Dreaming of baby
At age 50, I have finally recognized (a little late in the game, you might well say) that I won't have any more children. But it took me an astonishingly long time to make my peace with that idea. I always wanted one more baby. A person might ask why, knowing I've given birth to three children and that raising them -- as rewarding and wonderful as it was -- took most of my energy for a stretch of 20 years or so. Still, when my marriage ended 15 years ago, leaving me, at age 36, a single mother with five- and seven-year-old sons and an 11-year-old daughter, I continued to hold out a certain wild optimism that I might not only form another marriage one day, but that if I did, I might actually find myself becoming a parent again, one last time.
Maybe it was the knowledge that I had missed sharing my children with their father in the context of a loving partnership that left me feeling that desire. Maybe it was nothing more complicated than my lifelong love of babies, toddlers and virtually every other age of child on up to and, amazingly, including teenagers. Whatever the reason, for a full decade after the end of my marriage when I'd meet some interesting prospective partner and sometimes get into a relationship with him, I'd find myself imagining if this was a person with whom I could picture myself raising a child.
Loving every stage
I never did. Or at least, it never happened. And so, sometime in my mid-40s, ridiculously late for such things, I accepted the fact that my child-raising days were coming to a close and that the number of offspring on my list was going to hold at three. I grieved this more than a little -- the end of family meals and late-night talks at the kitchen table, the casual, unexpected connections you make with a child when the two of you share the same roof and he's on the way out the door to his game and you're on the way in with the groceries. So different from the holiday visits now that they've moved out and come home for only a few days at a time. Looking back on my years of parenting and the long hours of watching soccer games and sorting Lego pieces, driving carpools and untangling hair, I am filled with a sense of wistfulness and nostalgia. I know people grumble about diapers, the terrible twos and especially the teenage years, but I'd have to say I loved every single stage my children passed through on their way to becoming adults -- even the challenging ones -- and mourned the moment when I would no longer get to live with them.
But I also knew how lucky I was to have gotten to be a mother, three times over, to the great children I'd had. And so, as the last one entered his senior year in high school, I began embracing the new and exciting prospect of finding myself, for the first time since age 23, free of the responsibilities of daily, on-site parenting.
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