The ones who weren't

Fertility was never a problem for me -- I have three wonderful children. But I've never stopped thinking I am two babies short.

By Joyce Maynard

Read more: Abortion, Pregnancy, Motherhood, Life

Oct. 23, 2006 | Twenty-eight years ago, when I was 24, I found myself pregnant again at a time when the prospect of caring for a second child was neither sensible nor convenient. My daughter, Audrey, was not yet 1 year old. My artist husband was painting houses for a living, and I was trying to be a writer. We were living in a one-room loft with a shower in the kitchen. When Audrey needed a bath, I used the sink.

Still, I wanted to have that baby, and when my husband pretty well insisted that we couldn't, I was crushed, although -- here is one of the many ways a 24-year-old differs from a woman the age I am now, 52 -- I agreed to the abortion. It was, my husband reminded me, proof of the necessity for the procedure that we had to borrow money just to have it done.

From the moment I terminated that pregnancy (as the language has it, one of the ten thousand ways we in this culture have sanitized and distanced ourselves from the full emotional impact of abortion), I found myself obsessed with pregnancy. When the date came on which I would have been giving birth, if I had chosen differently, I fell into the deepest kind of mourning, and for two years after that, studying my daughter (an only child, till past her fourth birthday), I would periodically summon a phantom image of the younger sibling she was supposed to have had, playing alongside her. Only he wasn't there.

Eventually, I had another baby, a son. And another after that. Wonderful, perfect babies, who grew into amazing, wonderful children. Fertility was never the problem for me. I took for granted the ease with which I conceived and bore babies, as a rich woman might the experience of walking into a department store and picking up a dress or a pair of shoes.

The hard thing for me was never the biology of the thing, only the marriage that would support it. Back when I had agreed to the abortion, I said it was because we didn't have the money, but the truth ran deeper, and was more ominous than that. We didn't have the love, I think. The mutual support, anyway. Though looking back at it now, it was specifically the insufficiency of those things that came to fuel my passion for parenthood. I found, in my children, what I didn't get from my partner. I'd guess the same was true for him.

And maybe because of the loneliness of that marriage -- but also, too, because from the moment I had that early abortion, I had felt myself to be one child short -- I remained obsessed with the idea of having another baby. When I had one, I wanted a second, and when the second came, I wanted a third. After the third, I wanted a fourth. And every time, my husband and I argued about it. He must have carried justifiable bitterness over the relentlessness of my pursuit of a child (and what it suggested of my inability to find what I needed with him alone). For my part, I felt a growing frustration, and then rage, at my inability to control something as basic as my own reproductive life. I'd never pretend for a second that the pain for me of not getting to have another child equaled what a woman must feel, with a willing partner at her side, who's actively trying and unable to conceive. But all we can ever fully know is our own brand of grief, maybe, and that was mine.

I was 35 when my marriage ended, and when it did, one of the hopes I allowed myself -- in the midst of all the sorrow and regret of my failed marriage to my children's father -- was that I might one day be able to have another child. All around me, women my age were expressing their gratitude and relief to have the childbearing years behind them, finally. But as for me, I felt no less longing for a baby, after three of them, than I had when I was 22 and had none. Only now there was another element to the longing, which I had been too young to appreciate in those old days. I wanted not simply to hold a baby again but to truly share the experience of raising her, with my fellow parent.

I had a number of relationships over those years, and always, when I did, I'd find myself conjuring up the picture of having a child with this man, or that one. Sometimes, it was my inability to summon that picture that caused me to say goodbye to a man. Once, it was my own firm stand that I wanted another child that caused the man to say goodbye to me.

I was approaching age 40 when I met Don, a lawyer, who had never married, never had a child. Unlike my husband, or me, he earned a very steady income and had things like health insurance, and the kind of car that isn't likely to require a call to the tow truck several times a year. It took me a few months of spending time with Don to get used to the idea that we could not only go out to a very expensive restaurant for dinner but that, when we did, I might order not only an entree but an appetizer as well. Also good wine.

He professed to love me, and I think he did. In my way, I loved him too, though I continued to recognize an absence of a certain kind of passion I had felt as a young woman, and longed for still. I saw him as what my mother would have called "good husband material." Steady. Kind. Faithful. Someone who would be a wonderful and devoted father, probably.

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