Do you ever miss people you don't know? I have been lately. I miss the children I haven't had yet. When I first started working as a childcare provider, it was a way of channeling my mothering instincts to a venue that helped others as well as being a source of income for myself. It helped me not focus so much on being single and not having children of my own. Over the past year or so, though, my desire for my own children has stepped up a few notches, and it's starting to hurt.
I work about 45 hours a week, caring for as many as 9 children in four families between the ages of 1-7. I love these kids a heckuva lot. Both of my respite clients show me so, so much love. They greet me so enthusiastically when I come to their houses, give me heartwarming hugs throughout the time I'm there, and ask me not to leave when my shift is over. The almost 7 year-old clings onto my hand and asks concernedly "What are you doing?...No, Eve, No, I want you to stay" repeatedly when she sees me gathering my things and wrapping up business with her mother. The almost 3 year-old I watch three days a week cries and says "Hold you, Eva" when I start to leave at the end of the day. It touches and hurts my heart at the same time. I hate to leave the babies whom I love and care for in their parents' absence. I'm impressed at the easiness with which they love me, and the excitement they display when I come to their houses. The 7 year-old boy who tells me the schemes he's concocted to 'get' me 'fired' at least once a week, also tells me that he doesn't want me to ever stop coming over, and that he loves me, at least once a week.
The mothers I work for are 1-6 years older than me. I have pangs of jealousy at their opportunity to raise and love their own children full time. What is in store for me down the road? Will I be able to bear my own children? Will I be able to adopt? Will I have one, or two, or five? Will I have as much patience with my own as I do with these women's children? Will I have a husband who sticks around, who loves and plays with our babies the way I've seen fathers of these kids do? Is this experience of being a fill-in when these children's moms aren't available, and my role as an oldest sister to 7 siblings, the fulfilment my mission as a mother?
I don't think I could work for a mother who is younger than myself. I think it's hard enough seeing women in their late 20s with kids in 1st grade. I can't spend too much time looking at facebook photos or reading the blogs of my friends who have children. It starts to put me in a funk and I have to stop before I get too frustrated with my situation.
We hear a lot these days about the pain of infertility, of couples trying for years to get pregnant and being unsuccessful. There's a grieving process to it, and this is starting to become accepted and acknowledged by society. We don't hear much about involuntarily childless adults as a result of being single, of being infertile because there's no one around to fertilize one's eggs, so to speak. Of feeling like an outsider in a group of women because you're the only one who doesn't have your own children running around the playground. Of loving someone else's children so much that you miss seeing them over a three-day weekend. Of carrying diapers in your purse and extra stuffed animals in your car, and feeling like a poser when you come across them out of the childcare context.
For me now, at 28, it's not so much about whether I'll get married (I have a good bit of faith that that will happen at some point), but it's more of a question of when and whether I will have a child/children of my own to nurture and raise, and if I will have the opportunity to experience all the aspects of motherhood, from pregnancy to sleepless nights, to watching my little one grow into an adult and having children of their own.
What these arms and heart want is to love and care for someone(s) who I won't have to say goodbye to every afternoon or evening. Is that too much to ask?
12 years ago
