Sunday Confessionals : Open

Oloriel is our host and this week would like to invite us to open up, about something, or to speak candidly about a yearning we have of long ago.

For years as I was growing up I wanted to have a large family.
I got married at 21 and thought my dreams were beginning to come true when the chemist told me a pregnancy test was positive.  We were over the moon but sadly it didn’t last as indeed the pregnancy test may have been positive, but it hadn’t been mine.
I was gutted, and husband disappointed, but this wasn’t the reason our marriage fell apart and we separated just after our third anniversary and got our final divorce papers the month before our fourth.

The live in relationship had potential, but nothing happened for me there either, though I had a couple of hopes dashed and following some heavy lifting in the garden,  had a heavier period than usual. As things turned out, it was just as well as I left in 1989.

Apparently my family had believed I didn’t want children. If only they knew the anguish and disappointments over the years, and the fact that I had resigned myself not to be a natural mother when I was around 28. That was one of the reasons I went into foster care, though not babies or young infants, but teenagers as they seemed to be the ones more needy of stability and security, even if only for a short time. I understand I am a grandmother by default as all of my foster girls now have children, but I lost touch with them and hope they remember me kindly and with fondness.

My Dad died in 1996, the day after my 40th birthday, and some months later I had terrible pain in my stomach and my period when it came was black and thick. I went to see the doctor who advised a pregnancy test, which proved positive so I was immediately referred for a scan to find out what was going on. Sadly, at five weeks, I lost the baby I didn’t know I was carrying and that is the nearest I got to natural motherhood.

According to the experts I saw in the 1990s, my family is ‘dysfunctional’ but I could have told them that for free.  Now at 66, I have nieces and nephews with their own offspring, most of which I have never met and probably don’t know of my existence. I am a great great aunty, and when my mother was alive, we covered five living generations.
We are scattered all over the place, not close in more than distance, and so my ‘babies’ in latter life have all had four legs, a waggy bit and fur.

Photos: Above left to right, Barney, Kizzy and Maggie, below Maya

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