Apron Strings

Mine but never mine

When you didn’t come the first time, I think I knew 

Ashamed for wishing no then yes

Perhaps my fear had made you turn away

I was young, too young, though in my heart I knew

Mine but never mine

The second time and then the third, I knew you weren’t mine

The fourth time broke me in so many ways, snapped a vital chord, I think

The final time you didn’t come, but this time you left me answers

My too young heart had ever been right

Mine but never mine

Sometimes I wonder how you would have been

But, then I think that no, you never have been mine

Later others came and maybe they weren’t mine 

But I have loved them as I would have loved you

Mine but never mine.

---

Recently, I had a conversation where I attempted to clumsily explain my childlessness. Clumsily because it was not in my native tongue, rather a halting mix of my second and third languages. 

Why is it that people always think it’s okay to ask? Do we need to defend our choices to remain childless if that is the case?  Does there have to be a backstory to every familial formation?
Not that the subject should be taboo, for me, it never has been, in fact talking about it has often been a way to clear my head of niggling self-doubts and come to some kind of peace with my lot in life. 

In the early hours of the next morning I awoke with the verses I have shared here, and they seem to sum up the years of yearning for someone who neither existed nor would in any tangible way other than an expectant dream but also of the enormous luck that life has offered me to be part of the lives of others, who, although not my children by birth were and are very much mine in so many other ways.

My first pregnancy, when I was very young, ended just before I was due to abort and a voice inside told me that I would never be a mother. At first, I thought the voice was chastising me for my decision, albeit curtailed by nature's choice. Later, I began to hear the voice as more of an inner compass pointing to my eventual childless destination. 

Years of trying to “get pregnant” followed with fertility treatments that never quite hit the mark and only served to fuel feelings of resentment and eventual loss on two occasions. A longer and more positive feeling pregnancy came, but this one too ended the way of the others, later and leaving more emotional scars than the earlier ones. It most certainly contributed, though was not the only reason, for my marriage ultimately ending. 

Yet this was only one of many chapters, and the pages continued to turn, and a final someone almost came to me in my newly adopted country. This time, and possibly because advances had been made along the way, medical questions were asked, studies were done, and a tangible answer came forward. I have a chromosomal disorder which makes it very difficult, but not (obviously) impossible, for me to “get pregnant”. However, my body will always detect correctly the pregnancy as non-viable and get rid of it by the end of the first trimester or early into the second. 

Although this discovery was not news to my inner voice, now silent but nodding sagely to itself, it did give my conscious thought process somewhere to go that was sad but ultimately empowered by knowing why.

I now know why I also sought out/came upon the children who were in so many ways mine (not mine) over the years.

A boy ‘A’ who I worked with in a center for youngsters with severe and profound learning difficulties. I chose to be his carer outwith my work, at weekends and when he was hospitalised. 
A beautiful soul, so profoundly autistic that we perhaps shared eye-contact and true connection only fleetingly in all the time that I knew him.

My nephew ‘C’ a millennium baby. We bonded immediately. His auntie was the one he went to when he needed comfort as a toddler, and I was the one who could magically, it seemed, hold him in a way that let him drift into sound and deep sleeps almost from birth.

A 4-year-old child with Asperger's Syndrome, ‘G’. For a few years I was his “other mama” and above all helped him find words, sometimes Catalan, sometimes English to express his frustrations and confusion with the neurotypical world he walked through. 

Then a teenager ‘M’ who again bonded surprisingly easily given the fragile emotional age that I arrived in his life. He is now a strapping 20 something who stood up unbidden at my wedding to his father last year and gave me the most heartfelt tribute that any mother (not mother) could wish for.

They have all been mine, although never truly mine, and I will always love them all.

---

I include a link to the song "Apron Strings" by Everything but the Girl, which has been the soundtrack to this part of my life. With thanks to them for so beautifully summing up those feelings that I could not express for so long.   

"For apron strings, can be used for other things
Than what they're meant for and
You'd be happy wrapped in my apron strings"

Childlessness, miscarriage and infant loss are subjects that need to be talked about, and I would be blessed to hear of any other stories from those who have been in similar situations.