I am deeply moved and humbled by your writing. Don't stop.
I 100% very deeply regret having my 4 children. Before passing judgment, please let me explain.
I am an introverted, hard-working person. My mother named me Angel at birth, which set me up for a lifetime of living up to trying to be the perfect kid.
Sadly, as hard as I was on myself, everyone else was even harder on me.
It seemed like everyone was always disgruntled that I was ‘different’. I had sensory problems and hearing damage called misophonia because I suffered a skull fracture at 6 months old.
I had to try to find quiet time for myself whenever and wherever I could steal it to deal with my hearing sensitivity, otherwise I would suffer migraines and stress.
All the extroverts around me were perpetually unhappy that I couldn't give them 100% of my time and attention. I was constantly beat up emotionally by the adults around me for not having the energy, and for taking time out for art and nature to keep myself balanced.
Over decades, this dissatisfaction they had toward my style of living led everyone to start calling me crazy, bipolar, etc. Crazy for wanting to go fishing, read a book, paint a picture. Crazy for taking extra time in the shower or restroom to meditate, crazy for taking walks, and so on. Surely, I must have a mental issue, wanting to spend time in my own company.
In fact, several people I was around physically demolished my gallery-quality artwork to show me how they felt about my ‘quiet’ nature and activities. I was so devastated at their behavior that I permanently quit doing art at 18 after a gallery approached me to put my work on display.
It didn't matter that I tried to convince every psychiatrist from here to Timbuktu that I had some undiagnosed mental disorder that certainly they could fix with some magic pill. Certainly, I convinced myself, a pill would make me tolerable to everyone else.
I wanted nothing more than to be a mom for most of my life. I was told I would never have children, and I almost died several times trying to have children.
Finally, I had 4 children in a 20-year span of time. I was tickled pink. They were quirky, ADHD and autistic, and I loved the daylights out of them. I loved everything there was to love about being a mom.
Just like my family had, my extroverted husband and in-laws hated my personality.
Hated how I raised and mentored and guided the kids. Hated how I let them do art and make messes. Hated how I let them disassemble and reassemble things to figure out how the world worked. Hated that I pushed them to go new places and try new foods.
Most of all, they hated that I needed a break here and there. They hated that I asked for someone to watch the kids for 5 minutes so I could take my extra long shower after we did yard work and remodeling all day.
They called me a “bad mom” and a “bad wife” because I asked for a few breaks here and there. They convinced a few people that my requests for quiet time or alone time were somehow unreasonable. That grandma could do so much better; she was the vision of perfection that everyone else had to live up to.
I already failed her test because I didn't dust my mantle the day she visited for her white glove inspection. I was too busy ‘playing with my kids’, they said, to be a proper housewife to my husband.
All the people who claimed to be so much better at parenting than I convinced the courts I had ‘bipolar’. I even committed myself several times after that and tried to get meds for my ‘bipolar-ness’ to try to show people that my hearing sensitivity wouldnt cause any more problems.
Even me memorizing and spouting off all the symptoms to try to convince people that I had bipolar hadn't worked, the experts looked at me and said “you're just sad. You lost 4 children. I don't have a magic pill to make you feel any better about it.”
It took 5 child-less years and 30+ experts before I finally conned one into giving me psych meds, but the meds didn't make me feel any better about losing my home and my children.
I was too ashamed to look at any of them anymore. I have lived in my car for 5 years. I left everything behind. I never went back
A year after he took custody of our kids and moved them all in with his mother, my ex sent me an email stating that he took my kids to teach me a lesson for ‘nagging’ him. I guess he couldn't resist the urge to twist the knife in my back again about asking him to watch them so I could take a shower.
I guess grandma is still supermom, and I'm still the dog turd that I always was.
I nagged him, 1 time, to relieve me so I could take a break and a shower. Just like everything else in my life, the very moment I tried to take care of myself instead of someone else, I was somehow no longer deserving of being treated like a human being.
I saved the lives of 3 drowning kids. I CPR'd my infant back to life when he nearly died from meningitis he caught from another family member. I did a million other humanitarian things throughout, including helping someone with a stalled car this morning.
But no matter what I do, it's not enough. It's never been enough. It will never be enough.
I'm an introvert with a hearing sensitivity, and that makes me unworthy of being mother to my own children.
My mother committed suicide last year because she didn't feel good enough either. Everyone in our miserable town convinced her she was a terrible mother, too. Surely, she's a terrible mother to have had a terrible daughter with sensitive hearing, right? To have had a daughter who lost all her kids because she asked for help 1 time in 20 years of being a mother.
If I wouldn't have given birth to my children, I wouldn't have suffered any of this. Perhaps, my art work and authored books would have made me a pretty penny by now. I wouldn't have wasted 20 years of talent because wxtroverts told me I shouldn't waste my time writing or doing the art that I loved.
I certainly wouldn't have suffered being embarrassed about being a ‘terrible’ mother to the degree that I won't ever be able to live down the title and the stigma everyone has placed on me.
It's clear to me from my struggles in getting pregnant to my struggles in losing contact with my babies that I was never meant to be a mother at all.
I regret having my children, not because of them, but because a mother is expected to be perfect, and any other definition is considered a failure.
We, as humans, even take babies away from animals when we think we know better. I'm not sure why I ever imagined that same thing wouldn't happen to me, just for being a little ‘different’.
I hope my children don't have children. Since they are also a little ‘different’, and our society likes to separate ‘different’ children from ‘different’ parents to give them to ‘normal’ couples to try to make everyone ‘normal’.
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