Motherhood Ache.

I am frustrated. I am frustrated, I am sad, and I am impatient. Now, I am able to blame this frustrated, sad, and impatient outlook on the fact that I'm a day away from my period, but only a portion of it. The rest is just... well, I am. So there. And when you read the rest of this, you're probably going to call me selfish, you're probably going to tell me I'm too young. You'll think I'm a silly little girl, perhaps, and undeserving of such an honor.

So here I go. Judge as you see fit.
Every day, I go to the PX and the Commissary, and I see lots of people. I see lots of women... and these women have children. They have babies, they have big bellies. Most of them have a child, a toddler, and a big belly. I hate admitting it, but oh, I am jealous. I see these sweet little ones, or the not so sweet little ones, and 9 times out of 10, my eyes fill up and I have to look away because it breaks my heart. I want to reach out and hold one of them, and just pretend for a little tiny second that this little boy, or that little girl, is actually MY baby. There are days when after seeing pregnant woman upon pregnant woman that I go home and stare at my flat tummy in the mirror and wonder, what if? What if there was a little person in there? What would it be like? How would I feel? Would he or she know me? What would Andrew say, how would he react? How angry would he be with me if we were unexpectedly expecting?

There are days when I don't think about it at all. Those are the days when I am too busy cleaning, playing with the bird, or running errands elsewhere to think about having a baby, when I'm not inundated with images of little tiny life and I can't consider how much it's missing from my own. Those days are few and far between. If you talk to him, Andrew would tell you that I'm always pointing out the antics of children, of that little boy in front of us in line at the Comm. that kept bringing back Ding Dongs to put in the cart, and Mom just kept taking them and putting them back. Or the little girl that was staring flat out at both of us at Walmart, like we might have been aliens, probably because we didn't have kids. We don't have kids.

But oh, I want to.

Blogging isn't helping, either. I read these posts from women who have three, four, five little lives in their hands and I think, how lucky they are! How much I wish I was in their shoes! Quiverful families, or my cousin's family... people that are blessed and blessed and blessed and it only serves to make me more upset, more impatient.

You see, as far as I know, I can. We can. We can make babies, we can have little ones, but we aren't. Andrew wants to wait, he doesn't want a child right now. He says we don't have the money, we don't have the room, we don't have the stability. What don't we have? We have him with a steady job, with good security, and extra money building in the account every day. We have a two bedroom apartment, and a 4 door car that runs well. We love each other very much, we have very few minor problems in the relationship (such as when he doesn't rinse the dishrag, I'm going to strangle him, lol). I KNOW our finances like the back of my hand, and I'll tell you, that yes, it will be tough, but it's possible for us to afford a baby right now. I've brought it up to him, and he knows. He sees the look in my eyes when I see a child, he sees the tears... and he looks away. I don't know if he looks away to keep from having to see it, because it makes him mad, or if he turns away because he hates to see me cry, or if it's so that he doesn't have to see me cry over something that is, partly, his doing. I don't know. But he doesn't like to see it. We've talked about it, and now the excuse is he wants to wait until his first term is over to see if he's done, or if he re-ups. And he says, once the term is over, then we can have kids. So I was excited for a while, I was thinking to myself, that's great! Two years! I can wait two more years, right? Yeah, yeah, sure I can... and then he said he's probably going to re-enlist. I thought about that and asked, but if you re-enlist, and you don't want kids in the Army, what does that mean for us? Because if he re-ups, he's going to stay it out and retire... that's twenty years.

I can wait two. I can. I'll make myself. But twenty? I'll be 41 years old, and yes, I realize that's a fine age to have children... but not for me. I want to have the energy I have now, the body I have now, the health, the ideals, all of it, when I have children, not what I'll have in 20 long years as an Army wife.

He says that if he re-ups for the next twenty, "we'll see where we are". Okay, reasonable. Don't really wanna have a baby in Germany, got it, sure, fine. But if we're in the USA? I need answers from him, and he won't give them to me, and God help me, but I'm crying even while I'm typing this, thinking about it.

So I'm frustrated, because I have never wanted anything so much in my entire life as to have my own beautiful child. I'm sad, because the answers I'm getting from the man I love suggest that he may not really want to have children at all, even though we've talked about names and how far apart and everything else, and he was excited then... and I don't think I can live my life and be who I'm supposed to be without having children. They're my life and I haven't even begun one of them yet. I'm impatient, because I've been taking risks, just to try. Days that I'm not perfectly infertile, I've been treating as safe, on the off chance that maybe God has a different plan than my husband, but I'm starting to think they're in cahoots. I'm impatient because even in the best circumstance, two years is still a very long time for something I need more than breathing.

So there. Yell at me. Tell me all kinds of awful things. But now you know why the blogs I follow are the ones that belong to mothers with families. It's jealousy and admiration and the fact that I can't get parenting out of my head long enough to think a sane thought, so much that I look for examples of what I want to do with my own children in others' words. And now you know the thing I don't tell people, too, this motherhood ache that I have, the fact that my biological clock isn't just ticking, it's ding donging in there to get my attention.

See you later.