A Farewell to Future Children

My husband carrying his frozen sperm to the fertility doctor.

 

I grew up in a family of collectors. My grandmother on one side had a wall of framed photos running the length of her mobile home, pressed tightly together so that hundreds of images of the family through the generations stared back at you. My grandma on the other side wrapped piles of papers in the elastic from my grandpa's old underwear. So it was no surprise that my own parents inherited some of that collecting nature. My dad's came in the musical form with a collection of Grateful Dead paraphernalia that would rival even the biggest fan. My mom’s was more subtle. She amassed clothes, shoes, tiny porcelain figurines of bears wearing all manner of clothes and costumes. Our house was always neat and orderly as long as you never opened a drawer or a cupboard. Collections of what I always assumed was junk found their way into every nook and cranny of our lives.

So it's hard to say if it is nature or nurture that gave me my fondness for throwing things out; regardless the pendulum swung quite far the other direction. As an adult I moved every two to three years and that made it easy to ensure my pack didn't become rat-like. I went through my clothes annually reveling in the growing pile of discards on my bedroom floor. Empty plastic hangers swung on the rack in my closet praising me for being so unattached to my things. 

When I left my childhood home I took what would fit in a Uhaul for an interstate move to California. It didn't include any of my old yearbooks or beloved novels. The meticulously folded notes passed between my best friends and me during science class in high school stayed behind too. In fact I had a casket-sized storage box for all of my mementos from adolescence and childhood that I left in my closet hoping my parents wouldn't toss it out one day in their haste to reclaim my bedroom as theirs. (That box finally made it to my home but not until many years of grousing and threats to dispose of it first.)

My desire to dump continued when I moved in with my now husband. Sadly he was not blessed with the same casual approach to tossing things out and so I would have to secretly stash things I intended to get rid of until I was sure it was forgotten- a pit stop on the way to the dumpster if you will. It made for many awkward arguments when he would discover some long lost pile of junk/collection of prized possessions and say "Hey! I've been wondering where this was!" Some items were just too big or too obvious for me to throw out without his noticing and so we have packed and unpacked things like a window frame or medieval style light sconces from house to house over the fifteen years we've been together.

My impulsive editing was not usually embraced by my husband. A time or two it actually got me in pretty deep shit. In a fit of spring cleaning I arranged to throw a garage sale. Selling things right out of your house is a terrible idea for a person who derives pleasure out of tossing. Taking minimalism to the max I boxed up dozens of century old books my husband had been hauling around for the better part of his life. Applying the idea that if you haven't used it in the last year, you probably won't use it- I  happily lined the walls of our garage with his literary relics. When an antique book buyer showed up early on sale day and purchased all the boxes for twenty dollars I had a sneaking suspicion I had quite literally given away the house. My husband is still talking about those books nearly a decade later.

All of this is to say that my cavalier approach to cleaning things out has not been without it's mistakes. And in fact it is likely why I was slow throw out the spermcicles that were my chance at future children.

I shared previously how my husband's cancer diagnosis led us to bank his sperm and undergo fertility treatments to conceive Sloan. We were one of the lucky couples who did not have to use every chance we had to become pregnant. My husband's insistence that he had "super sperm" seemed in fact to be true. After Sloan was born we had three additional vials of semen containing the dreams of our future kids in storage. At first I was so overwhelmed with new motherhood that I couldn't even imagine adding another human to the mix. And then work, life, family took over and the months turned into years. I only really thought about our frozen future children every May when the hefty storage bill arrived in my inbox. We were paying substantial rent to house these unrealized spawn but every time I thought about actually throwing them out... well I just couldn't do it.

Finally I found myself leaving my career and having significant time to start dealing with some of the administrative parts of life I had been neglecting while trying to juggle it all. The flagged email about our now sizable overdue storage bill stared me in the face. I emailed the billing person to negotiate a reduced fee for payment in full and I requested the paperwork to authorize disposal of our spermcicles.

I filled out the forms and my husband had it notarized. And then the papers sat on my desk for most of the summer. Halfway through July I even drafted an email to the administrator with a copy of our forms. As my mouse hovered over the send button I started to cry. It felt so final. I knew our family was complete as a party of five but having a chapter close with such permanence, well it was difficult to swallow. I walked into the dining room where my husband was working and I let the tears fall. He stood up from his chair and wrapped his arms around me. "We don't have to do anything yet." he said with a calm reassurance that told me it was ok to not be ok with this step. And so I closed that email and forgot about it as the summer wore on.

And then on the day my daughter entered kindergarten I came back to my laptop and I just knew it was time. As we embark on a new chapter of Sloan's life as an elementary-schooler, somehow against all odds I have found a quiet confidence that I am at peace with closing the door on becoming a mother one last time.

So I sent in the email. And I symbolically waved goodbye to ever being pregnant or breastfeeding, late nights and early mornings with a newborn, to first teeth and first steps and first words. I bid farewell to the idea that there could be one more little person in this world that is a little bit of me and a little bit of Kelly. I have been blessed to get to raise children three times over. First, for over a decade as I took part in my stepkids' childhoods and now as a mom to Sloan. The universe has shined on me in ways I never could have predicted and I know that this is enough. It's more than enough actually.