Tuesday, June 16, 2015

New Experiences and Mixed Feelings

I am living my life and having fun, new experiences.  Experiences that I am grateful for and would probably never have had if Jeff was still here with me.

I feel guilty about that.

It's hard to think about what I would not have experienced if my husband was still alive and I have mixed emotions about that. These new experiences are shaping who I am but I'm only having them because my husband is dead.  Talk about a mind trip.

Then I start thinking about the experiences this last year and a half that I would have had with him that I will never get the chance to have...like having a baby.

If he hadn't gotten cancer and died, we would probably have a baby right now.

We never really discussed it in concrete details. It was more of an assumption and a maybe. But I was secretly preparing without telling him. I bought What to Expect Before You're Expecting and I had started taking folic acid.  When I bought my new car, I thought about buying a "family" car.  I thought about which room in the house would be the nursery.  I had built-ins put in thinking about how useful they would be in that room once the baby was here. I was thinking of names.

All of this was in my own head. I never shared it with him because I wasn't quite sure I was even ready for a baby.

Then, when he was diagnosed, we actually talked about how the pressure to have a baby was off of us because we needed to focus on fighting and ultimately beating the cancer. I was actually relieved that this pressure to have a baby had evaporated, which wasn't fake. I really was relieved, almost like I dodged a bullet.  The mixed feelings I have thinking back on all this...

I think back to all the times people have asked me about babies and how I feel about not having one with Jeff and I always talk about how we never really wanted babies, which is the truth. We weren't dying to have them.  Babies just weren't something that either of us really, really wanted.  Babies were one of those things that were just supposed to happen to us, an expectation.

But, even though I really did feel that way, I was actually secretly planning on having one with him. I'm not sure which is the lie...I think both have aspects of the truth.

Now, I'm so glad we didn't get pregnant.  I am so relieved that we didn't have a baby, because I would be raising a baby by myself and that baby would never know his/her father.  But that also makes me feel guilty.  So many mixed feelings.

I'm sure if I had gotten pregnant, I would never have regretted it, my life would just be so different than it is now.  I would still be having new experiences but totally different experiences and I would be sharing them with Jeff.

It's such a weird dichotomy to be happy and sad at the same time.

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