I never envisioned myself the mother of boys. When I used to imagine my child, I would picture a little dark haired girl. Sometimes, I would see her in glimpses, holding someone else’s hand. She would have a page-boy hair cut and look a little Asian. I had a long time to imagine and long for this imaginary child.
During the height of my infertility, I used to picture this little child, and tell her why I wanted her so much. I told her what a good mother and father she would have, if she would just be born. I shared my dreams with her. I looked in shop windows at little pink things that I might buy for her. She was my child of hope.
I came across a passage in a novel I was reading recently. It struck an unexpected chord in me, and I was reminded of my “infertility child.” Scottish sisters-in-law who lived in the 1700s are talking late at night. One is a new mother, with her child at her breast. The new mother was explaining to her sister about how she talked to her baby before the child was born.
“You can talk to a babe, you know. You can tell them anything. You can pour out your soul to them without choosing your words or keeping anything back at all. And that’s a comfort to the soul. I have often wondered if that’s why women are so often sad, once the child is born,” she said meditatively, as though thinking aloud. “Ye think of them while ye talk, and you have a knowledge of them as they are inside ye, the way you think they are. And then they’re born and they’re different—not the way you thought of them inside, at all. And ye love them of course, and get to know them the way they are … but still there is the thought of the child ye once talked to in your heart, and that child is gone. So I think it’s the grievin‘ for the child unborn that you feel, even as ye hold the born one in your arms.” And she paused and kissed the downy head of her daughter. “Yes, before … it’s all possibility. It might be a son, or a daughter. A plain child, a bonny one. And then it’s born, and all the things it might have been are gone, because now it is.
