Today Holidailies asks about things I once thought I’d do that I now know I’ll never ever do.
At first I thought, “Write a best-selling novel.” Then I realized that was defeatist. I’m only 58. I can’t rule that out yet. So I’ll go with the practical: Have kids.
Yes, Ms. Zero Population Growth over here once thought she’d have kids. This was when I was a kid, myself, playing house with dolls. In high school I began to doubt that I wanted kids. One of my sisters returned home to my parents’ house when she was in her mid-20s, divorced with two young kids in tow, and I got to babysit them that summer while she worked. Oh, they were fine and as well-behaved as you could expect a four-year-old and a seven-year-old to be. But ya know? I just wasn’t feeling it. Some teenage girls love kids—their mother did when she was in high school—but I didn’t have either the patience or maturity to deal with fights, crying, or trying to entertain them. Basically, I shut them up with ice cream.
Then I supposed I’d get married and have kids one day with my college sweetheart. Thank gawd that didn’t work out because while we were dating his mother married a guy who was tied to the Gambino family. As an Italian-American in the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut tri-state area, I wasn’t dating a Jewish boy only to fall in as a Mob wife. See also, although he had a nice start in life—prep school, transfered out of my alma mater to an Ivy League school after his sophomore year, went to law school, became an assistant district attorney down South—he blew it. Big time. Last I Googled him, he got disbarred because he got caught up in one of those awful scams where crooks sell older people fake insurance policies costing hundreds of dollars and worth nothing, and he ended up doing some time for it. Dodged a bullet there, boy howdy.
Anyway, in college I thought that if I was going to have a family, it might have been with him because I loved him, he was very devoted and faithful—almost doting—we had fun, his future was super bright, the kids would have wanted for nothing, and the icing was that the kids would have picked up some good tickets to the genetic lottery because the guy was also a model and had been a nationally ranked tennis player before he got injured, right before we met. I think even my Roman Catholic parents were past freaking out that he was Jewish because he looked so good on paper. Heck, at my childhood bestie’s wedding shower, my broad circle of Italian elders even said, “Wait, he wants to be a lawyer? Forget finding an Italian doctor. Go with the Jewish lawyer. He’ll treat you better.”
Gawd, growing up on Long Island was a riot.
Anyway, my college sweetheart did something bone-headed and made a big life decision, like drop it on me that he had been accepted to law school in California when I didn’t even know he had applied there. He just assumed I’d go out there with him. Well, kids, as I established with you a few entries ago, I don’t go anywhere just because a man says so, and as I wasn’t about to move there, I broke up with him. (And he ended up not going to law school there after all. He went to law school in—say it with me—D.C.)
After that, at the ripe old age of 22, I realized I didn’t want kids. Told every guy I dated after that the same thing. Some believed me and we parted ways, others thought they could convince me otherwise but they couldn’t. Even my ex-husband, who swore up and down he didn’t want them, decided two years into the marriage he might want them after all, and that was a major reason I divorced him. Yes, I divorced rather than have kids. That’s how much I didn’t want them.
It’s funny, no one in my family believed I didn’t want them, either, except my mother, who told me not to get married unless I did. (I should have listened!) The rest of them—my sisters, my father, my other relatives—were all “oh, when you meet the right guy, you’ll want them.”
“The right guy won’t want them either.”
“You’re young. You’ll change your mind.”
exasperated sigh
One day when I was in my mid-20s, my father really got on my last nerve with it. I was home visiting and he gave me the ol’ “When are you going to find a guy and have babies?”
“I’m going out to the bar tonight. It can be arranged.”
He looked at my mother, who I’m pretty sure was trying not to burst out laughing. “You believe this? Where did we go wrong?”
“What ‘go wrong?'” she said. “You have four grandkids from two of the other ones [two of my three sisters] so far. Two boys and two girls. What more do you want? Get off her back.”
“A WOMAN IS NOT COMPLETE WITHOUT A HUSBAND AND CHILDREN.”
“Oh, blow it out your ass.”
How I miss that woman.
Anyway, at 42 endometriosis got the better of me, I had all the plumbing taken out, celebrated with some gorgeous, expensive, high-threadcount white sheets, and here I am at 58, kid-free, no regrets.
And now for today’s ornament, one of the new deer.
zenzalei 