BEDA 4: Oh Mother, Oh Bother.

I've been told a lot that I am born to be a mother. My body disagrees.

This blog came as a response to another [Here] talking about the joy of being a mother and the pain of those people who are left to deal with the fact that they will never have their own children no matter how much they crave it. I can't help but think of the term 'smug marrieds' from Bridget Jones when I think about this. There is something very cruel about the fact that mothers complain about juggling their job with their children and having their own time when the option for some women has been very definitely removed. I would never deny that yes that can be difficult, it can be exhausting but the payouts surely outweigh the negatives, the love a mother feels from her child is like no other. Women who find themselves unable to have children don't get these payouts, they don't get to carry the child, feel them grow inside them and know that this child is a combination of them and (usually) the person they love the most in the world. Mother will never be a label they'll be known by and for many that's a heartbreaking fact they are forced to come to terms with, salt rubbed further into the wound by mothers who seem to see their children as a burden not blessing.

I feel for women who have it tough, I don't know how people seem to juggle things constantly and I don't know at the moment how to have the patience to be a mother. I know that this will come and I will learn (motherhood to me is not an automatically innate god given talent, it has to be learnt just like anything else) but at the moment I am not in the right place to have a child for so many reasons. I am however constantly at odds with my body. I have endometriosis. I don't know what the chances of me having children are, we won't know until we try and that won't be for a while but I keep thinking that I should bring it forward, I should try now because surely the sooner the better when it comes to the human body? Your ovaries are not the kind of things that you want to mature, they are no fine wine. What if I get to 32 and I find that I am barren, that I cannot have children and my future is not one of a combined DNA producing a brand new human being. Could I do that to Liam? Does he not have the right to pass his genes on and be called a father? We have discussed this at length and he has told me that no matter what happens, children or not, he will stay with me. Whether that is the case in 5 years is another matter.

This struggle between waiting for the right time and going purely on the biological has been made even more difficult by other people. The world seems to be invaded by babies at the moment, mother complaining of late nights and spit up and accidentally getting pregnant and I sit there and think but what if that's never going to be me? I know I can adopt, I would adopt, that's on the agenda anyway but it's not baring your own and it's not got all of those things that you expect from pregnancy and motherhood. It's hard for me because I want to sit there and tell these women off, tell them to stop moaning because they get to experience that and I might not. I get pain, crippling pain, as a reminder that I may not have a child every month I don't want to feel bad about the experiences everyone else gets to have and doesn't appreciate as well. I'm not going to lie, it hurts sometimes to think that could not be my fate. I'd love to be one of those juggling mothers who gets to come home each day and see their child asleep, happy and peaceful.

I think everyones got the right to moan, I own a blog I couldn't really argue, but I hope mums remember that some people aren't as lucky as them and if it came down to it they wouldn't swap their world for anything but there are so many who would.