Day 9 – Gone
by Zoeyjane
Someone you didn’t want to let go, but just drifted
Today, I sat in the waiting room of the office where I took Zoë for a dental check-up. It’s a new office, in a new building, run, I think, by government forces whose aim is to provide free and affordable medical and dental care to low- and no-income people.
This building is important. We get free check-ups for Zoë there, and I know they run some clinics targeted at at-risk youth – and it’s in an area of the city where such youth congregate, so win-win.
In fact, this building’s message is so strong, when you visit the women’s washroom, you can’t help but notice that someone has taken the time to use a label-maker to add to the sign ‘trans-gendered welcome’. That’s a powerful message about change and acceptance.
Anyway, I sat there while Zoë talked to an older girl while waiting for her turn, and I saw the receptionist emptying a box of stock. Dozens of boxes attractively labelled Plan B got stacked beside the quickly-emptying box.
I thought, ‘Damn, that’s a lot of potentially irreversible life changes, right there’.
My life would be so different, if my body weren’t what it were.
I would be a nearly-thirty year old, with a fourteen year old. I could have a child in diapers, still. I could be a mother, married to a man, both of us living lives nothing like what we are, now, most probably miserable because of it. Unfortunately – or not, depending on your opinion – life intervened and miscarriages took away those possibilities.
But there isn’t a missed due date that goes by that I disregard.
Maybe why my life works now, as much as it does, is because I’m a mom to a single, only child. Because something predetermined that none of those other phantom babies would be born. But fuck if I don’t miss them. Especially the first one I really wanted, the one that seemed to be the precursor for my tumble down to crazyland, the one that led to me blogging and psychosis and the first time I ever actually felt like Life Isn’t Fair And I Don’t Deserve This.
Tomorrow: Someone you need to let go, or wish you didn’t know. [link]
