I decided to make this Heartwood post free to read, in its entirety, as an example of what these posts are like. I will almost never do this with my Heartwood posts, as they tend to deal with very sensitive issues. This one I don’t mind sharing more widely.
Here’s a quick summary. When I was 23, and terrified of getting pregnant with my then-husband, I got an irreversible tubal ligation. Flash forward to when I was 28. I was subconsciously trying to figure out whether or not things were good with my then-husband, while consciously assuring myself and others that all was well.
I was feeling empty and purposeless, and so I turned to church. At the time, I was still aspiring to be a good church-goer, even though it had never worked out. My then-husband also professed faith, but every church I had us try out led to incessant complaints. I gave up for a few years, but in my search to find an answer for my inexplicable discontent with life, I decided to try again.
I found a Lutheran place with a female pastor. There were little comments in the bulletin about how much they supported the LGBTQ+ community. I thought I’d found the place. Even my then-husband couldn’t find anything to complain about, and all four of us started to go together. Until one Sunday morning, when he told me he’d kept our ten-year-old son up until 2AM playing video games, and not to drag him out of bed.
My daughter was up and bright-eyed as usual. She was always the odd morning person out. She liked church, and besides that, she loved hanging out with me so much that she often volunteered to tag along with me on boring errands like grocery runs. I decided to go, just the two of us.
The sermon that day was entirely set up to convince the churchgoers to give money to the church. I wasn’t really a fan, even back then. But I was determined to get something of worth out of the sermon, so I tried to keep an open mind, to discern the kernel of truth behind their plea for money.
The verse being referenced and expounded on was “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” The premise was that wherever you spent your money, that’s what you would value. Someone who stored it up in savings would value having piles of wealth. Someone who bought lots of clothes would value fashion. Someone who donated generously to the church would remember God, and more often follow His will. Internally, I argued that this was an extremely capitalist basis for motivation, and it assumes that all anyone treasures is their money. But then, I thought to myself, what do I treasure?
I thought about God, and how my ideas about Him had been in such flux for so long. I knew I believed, but I wasn’t really sure what that meant, in the grand scheme of things. Writing, my lifelong passion, had become a bleak thing, more a springboard for self-recrimination than for joy. I thought of my then-husband, and in one of my more honest moments I knew I didn’t truly treasure him the way they were talking about.
Then I looked at my daughter, sitting next to me.
I never wanted to be one of those women whose whole identity got swallowed up in motherhood. How sad for them, I’d always thought, because when their kids are grown, what will they be left with?
Back when I thought this, I didn’t realize how radically one can remake oneself. I thought of people as static, not plastic, as we truly are. I had not yet had the experience of being a phoenix—of burning my sense of self down around me in order to birth myself anew from the ashes.
Now, I think a woman could dive headlong into motherhood, get completely transformed by it, then as her kids age out of needing her to be their everything, completely transform once again. All it takes is a willingness to experience loss followed by reintegration. I never used to be willing to go through this process, because I saw loss as an ill to be avoided at all costs. I used to build my life around the idea of permanence. And so when I became a mother, I wanted to remain myself first and foremost, then a mother.
Looking at my daughter, my heart melted. I treasure her. Her and her brother. My kids. I felt the fiercest love I’d ever felt before. I also longed for more.
That’s when I began to regret my tubal ligation. At age 28, five years after the procedure. I knew on some level that I wanted more kids, even as I maintained that I didn’t want them with my then-husband. Because I didn’t want more kids with my then-husband, and because of the seeming impossibility of having them with my tubal ligation, I assumed I would never have more kids. And so I caught my daughter’s eye, and gave her a smile. I made sure to cherish my time with her.
I can’t honestly say that my revelation changed my behavior much. I’d like to think I put in more effort with my kids afterward, but I’m not sure I did. I know I was depressed and reclusive, that my habits and my kids’ expectations were pretty well-formed by then. It would have been difficult to change much at all. I know I don’t have any solid memories of the mundane from that period, because so soon, there were so many colossal events to overshadow all else.