From the time I was very small my only, ONLY consistent aspiration was to be a wife and a mother, to make a home and have a family. I grew up and married. It was not a sacramental marriage, though I did everything in my limited human power to make it so. Three years ago that marriage ended with ugliness and drama I could not have imagined and my kids and I are still recovering from trauma that turned our lives inside out.
I’ve just received word that the first decision on my annulment is affirmative, meaning that soon everything will be settled, over. I find myself having difficulty accepting how different my family life is compared to what I spent my life dreaming it would be. We’ve all heard the politically correct platitudes that “families take many different forms,” but we also know in God’s design a family consists of a mother, a father and children. Period.
Has anyone else here had to navigate this path of accepting a very different family configuration than what they had envisioned? I could really use some advice on how to leave behind the dream and accept (embrace even?) the reality of raising a family alone.
My family configuration is basically what I expected (SAHM mom + breadwinner dad + kids), but there have been a lot of other surprises.
As I’ve mentioned here before, when I was an idealistic newlywed convert, I imagined that we would have 4-6 kids and we would homeschool, just like all the cool people in our virtual peer group were doing. We had our first child. My first clue that the plan I’d envisioned wasn’t going to happen came immediately–I wasn’t able to directly breastfeed, and I wound up pumping and bottle-feeding instead. And we did the same with our second child, who never had a latch. It was only our third child, many years later, that was a competent nurser. Fortunately, I wasn’t as committed to breastfeeding as a way of life as other people, or I would have been devastated. (Back in the day, the CCL was HUGE on breastfeeding.)
I was a great mom of one, if I do say so myself. Aside from the breastfeeding trouble, I was practically perfect. However, within weeks of becoming pregnant with our second, I was a sleepy, stupid zombie and I struggled even to stay awake, let alone go to the toddler classes that I’d signed our oldest up for. Fortunately, we lived on campus at the time, and I had access to lots of college babysitting help. That was good, because my husband was trying to get tenure, and needed to be working all the time. We had our second child. I went to the lactation consultant before the baby was born and after, but no luck establishing a latch. Until our oldest went to morning preschool (an institution I had never expected to use), I struggled with coping with a toddler and an infant at the same time when I was by myself. Life also got easier when our oldest started full-day pre-K (thank goodness our oldest had potty trained by then!). So much for homeschooling…A couple years later, our oldest was in a private school and giving her 1st grade teacher fits and was also having spectacular tantrums at home. We got her to a child psychologist and then another child psychologist with a specialization in autism spectrum issues. Our oldest turned out to have Asperger’s (or to be mildly autistic), which made me feel much better about my struggles with her when she was a toddler and preschooler. It wasn’t that I was such a weakling–it was that she was genuinely a pretty tough kid to deal with. For a couple of years, I got to be the mother of the weird kid that does embarrassing stuff. And speaking of embarrassing stuff, around that time, our second child finally potty-trained at nearly 4.5, just in time for pre-K.
Our oldest has been very well remediated and is now a lovely young lady. Around the time that I was starting to feel confident that things were going to be OK with her (she was turning 9), I got pregnant again. I discovered that I’d had a miscarriage at 13 weeks, which was not what I had expected at all–you know how everybody is brainwashed into believing that once you pass 12 weeks, everything is peachy keen? I had a hard medical and psychological recovery from that, but got pregnant again as soon as possible. I had a scary and medically complicated but ultimately successful pregnancy after that.
I had expected that I’d want to be an SAHM for life. Well, as it happens, I’m 13 years into being an SAHM, and I’m ready to move on now. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt, want to talk to grownups now and have at least as much spending money as I did when I was 20. Oh, yeah, and we have a pretty full plate with just 3 kids. I never expected to be married 17 years and only have 3 kids.
That all sounds pretty grim, I know, but it’s the list of stuff I didn’t expect–it’s not the list of things in my life that are awesome. I am reasonably happy with how things have turned out but there were a lot of surprises.
