My name is Aida, I'm 37 years old and, following a miscarriage 11 years ago, I can no longer have children. Abrupt introduction, I don't think it's worth otherwise.
I've always wanted a house with a big kitchen, with a mirror on the hallway to see myself when I leave and when I come back, not to get fat and especially a lot of children. What means a lot? Looking around, even one is a lot these days. Anyway, I wanted 3 or 5. Four would've been okay, but it's not a number I'm crazy about. I had names ready: Maria, Lenca, Ileana, Amza and Incu. I had for back-up too- for both the girls and the boys, because I've been through life and I know that the count at home doesn't match the one at the fair.
I did how I knew it would be better: I got married, got pregnant.
It wasn't okay, I had emergency surgery in 3 months. I won't narrate this, nor how the nurse told me something I didn't exactly understood at the time about one of my tubes, but I will mention that a year later I got divorced. Things were going very badly, I met someone else, the bitch left with someone else, long story short.
All this time I didn't use protection, but I didn't get pregnant either. I said, like a naive Christian when the things get fucked up badly, God protected me from having kids with this guy.
In love, him, the new him, even more in love, we were all over the walls non-stop. I wanted kids, he wanted kids with me. To go- Him to go to take them to school, to be the cool parents, to travel everywhere with them and to make cool kids out of them, like the cool parents we wanted to be, to eat bio, but to give them Mc from time to time, the stuff you imagine when you're not a parent but you want to be. Anyway, every month I used to get annoyed when I got my period. At a certain point, I started getting sad,I no longer got annoyed. Then, discretely, I started talking to friends who encouraged me and after two years, instead of a routine check-up at the gynecologist, I decided to start having more thorough check-ups.
I found out what I intuited - I can't have children anymore.
I wish I were part of the category of people who quickly reconfigure their path and believe that their destiny is something else, if it wasn't meant to be this, a great one most likely, surely the universe has something special prepared for them. But I belong to another category, one that thinks that life is a prank and that it doesn't make sense, but at least in the summer, for two or three weeks, it smells like linden in Cișmigiu.
At the beginning (I think half a year was the beginning) I cried as often and discreetly as I could. Not that I was ashamed, but I was trying to avoid questions and opinions and I didn't really want to bother or put people in an uncomfortable situation. I took refuge in work and running. I've been running constantly since I was 18, somewhere between 6 and 12 km a day. In that period I had days when I ran even 20-25 km. I would have run to the end of the world, only not to have to stop and come back to myself. My ankles hurt, my leg muscles, and this pain anesthetized my soul. Running as running away is not a sport, it's not recreation, nor therapy, it's just running away.
I wanted a little human that I could grow, in whom I could find the features of my parents, to scribble on the walls of my house, whom I could teach to swim in the sea and the smattering of Italian I knew, who would ask me for money I don't have and yet somehow give them away, as my mother did with me, and who could eat bread with nothing on it, just as I did when I was little.
I couldn't be a mom anymore. I couldn't, though I never had been one.
My partner was, in which way and as long as he knew, by my side. And as far as I let him, and especially as far as I didn't. For a long time he was the only one who knew. Over the time he kept assuring me that it didn't matter to him, that he loved me and wanted to live with me for the rest of his life.
He assured me so many times that I started being insecure. And along with the sadness that I cannot be a mother, came the fear that I would be left behind for it. Not being able to have children became equal to I am not woman enough, whatever the hell that meant. I felt it like a handicap. I believed that every man in this world would leave me at some point because of it.
I didn't go to therapy, I didn't want to talk to anybody, not even myself. Actually, especially with myself.
From here on followed a period where everyone told me that I was blooming, that I looked better than ever, that I emanated femininity and mystery. I took more and more jobs. Commercials, theater, movies. I was on fire professionally, but emotionally I had drowned long before. I had made from the way I looked crutches so that I could get through the world without my handicap being seen, so people wouldn`t understand that I wasn't woman enough. Clothes had become more and more molded on a body toned by running, the make-up, the hair of Ileana Cosânzeana, the attitude, the height of my heels, everything had changed. I was highlighting everything I knew to be considered feminine. A neat, handsome exterior to cover a cold, empty interior.
I saw myself as in a contre-jour. More and more blurred by the light of the people who admired me. There was no thread of joy in me, no zest for life. Professional and financial success moved nothing in me. I was buying flowers and airing the house out of habit, but even these no longer had an effect on me. I started to cut down a lot on going out, walks and especially dates.
Aida left the chat.
My parents were constantly asking me when I was going to have kids, that they couldn't wait for it. It was nothing invasive, it was just love, the same love with which they pack me Schnitzels in empty ice cream boxes. My parents, who have raised many grandchildren - my brother's kids, my cousins' kids, of neighbors' and friends'. My parents, who are not interested in my accomplishments, though they are happy for them, but they just want me to be happy.
Two years later, I broke up with my partner and on the occasion of this news, I also told my parents what I had wanted to tell them for such a long time, that I cannot have children. Actually, I told my mom in a phone conversation. My mom probably had told my dad. I don't know, we haven't discussed about it since. In this conversation I was very clinical. Information and just that. I felt like I was suffocating when those words came out of my mouth. My mom was brave and gentle, but I could feel her holding back her crying, she knew how much I wanted children. I hung up the phone, put my sneakers on and went for a run. I cried for about 10 kilometers.
From this moment on, I started talking about it. I didn't feel better or relieved, but I felt like I was getting close to myself again and that wasn't necessarily easy. People were gentle, how they knew. I was greeted with garlands of regrets. Almost everyone had advice, stories of friends who had gotten pregnant after ten years of trying or simply miracles that defied medicine and especially why I wasn't taking into consideration adoption. "Maybe it's for the better" appeared as an encouragement sign in conversations. We humans know and have opinions, without being bad-intented. The best advice I have received over the years, which was given to me between two cigarette smokes by a lady, was: cry, tears don't stain!
After the breakup and to this day, all the man I was seeing, I was dating, I flirted with, except one, had children. What a catch net. Until this point I knew how to get better.
I had made a "business card" out of my "condition", it was almost how I introduced myself to men. Mind the gap. I wasn't trying to scare anyone, but I taught it was important for them to know when I saw things getting fast one way or another. None ran away because of it. Other causes, other blunders, other mismatches, but not this one. I realized the most important thing was that I didn't run away.
And because the years have passed me by and I'm slowly, slowly approaching 40, because I have a stable relationship, people feel compelled to ask if I want children (and, yes, my partner has a child). I was for a while delicate in my response, but for a while now I've been answering with "I can't have children". People recoil, they feel bad and I hope they never dare to ask that again anyone not close to them.
Depression I sure know I'm cured of, the ache hurts just as much. I didn't live any revelation, I didn't feel reborn, I simply accepted the weight of my baggage and I'm going on my way like this. I no longer think about it on a daily basis, I can even take babies into my arms without the thought of it short-circuiting me. I have adapted to myself. I no longer run away, but I am still running.
