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Like many woman, when I was a little girl one of my dreams was to get married and have children. In fact, by the time I was 14 I had a good idea of how many kids I wanted. The magic number was 4. Ideally, I wanted to start with a girl, have a set of fraternal twins of each gender, and finally have a little boy. I guess, even back then, I knew I wanted to experience pregnancy and labor as little as possible. And yes, I even had ideas about my dream wedding, and my dream husband. But I was never so prosaic as to dwell on any of the ideals. I just knew the basics of what I wanted. I wanted a husband to be a partner, friend, lover and co-parent. And I wanted to be a mother.

Now not everyone has these desires, and some ascribe those desires to media shoving in women’s faces that it is what they should want. I, personally, think that’s pretty silly. The media is always more of a reflection of what we desire, then someone trying to tell us what to desire. For instance, the media doesn’t tell us all people should have certain markers for aesthetic beauty, it reflects those markers we have chosen (right or wrong). And if you think I’m wrong about that, you haven’t spent much time living outside of the norm. But I’ve lived most of my life outside of it, and while I’ve always had ambitions that involve career and success, my dreams have also included a family.

So here I am, 35 years old, and every time I see an adorable baby, I feel this little stab inside of myself. Some would say it’s the old biological clock ticking down, but I finally realized it’s about more than that. It’s about the ideals I had, just how far I’ve missed them by, and that time is running out to even come close.

There were two women in my birthing class, when I had my son. They were both around 40. One had a 18 year old and the other had a 16 and 20 year old. They were both pregnant with twins. Personally, I thought they were both a little nuts. The idea of starting all over, when the work of raising a child was almost behind them, seemed insane. I made a decision then, and I haven’t really wavered much on it since then. 40 is my cutoff. Which is why I only have 5 years left to have more children, and it’s one of the reasons for the pangs I’ve been feeling.

But it’s more than just having more kids, or having any specific number of them. It’s about doing it differently, and having it be different. I love my son, and I wouldn’t give him up for anything, but having him wasn’t easy. In fact, it was rather horrible. Let me explain (and warning, some of this is going to be slightly gross).

When I was pregnant with my son, I spent 9 months incredibly ill. I got sick every day, at least once, and usually more often. At the time, I didn’t have medical insurance, so I was forced to deal with the OB/GYN assigned by Medicaid (before IL had Healthy Kids/Healthy Parents). He didn’t much like women on Medicaid, which I heard from multiple women before and after I knew him. So, despite the fact that I once called him at 3AM and told him I’d been sick 8 times in 8 hours, and I was now seeing little bits of blood in the toilet, he still refused to do anything about my excessive ‘morning sickness’. You’d think he would’ve prescribed something after the 3rd month, when I’d lost about 30lbs, but he just kept saying we’d wait it out.

That summer was also one of the hottest on record, which didn’t help my comfort level. But I did get really good at planning bathroom trips. I knew to make sure there was nothing in my shirt pocket, make sure my glasses were off, make sure my hair was back, what angle to approach the toilet to avoid splashing, and I even got to the point I could hold it until public bathrooms were empty so no one had to listen to me. I became one hell of an expert at losing my lunch with as little muss and fuss as possible. I also learned what foods I couldn’t risk eating, on the chance they came back up. I’d never imagined how painful it is to regurgitate raisin bran.

Then there was the fact that I was single, without much money, and dealing with a lot of stuff at once. It didn’t get easier when I decided that my ex was no longer coming to my parenting classes with me, and I started taking my mother instead. I really had debated on doing that, but I was just too frustrated to do anything else, when he refused to just shut up for more than 5 minutes during the first class, and explained to all the other participants the proper way to relax your ‘woman’ with a pelvic massage.

The night I was sick 8 times, I was working at a store out of town. I’d spent 3 years working for an inventory service, and I was coming up on management level by that point. Or I would have, if not for the fact I had to quit when Michael was born. There was no way I could raise a baby traveling 80% of the time, and working insane hours that no daycare (even in-home) would deal with. But I kept working right up until the holiday slow down in November/December. In fact, when I found out I was pregnant, I was doing “Walmart Weeks” in Missouri. What does counting a Walmart involve? It involves 4 hours of work (almost entirely on your feet or knees) an hour lunch, and then working until it was done, generally 8-10 hours later. I did that for 2 weeks. Luckily for me, the nausea hadn’t turned fully in regurgitation at that point. I also took some temp jobs while I was pregnant. One week I’d worked nearly 80 hours between both jobs. That was the same week Michael’s father told me he’d quit his part-time job at a fast food place, because he couldn’t deal with the stress. As you can imagine, I was a little pissed.

Which is one of several reasons that things got really tense between us, by the time Michael was born. In fact, I told him a few weeks before I gave birth, that I wasn’t going to call him from the hospital until after the baby was born. Some might think that was cruel, but I stand by that decision. We were arguing all the time, and I knew (from family history) that the odds were labor would be hard. I told him I needed to focus on keeping myself calm and as comfortable as possible, and having him there meant that was unlikely. Unfortunately, my sister changed the outgoing message on our answering machine, to inform everyone that we were at the hospital. He didn’t get there until a couple hours after Michael was born, but it was still a bad situation.

I moved into a low-income apartment in November. It was a nice place, in a nice neighborhood, and I was relieved (there are some scary ‘projects’ neighborhoods in this area). But it was also eerily quiet, and very empty. I didn’t have a computer back then, so I had little contact with the outside world. Hell, I didn’t even have cable.

I first started going into labor on December 30th. The contractions were uneven, jumping around between 5 minutes and 15 minutes apart. They weren’t Braxton-Hicks either, they were real contractions, they just wouldn’t become consistent. Finally, about 1AM on December 31st, they were always less than 7 minutes apart even if they still jumped around, so I called my mom to take me to the hospital, during an ice storm. They sent me home a few hours later, telling me to come back when they were consistent. Almost 24 hours later, trying to sleep between them on my mom’s couch, I woke her and said I was finally sure I was ready. This was confirmed about 10 minutes later, when my water broke. That’s when things got really bad.

Every time I had a got done having a contraction, I threw up. Which also meant I couldn’t sleep between the contractions. So I hadn’t slept in days, and I was throwing up so much that I left the hospital 30lbs lighter than when I arrived. Michael was only 7lbs. The rest, the doctors told me later, was due to dehydration from getting sick. I don’t know how many hours it went on, before they finally gave me something. It was a combination of something for the nausea, something to take the edge of the pain (though I never noticed any change) and Pitocin to move the labor along. Despite the Pitocin, he was still born almost 20 hours later. I did count myself lucky, since my mother had been in hard labor for 48 hours with me, and hospitals just won’t let you go past 24 hours anymore.

I can’t remember much about that night. I hadn’t had any real sleep in three days. I was basically a zombie, just doing what they told me to, and trying not to throw something heavy at the uber-bitch nurse who kept telling me I had to quiet down whenever the doctor checked my dilation. I think I might’ve told her to go to hell at one point, but I’m not sure. All I know is, whenever he checked, it hurt so bad I wanted to die.

I don’t remember anyone asking me if I wanted drugs. I took the classes, but they weren’t Lamaze, just birthing classes. They made a point to tell everyone that they had to decide for themselves if they needed pain killers. All I know is, other than that one early shot, I never had any, and I don’t remember anyone asking me if I wanted them. But like I said, I was something of a zombie. I barely remember actually giving birth at all, but I do remember when they gave him to me and he almost instantly stopped crying.

A couple hours after Michael was born, his father showed up. I told the nurses to ask him to come back in the morning. I could barely keep my eyes open enough to nurse the baby, much less have a conversation. It was probably an hour later, when the nurses asked me to please talk to him, because he wouldn’t leave and he was creeping them out pacing the hallway. I talked to him briefly, let him come in and see the baby, and then begged him to leave and let me get some sleep. He was pissed, and that’s when the paranoia really started.

I read about post-partum depression in my birthing books, but I guess it wasn’t something I concerned myself overly with. From my mom’s experiences, I knew the nausea was going to be bad (she was medicated for it though) and labor was going to be tough (which is why she made dad get clipped when they wouldn’t tie her tubes after my sister). That’s what I was focusing on, along with all the busy work involved in preparing for a baby. So when the symptoms started, I didn’t even know it was happening.

The first morning at the hospital, when the ex called, I learned the meaning of fear in a way I’d never known it before. I don’t know if it was his attitude in general, the comments he made for years about being able to disappear off the grid whenever he wanted, or just the hormones, but I was terrified. I called my sister, begging her to get there as soon as possible, and I never let the baby out of my site. I even rolled his little bassinet into the bathroom with me, when I couldn’t wait any more. And when the ex showed up, and asked to take the baby into the hallway so his new girlfriend could hold him, I categorically refused.

Between exhaustion, pain and hormones, the couple days in the hospital was a nightmare. Just doing the birth certificate was a trial, because the ex was absolutely livid that I was giving Michael my last name. I figured it was safer, in case he ever tried to run with the baby (which he had made some veiled comments about doing). When he left the room at one point, the hospital administrator tried to be really nice about it. She mentioned that she wasn’t aware things were so bad between us. I told her that my mother had suggested putting ‘unknown’ on the birth certificate. The nurse actually told me that there was still time to do that. Frankly, that made me feel 10 times better, because I knew it wasn’t just me that was concerned with his behavior. All the nurses, at some point, express concerns over his presence and attitude.

When I first went home, I went to my mom’s, because the whole family was helping her move into her first house. It was ok then, even if I barely got to hold the baby because everyone else wanted their turn. But when I went back to my apartment, it really got awful. I was still so tired, and he wouldn’t sleep for more than an hour at a time. I didn’t find out until a day or two later, that the problem was my unproductive breasts. I decided to nurse for the first six weeks, because it was better for the baby’s immune system, and then go to bottles. But while most women’s breasts stop making colostrum and start making milk within a day, mine didn’t. In fact, no matter what the lactation consultant (assigned by the hospital) told me to do, I never got actual milk to develop. So he was crying because he was constantly hungry. I stopped nursing entirely by day three.

I think it was about a week after Michael was born that I had sort of moved onto my mother’s couch and he moved into his portable crib in her living room. I tried to go home to my apartment sometimes, but it was so hard. I was so scared all of the time. I even accidentally locked him alone in the apartment, because I was too afraid to leave the door unlocked while I went to get the laundry from the car (thank goodness I kept a spare key at Mom’s house). And then there was the crying fits that would just come on out of nowhere, and the panic attacks that were excruciating. At my mother’s house they were slightly less frequent, because there were people around to keep the paranoia from getting to me. But it was still awful. I was tired, sad, panicked and crying my eyes out for hours at a time.

I think it was about six weeks later, when my mom and sister insisted I get some help. Since I didn’t have real insurance, I had to go to the local Mental Health hospital. It wasn’t fun. I told the admin nurse that I was a ‘cutter’, because I hadn’t heard of such a thing, and when she asked, “Do you ever cut on yourself?” I thought she meant verbally. I basically thought she was asking if I was ever harsh on myself, which I could be occasionally. Fortunately that was cleared up a second later, when she asked, “Where on your body do you cut yourself?” They had a waiting list for people who weren’t in immediate physical danger from whatever mental disability they had. I explained that, by the time I’d gotten to the top of the list, the hormones would probably have taken care of themselves. They bumped me up, and I was assigned to a shrink who’s accent was so thick I literally understood every 5th word he said. But, he prescribed me an anti-depressant and pills for the panic attacks.

It was probably at least 10 weeks after he was born that I really felt better, and a good six months until I was fully living back in my own apartment. The meds kept me from being a complete basket case, but I still had crying fits and couldn’t stand being alone for too long. The ex had seen Michael once, when I brought the baby to a McDonald’s to see him and his family. He called occasionally, but once my phone got cut off, I didn’t really hear from him until the next Christmas, other than at child support hearings. That’s when I realized just how much of a vindictive son of a bitch he could be, when he screamed at ranted at me, and then DCFS showed up on my doorstep a couple days later, saying they’d got an anonymous tip I’d left Michael alone in the car in front of the court house. He was in the car, by the way, but he was with my friend Beth and her daughter was in the car seat next to him. It was a nice day, and we’d been cooped up a lot, so she opted to sit in the car with the kids while I was in court.

Over the years, there have been four calls to DCFS on me, and none of them were founded. Three of them were anonymous (one was my apartment board b/c they’d come in to spray and they were freaked out about a jelly stain on the carpet I hadn’t had time to clean up), and each of those was clearly my ex. He also called Medicaid years later, claiming I was defrauding the system because we were living on the Iowa side of town and I was getting Illinois Medicaid (I was off TANF and foodstamps by the time Michael was 2). After they contacted me, they informed him that he would be in trouble if he made any more false claims, because the apartment the insurance company put us in after the house fire clearly qualified as a temporary emergency residence. Of course, that was after he’d filed for a temporary restraining order against me, two days after the fire, because I couldn’t provide a safe living environment, and I refused to let Michael go live with him until we had a new place to say. The judge pointed out that, between having tons of relatives in town, and the insurance company covering all of our living expenses while we looked for a new house, his request was completely unwarranted.

The ex and I have gotten to a relatively civil point right now, though there’s still the occasional problem. For instance, when I screwed up his plans by dropping the kid off to him 10 minutes late one day (he’s constantly late picking up/dropping off), and he started screaming at me in the alley behind his house. But that’s mostly stopped now. It might’ve had something to do with my getting in his face a few years ago, and telling him he wasn’t my fucking father and so he couldn’t talk to me like he was, even if I refused to do something the way he wanted. Plus, every time he yells, I walk away or hang up the phone. I spent too many years that way, taking his tirades, and refuse to do it anymore.

So what is the point I’m getting at? What does all of this have to do with the pangs I feel almost every time I see a baby? It has to do with memories that I can’t get rid of but maybe, just maybe, I can push back with happier ones.

I want to meet someone who will be an actual partner; not someone who will spend 3 years dissecting me until there’s little left by an empty shell, not someone who’ll argue with the ultra-sound tech on whether that little shadow is really a penis instead of just being happy at seeing his child on the screen, not someone who thinks that responsibility is buying a pair of tennis shoes because the kid’s old ones have gotten really dirty and grungy (never mind the dozens I bought when he was outgrowing them every 6 months), and not someone who’ll call and rant at my pediatrician (one of the most respected in the area incidentally) in the middle of the night because she diagnosed our son with ADD and any perceived deficiency in his child reflects on him and therefore can’t possibly exist. I want to find someone who’ll want to share the experience of having a child with me, and find joy in it together, not act as if he’s some parenting expert and I’m an idiot for not agreeing with everything he says. And I want to make the choices I believe in for my child, without worrying about whether his father will drag me into another legal battle because he doesn’t agree.

I want to spend 9-10 months enjoying the anticipation of having a baby, without feeling so sick that it’s more torture than fun. I want to have someone in my life to take just a little care of me, so that taking care of my baby doesn’t feel like it’s killing me physically and emotionally. I want to watch an ultra-sound with a man who’s overwhelmed with joy at the site of his child inside of me, so we can have that joy together. I want someone holding my hand when our baby is born, who tells me he loves me, and makes me feel less afraid. I want to have a doctor who cares more about my and my child’s health and wellbeing, more than he cares about his own personal politics or views of anyone using state aid, even if only briefly. And I want someone by my side, who’ll fight for me to have exactly that.

Bottom line, I want to have another baby because this time I want to do it right. I want to have good stories to share, about bringing a child into this world, not horror stories that make people cringe. I want to have another baby because, 14 years from now, I want to look back on the experience with happiness not tears.

I love my son dearly, and like I said, I wouldn’t undo having him for anything. But truthfully, having him wasn’t an experience I remember with much fondness. It was more than a year of pain, illness, sadness, feeling desperately alone, and sometimes debilitating fear. And it makes me just a little bit angry. My mother and sister have done what they could over the years, so I’ll never claim I didn’t have any help and did it entirely on my own. But when it came down to it, the only person who was ever responsible for my son was me. Just once, I’d like it to not all be on me. I’d like to share the job with someone else, someone who wants to make a family together; me, him, Michael and maybe a couple more.

I know that hormones are probably a little at play in how I feel, but I learned the hard way how to recognize their influence. I know, now, that it’s more than that. I know, now, that what I really want is a chance to be more than just a mother. I want a chance to be part of a family that takes care of each other. And I want to show my son what it feels like to have a family like that. Hell, I’d like to show myself too, since I have fairly limited exposure to it myself.

And you know what else? I don’t think there’s a damned thing wrong with what I want. My mother rolls her eyes at me, when she hears me mention wanting another kid. Somehow she mistakes the desire for a willingness to do the single parent thing again. But she’s wrong. I would never do it alone again. Well, maybe if I somehow became insanely wealthy so I didn’t have to worry about lousy doctors and living in a too-quiet little apartment. But what are the odds of that?

No, I won’t do it on my own again. But that’s OK, because I never wanted to do it alone to begin with. I did what I had to do, which is pretty much the theme of my life. But, if I did meet someone before the big 4-0 hits, I think I’ve realized now that I really do want another chance to have the kind of childbearing experience I can remember with a smile instead of a tear.