#Microblog Mondays: Honesty, and Delayed Sadness

One of the reasons why I love working with middle schoolers is that they do not shy away from difficult questions. Most of the time, if they feel comfortable enough to ask a tough question, I like to answer it (appropriately of course), because they genuinely want to know. (Although today a student asked, as a "Health question," when I lost my virginity... after I got over the shock I let them know that I was ABSOLUTELY not going to EVER answer that one, and that was more a question for parents, which was met with "EW! Why would I ask them?" and I answered with "THEN WHY WOULD YOU ASK ME????" Weird, weird, weird.)

So when a 7th grader who has a tendency to be naughty, but also oddly thoughtful, asked me in study hall last Friday if I had kids, and I said no, and he asked why... I figured I'd be honest.

I told him I'd wanted kids real badly, but that it just didn't work out.

He said there was medicine, that his mom had used medicine.

I said we did the medicine, and it didn't really work.

Then he said we could have tried adoption.

I said we did try adoption, two years of adoption, and that didn't work, either. (That blew the kids' minds, they didn't know that could not work out.)

He asked why it didn't work out, and I told him.

We'd done years and years of the medicine way. We had 6 opportunities where we could have been chosen to parent, but weren't, to varying degrees of devastation.

But most of all, we hit a point where we just couldn't do it anymore, where it took too great a toll on our physical and mental health. I said I was real stressed, and it made me sick. It was not a good situation.

There was some arguing about whether or not "sticking with it" is positive in that sense, and I might have brought up the fact that when you're in the emergency room, maybe it's time to reexamine your life and decisions and let it go. That 8 years was quite enough of living for something that didn't happen and felt like it never would.

And then he said,

"Well, I'm sorry. I just thought you'd be a really awesome mom."

And I said,

"Aw, thanks. Me, too. Me too, but life had other plans. It's a real shame."

I congratulated myself on sharing but not oversharing, of giving a dose of a storyline most kids don't get when it comes to family building, and most of all NOT CRYING. Not even a tearing up. I even managed to completely calmly say, "But you know what? I get to take all that mom energy that I would have used on my kids and SPREAD IT OUT TO YOU!!!" and then laughed maniacally.

But then Saturday night it came back to haunt me. The unfairness. The fact that everyone had a story about people who DID make it to the end with a baby, and I seemed to be this anomaly.

And that naughty boy with the core of goodness, who thought I'd make a good mom.

I cried. I couldn't stop. I fell asleep with a wet pillow.

But, I woke up and felt the gratitude for all that I do have, for the energy I have for my challenging students because I get most of my nurturing in at school and can come home and sink into my lovely home, my wonderful husband, and my cozy cats. It didn't linger, but in that moment of delayed sadness, the grief just seeped out like a spring.

Being grateful for what you do have doesn't mean these moments of grief won't remind you of what you lost. But I am also grateful that the farther I get from the rawness of it, the faster I bounce back.

Want to read more #Microblog Mondays? Go here and enjoy!