Spread the love
Print Friendly, PDF & Email

From Mary Matlin’s book

I found these comments very touching.

I surrounded myself with a circle of friends equally uninterested in procreating. In my last and deepest campaign immersion, plastered prominently behind by desk was the poster that read, “Oops, I Forgot to Have Kids,” like I cared, which I didn’t. The only nag of concern, and it was recessed very deeply in the back of my mind, came when Barbara Bush addressed the Wellesley grads in 1990. I was thirty-seven years old and had reached my all-time professional political apex as the Bush/Quayle deputy campaign manager. Really, it was more than professional: I was blindly passionate about politics in general, George Herbert Walker Bush, specifically. I was completely fulfilled.

Nonetheless, Mrs. Bush broke into my frenetic, totally self-absorbed, purposeful psyche when she told these young women that “at the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict, or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a friend, a child, or a parent.” In the haze of time, I’ve come to call this precise moment my awakening. But in real life, real time, few moments are precise, and awakenings are more like gently stirring currents than jolting lightning bolts.

Maybe Mrs. Bush’s speech focused me because it came from the most fulfilled, satisfied, complete woman I had ever known. With all she had done, seen, and produced, she ranked her family first. I found this disconcerting, disquieting because making a family was not even on my radar screen. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that anything could be better than what I was doing. She made me stop and think that there might be some merit to settling down for some people — but not me.

*******

Don’t ever discount miscarriages as insignificant, passing events. I was stunned at the insensitivity of the many who, in one way or another, expressed a dismissive and obligatory sympathy, as if I’d passed a kidney stone! As if the teeny tiny pulsing heart inside me had never beaten. Only other parents who miscarried had an inkling of our painful reality.

As your pregnancies will reveal to you, (1) you know almost instantly that your body is not alone, and (2) your love for that bud, that speck is primal, protective, pervasive, and possessive. When that all-encompassing obsession with another being — baby — is suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably ended with no being, no baby, well, girls, suffice to say, it is not a nonevent. Pregnancy, new life, is poignant from the first precious second. Even a joyful birth doesn’t erase the pain of an earlier miscarriage.

Please feel free to leave a comment under the posting, or sign my Spiritbook (guestbook) and chat on the tag board at the bottom of the page.

(Visited 2 times, 1 visits today)