainty we face.
She summed up so perfectly what many of us feel. We do not need to be defined by our previous experiences. We did not choose what happened to us. We did not choose to have heartbreak. And honestly, we are not choosing to have your judgement. We are choosing to handle our family and our lives in the way that we feel is best for us.
So stand with us. Support us. Tell us you are rooting for us. But please, don't put us in a "how could you" column of some list of who should or should not have children. We can do without that, thankyouverymuch.
GO Suzanne!
Even with all of our downs--and we've had more than our share--the ups, the joys of being a parent to my special kid, far outweigh all that other stuff. Don't get me wrong, that other stuff is real, it's there everyday. But sometimes we forget about it for a few minutes and we live and we laugh and we just are. And it's all worth it.
It IS all worth it.
BlogHer Contributing Editor Jenn Satterwhite also blogs at Mommy Needs Coffee and Mommybloggers.
