Desire to have children
If only one friend gets pregnant
© Basilico Studio Stock / Shutterstock
One has a child. The other one doesn’t. To this day, the friends have never spoken to each other about this injustice. So one of the other writes a letter …
Dear Connie,
that both of us are at a loss for words, that can’t really be the case. And it’s not our permanent state either, because we talk all the time. We only fall silent when it could be about one thing.
Why were children never an issue for us? I can’t remember that in our first few years we ever discussed together whether we could even imagine being a mother. You were in your late thirties and I was in my mid twenties. Maybe I thought that was ticked for you. It wasn’t on my agenda yet. But it couldn’t have been a clear thought, just a feeling. When I was pregnant a few years later, you said that you would try it too, but that it would certainly not be easy when you were over 40. I did not find anything encouraging for you, no consolation. Everything that came to mind struck me as banal and inappropriate: “It’ll be fine!” Or: “Children are not everything.” Who was I to say something like that? Instead of showing any movement at all, I withdrew with my big belly.
When the baby arrived, I didn’t want to expect you to be happy as a young family – which was actually totally draining and shaky and not that happy at all. But should I complain to you of all people? And so we left out children’s and family topics again, absurd, because nothing made me stand out back then. When I see myself in front of me at that time, I can’t believe that I was so uptight and didn’t say openly to you: “I’m so sorry that it didn’t turn out for you the way you wanted it to can you stand me and my life? ” Instead, I accepted that we would lose each other. You will have felt that, you let me go.
My son was almost in elementary school when you brought me back in – with him. “Don’t keep your child away from me,” you said, not reproachfully at all, but pressed the doorbell button a tad too long like your finger. And I still remember one of those evenings together when you gave the boy a hot water bottle before going to bed and said: “But don’t drink everything at once!” – I felt how much I missed your humor and your silliness, in principle, but especially as a mother who always grabs her teeth. I know you would have made a good mother. But that’s another sentence that doesn’t exactly hug you, right? I would really like to take some of your sadness away from you, which I always feel. It’s not a question of whether I can do it, but rather whether I am allowed to do it: Don’t you have every right to be sad? What I actually want to say, dear friend: Lean on me if you like.
This article originally appeared in Barbara issue no. 05/2021.