Brittany and Bill - Chapter 2 "After The Choice"
Photography by Randy Bacon
BILL'S WORDS
When I got married, I listened to the words being spoken just two feet in front of me. I took them seriously. Now, here we were. In front of God, our families and friends, and a giant red cross, flaming with the intensity of the love that I had for my about-to-be new wife. For richer, for poorer. In sickness, and in health. To death do us part. I mean, I really thought about those words. It wasn't because I was unsure of the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. It was because I really wanted her to know how much she meant to me. That I really knew what I was getting myself into. That I would cherish her and hold her and give her everything that she desired. I do. All of my thinking never prepared me for what the world would throw at us soon. Newly married. Madly in love. Ready to take on that world together. We weren’t prepared, but we survived, made it through and are stronger now than we were then.
Time passed. Wounds healed and Brittany recovered fully. She was still the funny, intelligent, and sexy woman who I chose (and luckily she agreed) to share my life with. Things got better in most facets of life. The story telling ceased to be as frequent, with willing participants not being as plentiful, as most in our orbit had now encountered the tale. With the decision being made not to try again to have children and not to adopt, we just didn’t think about it as much as we did in the first year after it happened. We got back to “normal”, but it isn’t what everyone else’s normal is. Everyone else, it seems, has babies. Friends, cousins, workmates, celebrities, royal families. The whole wide world was fertile and sowing and reaping and we couldn’t. A different kind of question then started being asked of Brittany. “How many children do you have?”
Our community is a very proud and boastful one, priding itself on being very child friendly - a great place to raise children. Neighborhood signs marking the entrance to each "hood", show happy families holding hands, declaring your arrival into their protective sanctuaries, their municipal embrace, their protective wombs. The city wants you to know you are in a place that is safe to take your family to the park, to live comfortably amongst other families in its neighborhoods. I never really thought about that before I chose to try to have children, but I knew that Springfield, MO was a great place to raise kids, because I had be told that and overheard that countless times before. The question that I was asking myself now was… “Is Springfield a great place NOT to raise kids?”
We were surrounded by parents with children. We were finding it hard to connect with people our age that didn’t have children. When we would go to work events or find ourselves at dinner parties or family get togethers we would undoubtedly be introduced to people whose first question was not, “What do you do for a living?” but “How many children do you have?” Because that’s what you do in Springfield. You raise children. After many awkward years of conversations over drinks and barbecue, we started to wonder was this the place that we really wanted to live? It’s residents were so focused on child rearing, was it just too much to have to deal with the reminder of our failures and to keep having to tell the story over and over, even as infrequent as it now was years past?
We decided to stay. My family is close by. She has solidified herself professionally and starting over in another city, while it might be exciting and adventurous, would have held the promise of even more unwanted conversations. People know us and our story here. Our story is us. Sharing our story over the years stopped being a burden. It wasn’t the city’s fault. It’s a great city. It wasn’t the people asking the question’s fault. They cared about us. They wanted to know about us. We were hurt. We were grieving. We were healing.
We are now at the point where we WANT to share our story. For other people out there feeling like we did, know that you can have a great fulfilling life without children. Very few people since we lost the babies shared with me that they had similar experiences when they tried to have children and failed. Those confidences mean so much more to me every day. Right after losing the babies, I wasn’t in a place to really accept their experiences as helpful episodes, but I am glad that they did because those stories stuck with me. They rattled around in my brain and when I needed them most, I remembered them and felt comforted by them. I felt like I wasn’t alone.
You are not alone.