Meeting reality

A month ago I took a break to the desert and met there a couple of friends in their early thirties who were both mothers.

The married mother had a three year old. The single mother had two children, a six month and four year old. She wasn't single by choice, but she was very happy being single.

I told them I was trying for a baby, in my own.

And they were like everyone I meet and tell (though less so the non- parent friends in their thirties) - very supportive.

But the conversation took a turn and the single mother said to me- check carefully your motives.

I asked her what she meant.

She meant that a child cannot make you happy. I think I told her that I felt unfulfiled. She said be careful.

Then the other mother, the married one, said, basically that she wished she hadn't had her child.

She didn't say it directly. But it was fairly direct.

She said "not everyone who has a child doesn't regret it." And me being me, I said something like "but look at your, it's so clear you love your child, you understand, I just don't understand how people can...".

And then I saw her exoression expression, her head was to one side and she was smiling and her lips were tight, so I knew she was not going to talk anymore.

All I have is a deep deep longing to cradle my own baby in my arms.

To look with wonder at my child. I look with love and wonder at all children. I want my own. I want to smell that child smell in the morning and watch them sleep.

In my mind it's a them because I always wanted five children. As the years went by I reluctantly dropped a child every year. At this age, medicine tells me I will be very lucky if I have one. I know I'll have at least one. Probably more.

Of course, I always thought I'd have a man. Not just a man. A family. A solid structure, like the kind I always clung to when I found evidence of it in the families of my friends growing up. Something about predictability, home cooked food served up by mother, eiderdown and unfamiliar toys to acquanit myself with, and family photos of a different world.

But these images of four walls, of smells and books and toys and adventures, this secure basis, was never something I managed to create for myself.

I don't yet know aged 44, how to look after myself, and that's the sad truth.

There's no one looking after me, and that includes me. my eating, grocery shopping, exercise, social life, everything, it's irregular and erratic.

For 44 years I have never had a place for everything and everything in it's place. Roughly translated emotionally, on some level, what this means is that everything is not well. Something is always not okay. Everything is always in motion. There's never peace.

Hence my forage into doing the stuff I fear.

I don't want to bring my child into this.

I know I'm repeating in my adult life the chaotic and stressful environment I had as a child. I know that my mind overcomplicates things in order to perpetuate it agitation and avoid feeling peace and satisfaction.

I know it's all in the mind and that the physical is a manifestation of that mind.

I cannot go to battle with my mind, but I know that when I begin to make order in my physical space, I begin to relax a little.