Work has finally settled into "a case is a case" routine. I'm finding the dullness comforting and reassuring. I want to keep it that way.
S at work is seven months pregnant, and let me feel her babe move. I've never felt this before, and I was touched that she allowed me this intrusion. Very faint movement, but distinct, and interesting. Not deeply moving, the way seeing a birth or death is, but very interesting to me, as a woman who has never wanted children, and has never been pregnant. Probably. Had a few scares at bad times, but nothing took. Perhaps that tubal infection when I was 19 meant I never really had the option. I used to be very curious about the process, but my innate ability to see the next few steps, the end results of my actions, lead me to realize I would not be able to be a decent mother. Especially not to a very young child. Especially not when I was young enough to give birth. I never wanted children, knowing my baggage. Knowing I had no touch with children, as was pointed out to me during my peds rotation during nursing school. (Very kind preceptor, who assured me I'd done well, but was an adult nurse, and I took her assessment seriously, and in good part.)
I know enough to be gentle with the pregnant. Nurse enough to know what is going on physiologically. And that was the end of that speculation, nursing school. The complications quashed any remaining ideas of giving it a go. Women still die in childbirth, or suffer lifelong damage from it. Knowing my low level of health, given that I have no serious issues, I figured a pregnancy would elicit a real injury, at least. Seeing my dearest friend suffer both during, and long after, directly because of gestational damage, convinced me I was probably correct. I'm not one of those women who could pop 'em out with hardly a break or whimper. Even if I hadn't been sterile. I was careless enough at times, this does seem likely, though I will never really know.
Occasionally, I take care of children at work. Always stressful, as they have collapsable airways, and are fragile creatures, with parents behind them worrying. I take this job seriously. But even without all that, they frighten me, little aliens, that I feel deeply protective of, and strange with. I didn't understand other children when I was myself a child. I suspect I was a pretty strange child myself. I get help, I do what I can, I try to be reassuring, knowing I'm not very good at it.
Very glad of the assistance from the good mums among our nurses and techs, who help the children that come through, as I make sure the scrub is taken care of, the charting done, the room warm, the Bair Hugger warmer on. I don't have motherly instincts. They have transformed, in me, to nursing instincts. I have a touch for position, for reassuring competence, for taking care and touching. For putting warm blankets on feet for most men, and shoulders for most women, and listening for variation. A flawed gift, that I strive to use for good, not evil.
7 comments:
It is always reassuring to read posts like these to know that someone out there puts thought into the care they gave in a position such as yours.
I suspect you probably wouldn't have been as bad a mother as you say, but that's idle speculation - I wouldn't rubbish your convictions.
I feel less need now to explain or defend not having kids, to other people or myself. It didn't happen for a variety of reasons, it could have done, but it didn't, and in the end I didn't need it to. I think I would have been OK as a mother, no better or worse than many probably. I waited for a while for the big regret to kick in, and that didn't happen either. I enjoy being with other people's kids, sometimes anyway, it doesn't make me feel sad or regretful or bitter. At the same time I'm usually quite glad when they go home!
Occasionally I wonder what it would have been like, most often I'm pretty relieved, not least because the couple of times I've been closest to it would have meant being shackled to people and times in my life that I am well relieved to be free of - the bond that others talk so dewily about having with the parents of their children fills me with horror in these instances.
I know that having children is an experience like no other, that doesn't mean I've an entitlement to it, or indeed that anyone has. I'm inclined to think that much of what people express as being a visceral need for childbearing and -rearing is cultural; I think it might be easier not to have children in many European countries than it is in the US. I firmly hold that having them is neither a right nor a duty. Also that it's a mistake to think you can control too much, have life to order according to your perceived needs and wishes, especially when that involves other, dependent lives.
And indeed, your studied and treasured competence in looking after people is frankly, to me, more of an achievement than something which biology does without much effort.
one can never tell.
My daughter felt the same as you, but the idea grew on her after nine years with her man.
Now she is a good mum to twins... Nature's Revenge?!! (or just my family stuffed full of 'em!)
Other friends are marvellous "Aunts" and get more respect from their young visitors !
As you know, I feel that human beings have disastrously over-run this planet, and I feel a bit guilty about having had two kids myself: it was an indulgence. I can't imagine thinking of it as a duty, with things as they are.
I bet you would have been a good parent, if it had happened, but -- my God, so many different lives we could have had, and who can see even as far as the first bend in the might-have-been road? I'm a little weirded out, truthfully, by people who are all regretful about not having had kids, or not having married -- as if they could reliably predict what would have happened if they had!
I sure as hell wouldn't want to go through pregnancy myself, but Ridley Scott nicely illustrated a typical male viewpoint on the subject with Alien.
P,
Not just men.
catching up on my reading here, after a long(ish) time away.
i, too, have absolutely no desire, nor do i recall ever having had it - i mean the real, visceral thing. the only time i "wanted" children was, i am convinced, inspired by particularly saccharine laundry detergent commercials which have precious little to do with reality.
people tell me i would have been a good mother, but i know i would have been an anal, obsessive, over-protective one with brief flashes of fun in a sea of fear.
i always think that parenthood is a heartbreak waiting to happen. from what i hear, parents always love love love their children, but children are designed to eventually go away and relegate their parents to secondary status, which has got to hurt, no matter how open minded you try to be.
so there.
Post a Comment