Goodnight My Angels.........

When I was maybe fifteen years old or so, I imagined what my life would be like when I was 35. Twenty years after my 'tortured' teenage life, what would I have become? What would I have done with my life?

I am a child of the 70's and the 80's. A time when women were coming into their own and finding their voice, demanding equal rights, equal pay and burning their bras. My mother embraced the women's liberation movement. She straddled the line between traditional responsibilities and working her ass off to break through the male dominated bureaucratic nonsense. She taught my sister and I that we could be whatever we wanted to be. I had big ideas and big dreams. Professional musician, bohemian poet, music therapist, business woman....... all were exactly what I wanted to be at one point or another in my high school years. There were a few things that always remained a constant in every metamorphosis I imagined: marriage and children. No matter what my career 'du jour' was,
I always saw myself married with at least two children. I saw myself 'having it all'.

Things didn't quite work out like I thought they would.
Oh, I have been married, but unfortunately I never had children. As much as that was something my heart longed for, my gut instinct would slap me with a reality check. The timing was never right.
So I moved through life, placing the desire to be a mother on the back burner, waiting for the time to be right.
The partner to be right.
Everything to be right.

But that never happened.

Five years ago, the possibility of the time ever being right was taken away from me.
By ovarian and uterine cancer.
Honestly, having a child was not on my radar preceding my diagnosis. The cancer was a complete surprise, it came out of left field. My only focus was to survive. So when I was told that my surgery would involve a radical hysterectomy and bilateral oophorectomy, I didn't disagree.
I didn't question it at all. My reproductive organs were trying to kill me, and I just wanted to live.
So they took it. They took it all.
And in the months following my surgery I only thought about recovery, dealing with chemo and working at the same time. There was a painful breakup, total loss of hair, chemo brain, surgically induced menopause and anxiety attacks. Some days every moment was a monumental effort to move forward.

I'm not sure exactly when the grief surfaced, but eventually it did. I was so grateful to be alive, but my sacrifice was the ability to create life. The desire was still in my heart, and I mourned the fact that the possibility no longer existed. Even now, as ridiculous as the thought of me having a child at 49 years old is, it still makes me sad that I never will.

Mother's Day has become a strange juxtaposition of profound gratitude and love for my own mother, and a shadow of sorrow for the fact that I will not know that for myself.
But as crazy as this may sound, I believe in some way I will know my children someday.
The spirit of who they might have been lives in my heart. They'll always be a part of me.

Goodnight my angels.

'Goodnight my angel, now it's time to dream
And dream how wonderful your life will be
Someday your child may cry, and if you sing this lullaby
Then in your heart there will always be a part of me
Someday we'll all be gone
But lullabies go on and on
They never die
That's how you and I will be'

~ Billy Joel