I don’t think you’d be a good mother has been in my head for years now, long past my husband’s numerous amends, which I accepted and appreciated. I always knew he was genuinely remorseful about it.
The thing is, he never said it. I know this now. He never said it. I learned, just now, via my journal, that this conversation, the original conversation where this good-mother topic came up, just a few months into our relationship, was not how I remembered it.
How it actually went: We were in his bed. We were talking about porn (whether to watch, what to watch if we did watch, what we might like to do after or during if we did watch), and about moving to a small town someday (where to move, when someday might be, what that would be like).
What will we do there? I said. Pretty sure neither of us imagined then that get divorced was what we would end up doing there. We were still imagining our happy ending.
You can watch the kids while I build stuff. Long pause while I considered what this meant, and he considered what he was going to say next. Well, I’m not sure if I see us having kids. He had, up to this point, talked often about us having kids.
Don’t you think I’d be a good mom? I said.
I do, but I think you’d worry a lot, he said.
Fair enough. I worry excessively about many things. Now including the kid, who isn’t even my own.
Review: I don’t think you’d be a good mother. Said by no one. Construed, it seems, from some combination of my own thoughts and his use of worry.
I feel like I should apologize. Not to him, I mean, I should do that too, but I feel like I should apologize for getting this far and putting the car in reverse. Maybe just to myself. I’m not a fan of egregious twists, especially when it means I have to review a few decades of my life. I put something on someone else, on my partner, I held on to this idea I thought my partner believed about me, when it was actually what I believed about me. I had always been deeply unsure about my potential as a parent. The decision not to have children was one we made together, though it may have been a decision that got put off too long to know whether it was a real decision or a nondecision. My memory goes straight from Okay, we’ll put this off until after we do a few more things to I’m not sorry we never had kids. But those last words were his, not mine. I’m not sorry we didn’t put kids through divorce. I have, to an extent, defined myself by having been that kid. I have a measure of acceptance that we didn’t have kids. I worry a lot, but I don’t worry that I fucked up my kids. I have a larger measure of regret that I let the conversation fade out the way it did, that I didn’t try to circle back around at some point. Prior to getting married, I had considered, and ultimately rejected, the idea of being a single mom as being more of a challenge than I was up for, and, by extension, knew I was most likely letting go of the idea of being a mom at all. I was in my late thirties then, and I knew if I found a partner that I wanted to have time with that person before we had kids. And I am glad, so glad I had time with that person before we forgot to keep talking about it. Regret is a funny thing. My program promises me that if we stay sober, we’ll neither regret the past nor wish to shut the door on it. I well know that sharing my experiences can have value for another alcoholic who wonders if they too can get through a similar experience sober. But I for sure wish to shut the door on it sometimes. I wish to slam the door on it sometimes. One of the things about being sober is, those feelings we drank away, we start feeling them. It’s not easy to be fully conscious twenty-four seven. Maybe I did slam the door on this subject in a certain way. Acceptance, the other side of regret, for me comes and goes. For every choice made, who knows how many more are let go that might have opened that door to something better. I don’t know how not to wonder about other choices, or how not to wish now that I’d talked to my partner about this and so many other things when I had the chance, or how not to wish that I had talked to my therapist about how much time I spent wondering whether I should have kids, and whether or not I’d be a good mom, since the answer I usually arrived at was never that I’d be a great mom, it was that I’d probably be just as complicated a parent-person as my mom was. And as much as I know my mom did the best she could, don’t we all want to do at least a little better than best we could? Best we could always feels both loving and sad at the same time. Seemingly, there was only one way to find out if I’d be a good mom, but I failed to definitively choose motherhood, and then I failed to fully make peace with that choice. That’s regret, right? And yet, I couldn’t get up in the morning if I didn’t have some acceptance about my choices, or if those choices hadn’t also led to so many joys and delights and wonders. And then a kid did come into my life, and she told me a new story about me.