Baby Boy

I have been with some unsavory men.  Several, really.  I think the curse may have been broken on this one...one can only hope and wait.  I had a baby fourteen years ago with a real peach of a piece of shit.  Jamie Todd Doyle.  I have no qualms saying his name without reproach.  Fuck that dude forever.  Though he was young, though not as young as I, he made some stupid fucking decisions;  Like, having no part in the pregnancy process whatsoever.  Still happy to fuck my growing ass, but nothing more to do with it.  I think I've been high ever since.  A few times in sobriety when numbness is replaced by anger and frustration at and with everything, I have regret.  Then I remember who I was with and where I was, both geographically and mentally.  I wanted to be an actor.  I wanted a life.  I couldn't possibly be responsible for another human life if I wanted to have one of my own.  I hardly lived, hadn't seen the world and was knocked up at eighteen, going to doctors appointments alone and getting my college homework done.  Fuck.  Fourteen years and I'm still messed up about it.

Now that my passion for theatre is waning, I think about what could have been.  Me, living in Fort McMurray, married to Jamie.  Hating existence, having a baby with a man who thought only about items with engines and himself.  My dreams, which escape me now, would have been offered up on a platter of shit and despair.  Hopelessness sets in when I think on what would have been.  I feel like I'm suffocating just thinking about it.  So I did what I thought best for the baby boy and released him to a beautiful, generous, wanting family who loves him with everything they have.  Providing what I couldn't.  Or refused to out of selfish regard.

I'm with someone currently who wants children eventually.  How do I tell him it's not nor has it ever been for me?  The myriad reasons to not have children...really there's only one.  I don't fucking want to.  I didn't want a baby with a useless half retarded man who had nothing going for him;  A man stuck in his meager existence with skewed values and an empty head.  Having a baby ruined my body.  Why would I volunteer for that again?  This current man would make such a wonderful father.  He be brilliant, beautiful, kind, thoughtful, courageous, caring...everything I've always wanted in another.  Seriously, everything.  He makes me lighter...if I let him.

So!  I had a baby.  He's nearly an adult and I am still trapped in time.  My lesson for the choice I made perhaps.  I don't regret giving him to the family that graciously needed him.  I regret my regrets about the situation.  The time lost on thinking on regret.  The loss.  I am grateful for the experience.  How long ago it was and how I still feel frightens me.  Nothing reminds me more of how I've aged then this.  Nothing reminds me more of getting older than this.  I find this terrifying and tragic and futile.  I will get old and die so why continue this cycle in my brain?  Why the torture?  Why these thoughts at my windowsill?  The blinds are closed but I know they're there.  Taunting me.  Taking away precious moments of the here and now.  It's tough to be present when my body continuously reminds me of what was and could have been.  Baby Boy, I'm sorry if I fucked you up.  You are loved.  Even if from a far and in my own unpronounceable way.