My younger son sat burbling happily in his Exersaucer – the same one I’d spent weeks upon weeks carefully selecting as he rolled this way and that inside me. I’d spent months researching each baby item I bought with the same feverish intensity I’d once brought to my overachieving scholastic career. While it might sound extreme, I’d never felt more blissful in my life.
It wasn’t always like this.
Only a few short years before that bliss, I was a single, twenty-year old due to give birth to my first son, while everyone around me worried and gnashed their teeth, removing any bit of joy I might have been feeling. I relied on the kindness of strangers, all thrusting baby accessories at me as they clucked at my growing belly, the pity evident in their eyes. I wasn’t sorry about having my son. How could I be sorry? The “I’m pregnant,” statement followed by “I’m sorry,” both confused and saddened the hell out of me.
After my baby shower, my then-boyfriend and father of the child, suggested we take back the few things we got for our new baby. We should take it back and buy diapers and formula, he reasoned, instead of the crap people had lovingly bought for us. I simply looked out the window – I couldn’t believe this was my life.
Soon enough, though, I realized that I’d rather be a single mother than have my oddly quiet, young son’s luminous eyes follow me back and forth as his father treated me badly. No child should have to watch that, and I knew in my heart that I deserved better. Being single was a hell of a lot easier than having to bow to the alter of my wrongness every time I opened my mouth.
When my son was two and officially diagnosed as autistic, I met the man I would marry. He couldn’t have been more different than my son’s father – totally involved and sweet and kind and he loved my beautiful boy with the luminous eyes who watched someone treat his mother with respect, love and honor.
One day, my now-husband asked my sweet child for my hand in marriage. My son replied with a happy, “Okay!” About a year or so after our wedding, I found myself pregnant again. Only this time, everything was different. I was only a couple of years older than when I first got pregnant, but this time, people smiled at my growing belly, touching it and wishing the baby and I well. Nobody said, “I’m sorry.”
While my ex and my mother fought over me even as I labored with my first child, the first grandson, and the boy who would forever alter the course of my life, this time around was all quiet and calm as my husband and I waited for two to become three. When I gave birth, there were no remarks from the doctors, shocked that I loved my baby. No nurses looked at me as though I was quite possibly the world’s stupidest person when I begged for help changing a diaper for the very first time.
It couldn’t have been more different the second time around. I was respected as a mother and my abilities went unchallenged. My second son came home to a house I owned, a room I’d painstakingly furnished and a family that couldn’t have been happier to have him. The very same way I felt about his cherished older brother.
There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t remember how lucky I am – and how far I’ve come.
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