Well folks, we did it. X & I got hitched on Halloween in a wonderful ceremony officiated by three of our best friends. We were surrounded by people we love dressed in a multitude of Awesome costumes. We had SO MUCH FUN! It was the perfect wedding IMHO.
Three days into our married Life together, the inevitable happened. I made a comment on Twitter about not feeling well and before I knew it we were balls deep in ribbing & teasing about being pregnant. On any normal day I could have taken that in stride, but that was not a normal day. At that point, I had been feeling queasy, head-achey, irritable, and emotionally raw for about a week. Hormonal, maybe. Emotional backlash from getting married a third time, potentially. Who knows for sure, but the ribbing continued and by 6:30 in the evening I’d had enough and had a bit of a breakdown. So I did what any unstable Woman would have done in my shoes, I went upstairs and took a shower.
While showering I pondered what it was about the playful teasing from the people closest to me that set me off. I realized that for the better part of the last 9 years of my Life I have spent a lot of time and energy on wanting another baby. Sometimes very desperately, so that I became depressed over it off and on for years. I know that my first husband would have given me another baby, had I stayed with him. I know that my second husband would have never agreed to it. He never wanted kids. In the beginning of my relationship with J & K, K promised me a baby. “You are going to have my son.” he said, and OH MY GODS my heart ached in my chest at the words. I clung to that promise like a life raft through the uncertainty, fear and heartache the three of us went through together trying to make that relationship work. But J wanted another baby. More desperately than I did it seemed some times… at least she was more vocal about it. Part of me has always believed she needed it to prove that she could. Part of me believes it was her way of establishing something with K that I would never have, whether it was a conscious effort or not will never be known. Regardless of the motivation behind it, we supported her and worked towards making it happen, and it did. She had his son. She bore the baby that was supposed to have been mine. But I helped in the conception and gave him a name, I took care of him, fed him, bathed him, changed his diapers, played with him, LOVED HIM LIKE MY OWN… and now, I am not allowed to see him. I haven’t seen him, nor his sister, since February. And often my heart aches with missing them.
When I told K & J that I had fallen in Love with X and was leaving, K desperately and passionately tried to convince me to stay. It was so hard… it was heartbreaking on so many levels… much of our conversations happened in the middle of the night when he would wake me, unable to sleep in his distress, and try to nail down the issues, try to fix things, try to repair the irreparable… much of our conversations I have lost and cannot remember. But I do remember a couple of things he said to me, probably because they made such a profound impact on me and my understanding of how it was definitely time for me to leave that relationship.
“We knew this was going to happen,” he said, “We’ve been expecting it.” He explained that he and J had been wanting to Handfast to me but were “waiting for this to happen”. He thought of me as his Wife, he told me. If I had only waited a little bit longer, he explained. If I had only waited? What?! So, let me get this straight… you’ve been expecting me to cheat and fall for someone else for the LAST FIVE YEARS and it was only AFTER I passed that test that you were going to make that commitment to me?! It was only AFTER I passed that test that you were going to tell me how you felt?! Only then would I be deserving of the title?! How backwards is it that you are going to wait until something threatens the relationship to tell someone you want to be with them for the rest of your Life?!
At some point after that conversation, I was sitting alone of the front porch, smoking & thinking. He came out to join me and, as was his habit, tried to nail me down to talk about what was on my mind. So I told him. I had been sitting there thinking about how badly I wanted another baby and was struggling with coming to terms with the fact that I wasn’t going to have one. He apparently didn’t believe me because all hell broke loose after that, none of which is pertinent to this particular story…
Expectation rules Perception.
They spent our entire relationship expecting me to stray. I went into that relationship expecting the home & family I’d always wanted. At least one of us got what we expected…
X expects the best of me. He expects me to choose him, every day. I expect the same from him and we expect to spend the rest of our Lives together. I also came into this relationship expecting I would never have another baby.
X had a vasectomy shortly after B was born. 12 years ago. When our friends were teasing us about being pregnant they educated us on a little thing called recanalization. Apparently, some men’s little swimmers have overcome the seemingly impossible and found a way back to the urethra, in spite of the vasectomy.
So, suddenly I was smacked in the face with a real, however remote, chance that I could, in fact, be pregnant. Given the fact that X & I are intimate when ever and where ever possible AND given the fact that our sex has been a large part of our Spiritual & magickal workings for the last 9 months, it wouldn’t surprise me one damn bit if it happened to him.
Well, fuck-a-doodle-doo, hail Eris.
The emotional whip-lash of that realization is what caused my anger at our friends. As misdirected as it was. We Cancers, sometimes it takes a while for things to filter down and come to full understanding.
So, X & I talked about it. I really don’t want to actively pursue getting pregnant. That’s a whole mess of Crazy that I just don’t want to delve into. He could have a surgery to try to reverse the vasectomy, but there’s no guarantee that it will work. I don’t want to be artificially inseminated with someone else’s sperm. And neither of us are really keen on the idea of inviting one of our male friends to do the deed. So, we are left with the remote possibility that somehow one of his little guys makes it through and manages to find one of my little gals and by a near miraculous act 9 months later little Ripley is born.
After three long term relationships, years of on-again off-again bc, and many nights of using the thrills and spills method producing nothing, I’m ok with letting the Fates decide this one.