Motivations

I've been reading so many interesting pieces of writing on blogs recently. These two have been occupying my brain for the past two or three days.

'so-called replacement child part 1' at klepsydra

'words pouring out' at Fionn

I started writing comments on both occasions but I got a bit carried away. Rather than take over either of these good folk's blogs with my rambling, I thought I would grab (or perhaps more accurately steal?) these topics, bring them back over here and ramble away on my own blog instead.

As I read them (with a thousand apologies to the authors if I have the wrong end of the stick) these posts revolved around two major topics

(a) what motivates us to have children in the first place? Do we have children in order to fill a void in our own lives? In the hope that they will make us happy or give us purpose that we would otherwise be lacking? Or to occupy the void left by the loss of an older sibling?

(b) Following on from the final question, the notion of so-called 'replacement' children.

I've been racking my poor old brain over these questions.

Why did I decide to have children?
Why did I want to have children?
Why do I want to have more children?
Is Jessica Georgina's 'replacement' child?
Are any further children that I bring into my family condemned to be 'replacements' for Georgina in one way or another?

Well . . . . why did I decide to have children?

I suppose you could argue that the decision I took was rather the decision NOT to have children earlier by taking precautions for the past fifteen odd years or so. If I had left it up to nature alone and dithered over taking the decision NOT to fall pregnant my eldest children would be in secondary school by now.

But, having taken birth control for many years, I made a conscious decision to stop taking it and I certainly did this in the hope that I would fall pregnant and have a child.

It seems rather frightening that I conceived two children deliberately - not accidentally, as the result of one too many glasses of wine which I believe is partially the reason for my existence on this planet -  yet I really have no clear explanation as to WHY I did this.

I think I can probably provide some sort of rationale for most major decisions that I have made in my life. This isn't to say that I have made good decisions necessarily but at least I have some vague inkling of why I acted the way that I did, why I took the routes that I took. But having children? Suddenly everything seems much more murky.

I've been trying to peer into my motivations for wanting children but I've actually found it extremely hard to grasp any of the specifics.

Perhaps because I run a pretty fine line in the self deception department? I've often thought that if, through some horrible fairytale type mechanism, all my inner workings were laid bare I would run screaming from the monster that suddenly appeared. Perhaps I don't actually want to know why I want(ed) children? Were my motivations purely selfish? To make myself happy or to fill my aimless existence with something, anything. I hope not but it is very hard to decipher when I stand so close to myself that I can hardly make myself out.

Perhaps because some of my motivation is hardwired into that old, old part of the brain that drives the basic impulses, to eat, to breath, to run from danger, to reproduce?

Perhaps because the decision to have children was one that I made a very long time ago? I have always wanted children or at least I can't remember a time before I knew I wanted them. My mother has always been involved in the care of young children and as I grew up I spent a lot of time with children younger than myself. I loved looking after them, I liked their company and their honesty. I used to daydream about the children that I would have when I grew up.

When I started my periods at the age of about thirteen, I remember crying and crying over the 'children' that I was losing. I thought of it as ' there's that little one's chance gone' in a rush of blood and teenage melodrama. Never mind that I was a million miles from having a boyfriend, even further from having much idea what to do with one if I had happened to come by such a creature and being the kind of teenage girl that actually prefers books to boys at that age.

As I grew older I realised that there were other things I wanted too. I wanted to study, stay out late, have a career, have boyfriends who weren't interested in having children, a house and to be irresponsible. But my future children were always there, I confidently assumed that they were waiting in the wings, definitely part of my ten year plan. I had a notion that I wanted my first child whilst I was still in my twenties. I don't know why? Perhaps in imitation of my own mother.

Perhaps I wanted them because I was, intermittently, part of a large family and then a small one? My mother is one of five children and I am one of fourteen cousins. The majority of my family live in South Africa but I was born and raised in England. I did go back to South Africa many times throughout the course of my childhood and always felt  . . . .hurt? excluded? . . .I'm not entirely sure. I was part of this family that I at once belonged to and did not belong to. The little English girls that huddled on the outskirts of a family that seemed so loving and involved with one another. Different accents, different appearance, different. Just different.
I think it made me want to anchor myself  firmly to something or somebody. My little English family of four seemed so damned insubstantial, a puff of wind could blow us away. One of us could be taken out at any second. Four, three, two, one. Almost a premonition of my own little family of four that disintegrated so rapidly and lost one of its members in a haze of hospitals and machinery.

So there probably are reasons but they are lost in the mists of time, in my befogged and befuddled adolescent brain, made by a person who is no longer.

Perhaps I had my children for all the wrong reasons?
I hope not.
I hope that I had them out of an attempt (perhaps a misguided one) to love them.
I just don't know.

But there is no escaping the fact that it was partly my decision.

To bring these children into being and subject them to this bedazzling, disorientating and appalling experience. What right did I have?
Those poor, frail little scraps of life. Such tiny glimmers of people.
To bring them here and have them stuck full of needles and tubes.
In all the noise and light when they should have been in the quiet dark.
I can only plead that this was not I what I intended. Truly.
I wish I could apologise to them in a way that they could both understand.
My dead daughter and my living daughter. I am so very sorry my dear sweet ones.

Sometimes I think we would have all have been better off if I had just left well enough alone. Kept taking the tablets that stopped my body overproducing babies and then melting down before it had finished the job.

But I can't leave that thought of  'another' alone. Another child, a phantom child, who seems to tug at my skirts and at the edges of my thoughts and dreams. But I'm not entirely sure if that child is a future child, an unknown child or if that child is, in fact, still my Georgina.

My daughter, Georgina.
I want her back so very much, against all possibility and reason.
But she isn't coming back.
Having another child will not bring her back.
I'm worried that my brain has not quite grasped that final fact yet.

******

Which brings me to the idea of 'replacement' but I think I'll have to save that for another day.
This post is getting far too long already.