Sometimes the Void is Too Small to Scream Into

I’m going to lay out a bit more of my personal life than I usually make public knowledge, but I think it’s important to talk about. I had a recent, unexpected brush with fatherhood. The person I was dating got pregnant. It ended up being an anembrionic pregna
ncy, which basically just means that a gestational sac formed, but no embryo ended up growing inside of it. An incredibly common thing. Also meant no kid. 

Now, there is the expected guy response. Woo hoo. Nothing to tie me down, baby. I am still free to be me. YAAAAAAY!!!!!!! Dancing on down the road.

Not my personal experience. 

I was married for 20 years to someone I started dating when I was 19. She never wanted kids. I certainly had no interest in kids. She eventually found out that she had PCOS and endometriosis so kids were pretty well off the table anyways. So I never really thought much on whether or not I wanted kids as I grew older. Nature had made that decision. 

Then, as a 48 year old, we got divorced. Its a thing. It happens. Because of my age, I didn’t bother thinking about whether or not I wanted kids, because I am an old fuck. Again. Nature made decision. Further bolstered by the fact that this woman I was dating had been told when she was 13 that she would never be able to get pregnant.

Then, urine brought 2 lines up on a stick and suddenly I was looking at inevitability in something I had always taken as impossibility. The usual fear hit in. Confusion. More fear. Finances and living situations and the usual difficulties of dealing with young humans had me freaked out. So did hope. That was the part I didn’t expect. I’m great with horror and sadness and anger and despair. Lived with those my whole life. 

Hope. Well, I have no idea how to deal with that. 

We started referring to the kid as Nat, short for Not A Tumor. Looked into what would be needed to help her with the pregnancy. Started talking about how we would deal with taking care of this human. Things started to make sense and my initial approach of “I’m not going to turn my back on a person I helped bring into the world” became active excitement about helping that person become whoever they were going to be. It could be possible for me to be better than my own father and not pass along so much trauma.

Then the ultrasound showed nothing growing inside the gestational sac. Waited a week to go back and check again. The time was interminable. We were told that the date of conception could just have been wrong. Hope was crumbling, but neither of us mentioned it. We just kept talking about everything the same as we had been. I knew better, but didn’t accept it. The week passed. Another ultrasound. I strained to see something, anything, on the screen inside of that gaping oblong void. Nothing was there.

I tried to bury myself in helping her deal with what she was going through. The emotional and physical suffering. Its how I deal with pain and stress, pretending that mine does not exist and focus on helping someone else. It became pretty clear that she didn’t want my help, though. She distanced herself pretty heavily from me. So I had plenty of time to be faced with it all. A possible future collapsing without ever existing. The realization that maybe, in some way at least, I could have wanted the thing I never really thought about. The further realization that it was well and truly gone.

I couldn’t even grieve with her and work through this together, because she opted to cut off the relationship. Maybe it was associating me with her own growing, then loss of, hope. Maybe it was the realization that she actually could get pregnant combined with the cold math that no one wants to have a kid with a near 50 year old and that she should look at people who wouldn’t be damn near 70 when the kid graduated high school. Regardless, sharing the grief wasn’t an option.

And I don’t know how to talk to my friends or my family about this shit. Typical guy bullshit. Feelings are hard and confusing. Plus, how likely was it that they would be secretly relieved that I wasn’t having a kid at my age or as the person I am? 

So I’m left with the feeling that I caused this. That it was all my fault and that I managed to cause harm to someone else in the process. That my only value in the world doesn’t lie in who I am but in what I can provide for other people, and that I can’t provide shit. 

I know that isn’t true. At least the all my fault part. As I said, anembrionic pregnancies are incredibly common and most people that miscarry that way never even realize they were pregnant. But logic doesn’t settle well in the heart. And working through it alone doesn’t really fucking work. So I spiral in self hate and blame. 

I’m not sharing this because I want pity. Life does this kind of shit. It sucks. It hurts. But it happens and doesn’t make me special. But I have to wonder how many other guys out there have gone through similar. Stretched a plastic smile across their face as buddies slapped them on the back and made jokes about dodged bullets. Downed a few too many shots and crashed out on the floor a few too many times. Maybe started some fights over idiotic bullshit to just feel capable of doing something. Or curled up in a room with the lights off. Alone. Not screaming or crying, but just staring and bleeding. 

Also, I find myself missing you tonight, Nat.