Realizing you are a mother already... a childless mother.

I didn't even realize I had already become a mother.

I'd been medicating myself dutifully, caring for the OCD that had grown out of control and threatened to take over my whole being. Learning late in life to mother yourself is still mothering. I recovered from a terrible relationship in record time, because I figured out how to mother myself out of obsessing over someone clearly and definitively incorrect for me. He also will remain forever crucial to my life direction for telling me that I'd be a terrible mother. Whenever I dare to drift out of the sanity lane and think kindly on this person, I remind myself that he said that to me, and then I self-correct.

I created a business whereby I professionally mother beings who were somehow, crazily willing to pay me to come to their homes and do what mothers do- support, encourage, organize, suggest, and nudge them toward their personal and professional goals. Not to congratulate myself but as an example of professional mothering, I wrote and read eulogies aloud for one client, who had two dogs pass away on the same day.  The things that only a mother would do, or not judge someone for doing.

I took in dingy, handicapped animals and saw them through the remainder of their aimless little lives. I took over a writer's group from a friend who had to move on as his wife was actually having actual children and then mothered the writers and actors that came into and out of the group. I mothered various strangers at a public writers gathering every Tuesday night for three years in a bar, where I even mothered one of the bartenders... and then the bartender's family when he died in a car accident.

I write this not to deify myself but to explain how, in the absence of a child, a person can compulsively mother others and not always to positive ends.  Ann Landers (or Eleanor Roosevelt- two exemplary professional mothers) brilliantly wrote than no one can take advantage of you without your permission- so I gave permission far and wide for myself to be turned inside out for the betterment of others, friends, lovers, strangers and anyone with a limp.

My sisters and I share this obsessive mothering genome. We were raised by the consummate professional mother - who lost her mother early and tragically.  Our mom lost the template of how to be a mother at the age of sixteen, so she covered all the bases by mothering the hell out of us and everyone she ever met. If my mother were to write a memoir, the title would be, "You'll Never Guess Who I Sat Next To On The Plane"- she collects everyone she comes across and mothers them into submission. My mother was a kindergarten teacher in Harlem for nearly 20 years, so she mothered in the trenches with the best of them.  So, I come by my mother instinct honestly. Lexapro does help. A tad.

But as I write these words, with three dogs, a cat and my beloved all hanging in the kitchen with me, I am simultaneously struggling with my fear of finally becoming a real, true, actual, factual and no give backs mother.  I'm terrified actually. I can't possibly be considering myself as someone else's mother. I feel huge surges of selfishness roiling just under the surface. I have nightmares where I lose my baby because I just really wanted to take a nap.  What if I just don't feel like being a mom one day? Can I take a day off from being a mom? I don't think so. I worry less about being a not good mother than about spontaneous urges to go AWOL once I am irretrievably given a child to be a mother to.

I'm terrified of not being able to find time to write again. To exercise, to drink to excess with friends in a bar, to take a walk when I feel like it or see a movie just because. It feels so petty and spoiled but it's true.

Worst of all, all I seem to see in the news is evidence of mothers and fathers who do horrific things to their children. This is the factory where our future child is being manufactured. So not only do we get someone else's kid, but they get to make the child to their damaged specifications, then we get to live with and shape the rest of our lives around the rest of it.  Good times.

I run free with doubts of my ability to do this, to mother someone who actually needs to be mothered, but truth be told- every time my fiancee and I see a baby of any race, age, gender, we play a little game. He'll turn to me or I'll turn to him and say, "OK, someone just hands you that baby and says, "Here's your child." And we smile at each other and say. "OK. That's our kid."

First you cry...

Actually, I didn't cry as much as I thought I would.  Blame it on Lexapro, or getting older, or the fact that I had spent so much time alone before meeting the Canadian that when I did finally find him, I was astonished to meet someone who was more of a man than me.  They say nature abhors a vacuum, so, due to the prolonged absence of a man, (or perhaps the cause of it), I became the person I would lean on... and take shameless advantage of. I fixed cars, planted trees, hooked up routers, modems, killed insects and assembled furniture, including an outdoor restaurant heater that quite possibly weighed more than I did.  I could still get pregnant. I just couldn't get arrested... romantically speaking.

After a two and a half year dry spell of absolutely zero sexual congress that involved another human being, I got myself some. It did take a village to get me laid.  Friends advised me in almost Karl Rovian intensity and I finally sexed when I was well into 42. And I got pregnant, most likely the first time out of the gate. That's right, I broke a dry spell longer than JFK's entire presidency and scored a sperm touchdown that very same night.  And the sperm was courtesy of a friend of some twenty years that I had entrusted my born again virginity to.

I miscarried before I even realized I was pregnant. And it was painful. And it was on the floor of my gay best friend's house during a predominantly gay male party. I was the hag curled up on the floor, trying to remain as charming and blithe as humanly possible while holding a bottle of icy vodka to my lower belly.

But that's another story. When it became increasingly clear to myself and my determined, devoted Canadian that our ovulation chart, thermometer and pre-natal vitamins were going to have all the in vitro impact of the African fertility statues my mother picked up in a tourist shop while on white-lady safari in Kenya, we grieved in degrees.

Sure, there was your average anger/frustration, your dime-store denial (which we still dabble in), the run of the mill bargaining and all those other registered trademarks of the Kubler-Ross death patent. We are still working on accepting that there will not be an adorable, impossibly pale and hopefully not too rashy smaller version of the two of us running our lives any time in the foreseeable or unforeseeable future.  Perhaps it is a blessing- the Canadian is a recovering alcoholic while I still practice the art of drinking- we share eczema and psoriasis and a panoply of medications to make us bearable to ourselves and others... but if all these felons, teenagers, Palins and crack heads can procreate willy nilly, it just seems slightly unfair that we cannot.

But that is just how it is.  So, we grieve while celebrating all our friends and their lovely, beautiful babies.  I grieve seeing chic pregnant women hiking and sailing into pre-natal yoga, I grieve seeing them breastfeed, I gape in awe at how their hormones enrich their skin and hair and fashion sense.  I grieve for what I cannot ever do, and in that letting go, I understand just how much of an every day sort of miracle a child truly is.

And so, the next step is adoption. There is an earthquake in Haiti, babies who need homes, and there are friends who find their children, and not as a result of their own genitals doing anything particularly smashing. So, that's what we plan to do next.

when does one turn to other's children to raise?

We met late. I was 45 when the Canadian knocked my socks off, in that gentle way only well-mannered, sober Canadians seduce and woo- which is not me, nor how I seduce, woo, drink, talk or live.  I do nothing gently.  But we got on.

We used birth control exactly three times before we knew we were gonna be playing for keepsies.  We've essentially been married since a month after meeting.  So, we played without a goalie and tried to make a creature out of our own ingredients.  He knew about ovulation from trying to get his ex-wife to carry his load. He kept a chart on the fridge of my cycles, we took my temperature, which oddly never goes above 97 degrees, ever, and we sexed constantly. We connected once and I lost it early on, bleeding for two weeks straight.  Good times.

My egg numbers were surprisingly hefty, at first. But without insurance, and tons of disposable or indisposable cash, we were playing without a goalie and without helmets.  And the ice of aging is hard. One month I had the egg count of a 16 year old nubile girl and two months later, the egg count of a neutered 16 year old basset hound.

 It's ironic, in a distinctly un-Alanis Morrisette way. I played carefully. I didn't have a kid between junior and senior year like my dear friend from Catholic all girls school. I didn't have kids with any number of tools, douches, drunken louts and sad clowns that litter my romantic runway. I kept my uterus tidy and HPV-free for the right sperm- and I met him too late to use that uterus for its designated purpose. So, for all fertility intents and purposes, I didn't have a kid when I wasn't in a responsible, stable, or financially feasible place to bear and raise a child right- I waited for all my ducks to line up, and those retarded ducks took their sweet ass time lining up but they finally did, and now I'm a man.

We could have taken credit cards out and done the fertility by any means necessary thing that is quite popular in the East Coast - West Coast birthing culture- but spending a quarter of a million dollars to have our ingredients grow a person just seemed... too much about us. I am no Gandhi, but I just didn't want to exercise my ego that much. That, and the economy collapsed, so the credit card offer carnival of two years ago folded up its tents and left town.  We were gonna have to DIY if we were to get a kid.

We are still in love, I'm 48 now, we are even going to get married, but before then, if we are lucky, we will be handed someone else's unlucky child- gender, race and age unknown- to raise for as long as the courts will allow us to.  So, we will have a foster child, but until we make it legal, our foster kid will be a bastard foster kid. Can't wait!

So, this is my blog- we are in the foster to adopt system, and since we aren't hitched yet (the very idea of making a wedding makes my long dormant eczema resurge to my face) we are searching for our bastard foster child. If you see our kid, let us know. Much appreciated.

Coming up in following blogs-

how best to acquire a kid: buy one straight out or just rent?

Foreign made import or export?

Gay friends who pioneered our foster to adopt path.

Taking professional parent classes.

My work with foster teens.

The whole journey from 'just us' to 'all of us'.