Mother's Day Blues

This post is a bit delayed, partly due to avoiding the internet altogether on Mother's Day and partly due to life getting busy and forgetting. I went into Mother's day telling myself it was just like any other day...at least that's what I tried to convince myself. I made my video post, sent a happy mother's day post to my mom and hopped off the internet like it was on fire. I spent the day distracting myself with Netflix and video games but every so often a thought would fly into my head, like "wow imagine how different today would be if I had a 1 year old." I saw a robin outside trying to build her nest for her own babies and felt a familiar pang of sadness in my heart. I tried to cheer myself up by baking cookies but instead thought how much more fun it would have been to bake cookies with a little one. Overall though, I managed to do a pretty good job at forgetting it was Mother's Day...until the next day. The day after Mother's day was way worse, probably because I worked so hard repressing everything I was feeling from the day before. So the next day everything just let itself out, and despite avoiding the internet the day before, I still saw the barrage of Mother's Day posts on my feeds.

I don't want those that happily celebrate Mother's Day to feel any guilt for making public posts though because one day I hope to be one of those lucky people. It's just a hard day. Probably one of the hardest days throughout all of this because it's the only day that is a direct, no-doubt-about-it reminder that I am NOT a mother. I remember Mother's Day last year was difficult for me in a much different way. I was working in a preschool room at a daycare at the time and as such, we would help the children make special Mother's Day gifts for the mothers, grandmothers or other special women in their lives. There were a lot of reasons why working a the daycare helped to fill that hole in my heart in some capacity but there were many other reasons that made it hurt even more.

I loved being around kids, being someone that they looked up to and loved to spend time with. I loved being able to laugh with them, teach them things, and comfort them when they were hurt or sad. It definitely helped to fulfill my need to take care of someone. But then there were days when I would get asked out of the blue by a child if I had a baby in my belly...because their mommy had a baby in her belly. The days that I found out a child would be becoming a big brother or sister were bittersweet. The days that a child accidentally called me mommy instead of "Miss Megan" were heartbreaking. Saying goodbye to children leaving the center or even just moving up to the Kindergarten room were the days I had to hold back tears all day. There came a point where I had to decide what was best for my mental health and in the end, it got to be too hard being around the children all of the time after I started fertility treatments, despite how much I loved them...because even though being around them helped, I still went home every day to an quiet, empty house and the silence was deafening.