When I was young, the only thing I wanted was to be a mother.
I patiently guided my beloved “Baby Wanna Walk” doll Nicola around the house by its tiny plastic hand, cooing encouragingly. I wrote long, elaborately detailed stories about a family of ten children that I secretly pretended were true stories about my own, written for a magazine fascinated by my life. I lugged sacks of potatoes around on my jutted-out hip. When I was around seven or eight I even went through a rather intense stage of pretending to give birth to my teddy bear, Christmas, at night – pulling him slowly out from beneath my nightie, clutching him to my chest, and whispering “hello my darling, hello my sweet baby” against his furry forehead.
With age came the ability to get my hands on real-life children, and I funded my way though high school and university by caring for other people’s babies. I was never happier than when I was cleaning chunks of banana out of the corners of high chair trays or listening to the same terrible knock-knock joke the fifteenth time in an afternoon. However though, suddenly, unexpectedly but undeniably, while the joy I experienced from being around children never left me, my desire to become a parent did. I still stared into every Pumpkin Patch store I walked by, but no longer with the same sense of anticipation and excitement. Instead, I would feel a sad tugging, an unformed nostalgia, a sense of defeated acceptance that at the time I could neither name nor understand.
It wasn’t until I met my wife until I realised why the desire to be a mother had left me, and that was because it came flooding back about three minutes after I fell in love with her. When I was younger, I had only ever imagined mothering as having a child of my own, but as I grew older I learned that this happened in the context of a family – a family that I understood to be made of a mother, a father, and children. The issue, unbeknownst to me, was that I did not want that type of family. I adored the men I was dating – kind, funny, loving men – but I did not want to marry and have children with them. I attributed this subconscious certainty to the fact that I must, then, not want to have a family, but that turned out to be phenomenally untrue. I just didn’t want to make a family with a man.
The irony of trying desperately for years to avoid falling pregnant to men only to find myself desperately wanting to fall pregnant to a woman was not lost on me. Fortunately, my then-girlfriend-now-wife was both a) willing to reproduce with me and b) almost equally as fond of meticulous forward planning using an array of spreadsheets as I am, and so a vision for our future began to take shape. We factored it all in: a trip to Disneyland in 2014, a year of saving in 2015, a wedding in 2016, a trip around Europe in 2017, and a baby the year after that. We planned for the new car we’d need, discussed whether we’d stay in our beloved tiny two-bedroom unit, debated at length over who should get pregnant first, adopted a cat in plenty of time to get him used to human contact, and started reading every parenting blog on the internet (fine, maybe that was just me). We thought, mistakenly, that we would saunter into a fertility clinic a year or so before we planned to get pregnant, register, choose from the huge catalogue of public donors, and use the cheapest possible method of insemination.
Well.
We did go to Disneyland in 2014, and it was every bit as magical as we’d hoped. We bought the car with four doors, and we got married on a glorious afternoon in March 2016. The rest of it, though? Not even all of our spreadsheets and long evenings spent planning could force the rest of it into the shape we’d hoped.
This blog will be the story of our family: like the ones I used to write, but this time it will be real. There will be far fewer children, far harder decisions, far more medical interventions, and far less getting whimsically lost in forests. There will also be more love than my tiny child brain was even capable of comprehending.
(For the purposes of this blog, my name will be Molly and my wife’s will be Linda (if you can guess why, let’s be friends). Even if you know who we are, we’d super appreciate you only sharing/speaking about us using those names.)
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