Grieving The End of My Childbearing Years After Losing My Daughter

“I’m not sure I want another baby and time is running out.”

Searching for sea creatures -- photo by author

“How many children will I have?” I ask Isabel, my Chilean host-sister, over video chat. She’s in her kitchen in Chile deliberating my future with each tarot card she gently turns, analyzes, then reads aloud. I’m 3,500 miles away, standing in my kitchen in Maine, unshowered, in a t-shirt and underwear. It’s nearly noon. My two kids are in daycare. We are supposed to be moving from Maine to Maryland and I haven’t done a thing.

Isabel flips another card.

I’m lightheaded with anticipation of her response. The laundry list of things I should be doing, like packing, is weighing on me, but I can’t stop focusing on whether or not I will give birth to a fourth child. I turn forty next year. I’m obsessed with whether or not to try to conceive before I’m no longer able to do so, or by societal norms, become too old. Personally, forty feels like the top end of desirable for me to carry another child. Aside from my eggs growing older and less viable by the second, there’s an entire galaxy of complications and emotions surrounding the life of my daughter June.

Pregnancy feels risky, almost dangerous. I feel like I shouldn’t have more children after our eighteen month old daughter, June, died from cancer. It also feels like June dying is the exact reason I should allow myself to have one more.

Invisible pressures emanate from both inside and outside of my body. I try to only pay attention to the fickle ones that come from within and formulate imaginary boundaries.

As in, the one where I’ve decided if I haven’t had a child by the time I reach forty, then I will no longer try. Or the one where I decide it’s best if I let the idea go and just love the two healthy living children in front of me. Usually, it’s that same rational voice that scolds me for being so selfish for wanting another.

I fluctuate between creating boundaries and counting how many days until I reach my fertile window in my period tracking app. I live on high alert that my child bearing years are waning with each pass of the moon.

Like a phase of the moon, my cycles will wane until one day there are none left, only darkness. The curtain will close on the act of my life when my body created humans.

A moon wanes until finally it’s in complete darkness where it then becomes a new moon. If my cycles were like those of the moon, then once my ovulation has waned to nothingness, technically, I’d be new. Darkness and newness are places I am familiar and comfortable with. The label ‘new’ even feels a bit exciting. Could I be like the moon and still be ‘new’ after my childbearing years wane?

………………….

I once heard someone quantify time in “summers”. For example, a child may only have eighteen summers, from the day they are born, in their parent’s home assuming they move out at age eighteen. This signifies only eighteen summers together before the parent becomes an empty nester. Upon hearing this dismal way of breaking down the years, I apply it to my own life because at times I like to step into and out of my own darkness.

I think about June. She had one summer. Two, if you count the one she spent in utero while I was on bedrest. Most of that time we laid outside in the beating midday sun, half naked. I’d like to think that tanning my bulbous belly didn’t give her cancer.

There exists a shared insecurity around why June had cancer and died, something I’ll never understand, and why I want to have a fourth child.Something I also can’t quite put my finger on. Yet, the two feel undeniably linked. Linked by grief.

Aside from still deeply grieving June, lately, I’m grieving the transition out of the stage of my life when my body created her. A time when there was never any promise of children, yet existed the hope. Like when I suffered a miscarriage, but remained hopeful for another chance at creation. I’m grieving the hopeful, naïve person I once was. I’m grieving the life I didn’t have as a mother. I am grieving what I went through when I lost all hope the day June died.

Saying goodbye to my childbearing years is reminiscent of the permanence I have come to dearly know of losing something I will never get back.

………………….

When you break down the years into summers they feel vastly shorter. As if the future vanished the exact moment you considered it. A fleeting memory distinguishes the true brevity of life.

Everything in the past becomes a memory whether it’s one summer or eighteen. Each can be reduced to a thought. It’s the only living proof that time is not linear. In our memories, years can be combined to a split-second. We live the present in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, and years only to have them diminished to the briefest of thoughts. What’s your longest memory?

There is an upside to this. I can think of many instances at once of time spent with June. Many different smiles or facial expressions she had, at one time. I can think of her laughing and the smell her skin. The scent of June is also a memory. If I can remember her laughing, as I tickled her on the couch until she threw her head back into the cushion giggling uncontrollably, while also remembering how she smelled, it’s proof that I can experience multiple memories at once. Sheer, nostalgic beauty. It brings so much heartache, but days I have nothing, just darkness, I still have the memories.

Then again, when you think about the human life and potentially experiencing eighty-five summers (if you’re lucky), in a world where we add everything up, and eighty-five falls on the backdrop of millions of years, time becomes a riptide.

………………….

After absorbing the summer theory and applying it to those I love, I apply it to my childbearing years.

Huge mistake.

I might only have one.

No different from the one summer June was alive which has now been reduced to a snapshot in time. One I’d give my soul to have back.

If I have one summer left, that means I may only have twelve more moons before perimenopause (if I’m lucky). One more summer of fertility which equates to twelve lunar cycles. At this point in my life, it’s the most inconceivable idea surrounding conceiving I’ve ever considered.

………………….

“Three children,” Isabel says.

“Three?”

“It’s not clear if you’ll have three children or if it’s three living children.”

I have three children altogether. I have two living children.

The cards give me zero clarity as to what I am supposed to do with my life. I wish the cards would just decide if I will have another baby. I wish someone would tell me if I am making the right decision by wanting another baby. There’s an uncertainty that plagues me since June died. My freewill and innocence died, too.

I would never regret having another child after losing June. The flesh that is my baby is the purest form of love I could ever imagine. It took me losing June to understand love and living in love is the most important thing in my life.

June, completes my third child, but is no longer here. She was my second born. My ‘middle’ child. I hear other’s talk about their middle children. They say things like, “Oh she’s totally my middle child,” or “she’s my biggest personality, definitely the middle child,” and every time I think, “Is that how it is? Is that how it was supposed to be?”

Ultimately, I always wonder, “Would June have been like that?”

I’d give anything for June to be the middle child. June was never given the opportunity to fulfill the role because she passed away eight weeks shy of her baby brother’s birth. I will never fill the hole that exists in our family between the first and the last. If we had a fourth child, it wouldn’t bump my third to the second and fill that gap.

………………….

I am thirty-eight and three quarters years old. The “three quarters” isn’t me insisting my age as a toddler might, “I am three AND THREE QUARTERS.” Although, half-years and quarter-years begin to matter as we get older just as much as they did when we were young. In realizing this similarity between the young and the old, the young grasping for more years, the old grasping for more time, I might just have a toddler-style tantrum about it.

………………….

I plan to live every year, as if I know it can only get better. I hope the pain and suffering of my thirties melts away. Hard lessons have etched me into the stone I’ve almost become this decade. I’ll spend my forties remolding the statue that life wanted me to be. I refuse to succumb to the representation of what my past experiences might potentially have the power to make of me.

“Are you going to try for another?” A common question amongst mothers my age. Societal perception. Moms trying to suss out other moms. No different from how I suss out my future in the tarot reading. We all want to be told what to do. What we can handle. Naturally, we compare ourselves to our peers.

The question of another child is often an emotive conversation inadvertently overflowing with personal information mostly coming from me.

Like when I tell select mothers about June.

I know the question has nothing to do with June dying of cancer because many of the mothers I’m meeting for the first time. They don’t know she existed. A micro-heartbreak within itself.

If I don’t tell them about June, I simply respond with, “I don’t know, how about you?” For a moment my response has nothing to do with my past or my future, just me being a ‘regular’ mom. This hurts more than telling them about June, but I’ve learned it doesn’t feel good to make moms cry at the playground.

At times, I imagine my feelings of wanting another have nothing to do with June. Perhaps this contemplative threshold exists for other woman exiting their childbearing years. I know that I am not alone and that millions of mothers cross from their thirties into their forties, and at one point or another, share similar thoughts.

………………….

Pregnancy isn’t the last thing we might consider as a maturing woman, however. I once read that a woman’s most ‘attractive years’ are their thirties because they are established in a career, have discovered who they are, possess confidence, and still have the glow and dependency of a monthly ovulation. Well, isn’t that the icing on the end-of-ovulation cake?

I’d like to not believe it, but it makes me reflect on days when my husband tells me how beautiful I am and I know I’m ovulating. It’s usually the only time of the month he asks if I did something different with my hair or if I changed my make-up, and usually I’ve done neither.

………………….

“Picture your Thanksgiving table in ten years, what does it look like for you?” A girlfriend’s OBGYN once asked her.

When I picture my family, I imagine my three beautiful babies sitting around the dinner table, talking, laughing, connecting. They’re older, but they’re still my babies.

One of my babies in that equation died.

My family will always be complete, but it may never feel whole because while I have had three incredible little creatures, there are only two I can physically account for.

When I expressed to my therapist that I feel selfish for wanting another, she disagreed. “I think it shows how much love you have to give. There’s still so much love between you and your husband after losing June. It feels hopeful.”

None of which I could disagree.

………………….

I know another child may or may not be in the cards. Clearly, the cards want me to determine that for myself. As I should. At the end of the day, I’ve got one summer or twelve moons, to decide because I turn thirty-nine in two weeks.

Despite the ambiguity of the cards, three children or four, there’s no way to truly know except to live. While I do, I intend to appreciate every last ovulation this body has to give me.