Every Mother's Day has
been bad for me since my little girl was about 5 years old. That was the year I
made some poor choices and got very sick and had an abortion right around
Mother's Day. I wrote about it on my bluejacky
blog several years ago
before bluejacky morphed into my hard hitting silly survey site. It was the 20th
anniversary of that abortion and suddenly hit me hard. My little girl was 25
when I wrote it. Mother's Day
Last year about a month before
Mother's Day, I went through a severe hormone crash, and doubly so. My body
started going all wonky, so my gynecologist pulled me off birth control pills,
which was enough of a crash, but that in turn threw my thyroid hormone way outa
whack because supplementing with estrogen for years can cause a requirement for
extra thryoid hormone uptake. So when I stopped the birth control, I zoomed into
hyperthyroidism, with full blown anxiety attacks and insanely high blood
pressure. My endocrinologist had to crash me down to a much lower dose. The
next 8 weeks were a nightmare, and all the jokes and stories you hear about
menopause making women crazy suddenly became bizarrely real for me. The world
bubbled out into multiple floaty realities, and I could never be sure which one
I was in, although I was in all of them and it was all real and I did just fine
with it, according to my psychologist. As my body figured itself out and
readjusted to its own new default hormone levels, my mind coalesced back into
'me', and everything seems to be fine now.
During that weird couple of months
I slid back into my past and exploded with abrupt honesty. That Mother's Day
post I wrote in 2008 left out some glaring details, one of them being that I was
'escorted' to that clinic by two men in a car that wasn't mine. Even though they
weren't cruel to me, the pressure was immense, and my psychologist very simply
calls this a forced abortion. Read the other post if you feel inclined to argue
with me- they literally stood guard at the clinic door, and I was restrained
during the procedure. Since I was already trying to justify it away in my head,
I didn't realize how much like a rape that would affect me, and I never got over
the death of that child. My psychologist says this is a pretty common thing when
women go through menopause, they go back through all the emotions they stifled
from earlier losses. It's so common to keep women on some kind of hormone
replacement or antidepressants through menopause nowadays that I didn't have
anyone I could talk to about it, having to wing it without meds for other
reasons.
This year my little girl is 30, and
she popped my first grandchild out the day before Mother's Day. My nerves have
been pretty shot. I'm at the age now where I'm experiencing the deaths of loved
ones more and more, and having already lost a niece and my own mother in the
last decade took a pretty big chunk out of my soul. I didn't want to tell anyone
how nervous I was about the possibility of things going wrong during this birth,
so I sucked it up and bit my tongue, because it's so much more important to be
positive for the new mommy. The relief afterward has been overwhelming. I spent
another Mother's Day crying.
I watched the world blab out happy
mother's day greetings on twitter and facebook and other places, and didn't
really say much. I know there are a lot of very sad women out there who have a
very hard time getting through Mother's Day. My own mother's birthday is a month
after Mother's Day, so this time of year feels weird since she died a little
over 3 years ago. My sister has been going through it without her oldest
daughter for nearly 10 years. And every year all I can think about is the kid I
never had, and how old and smart and handsome he'd be now. I know it's so very
sweet that my daughter had a little baby right on top of Mother's Day, and you'd
think that would make it all better for me. But it's weird. She had to leave her
baby at the hospital when she came home (nothing terribly serious) and spent her
night crying. And I know that's a horrible feeling and felt so sad for her, and
I cried too. We know it's going to be ok, but it's still hard.
Mother's Day is over for another
year, but we still need hugs. All of us. You, too. And you don't have to
technically qualify as a mother to deserve a hug.
