A few weeks ago I was flying home to Seattle, from John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, CA., after spending a weekend in Venice, CA. While I was waiting for my departure, I found myself sitting next to a woman who had the most delightful smile. As strangers do, we started chatting about what our trips were about. She was 80 and had just spent the weekend in Rancho Santa Fe, visiting her son, celebrating his 50th birthday. As people do, after time, impersonal conversation morphs into more personal, as you begin to sense a similarity in energies. A companionable trust builds and you begin asking questions and discussing things of a more personal nature.
I have been thinking about that conversation for 2 weeks now and as much as I do not want to write about it, I must or else something inside will keep eating away at me, as it has for a number of years now. It is time to release the poison.
Until our discussion, the realization that it was still there was not apparent as the years, relationships,personal growth and wisdom developed. It lay buried among memories and realizations. I think she was an angel sent me that day, so I could lay to rest this anguish.
The question she asked me was if I had any children. Answer: "No". She asked me why not? Answer:"Never met a man I wanted to raise a child with." She looked at me sharply and said, "But you are such a beautiful, charming woman, what man would not want to have children with you?" Response: "Thank you, however I never met that man." She asked, "could it be that they were never meant to be the one you would spend the rest of your life with?". Pause, Answer:"Oh, God, you're right!". She leaned closer to me and said, "Don't worry about it, my dear, someone is here for you. God always sends us a mate, just as he does for the geese."
We laughed and I thanked her.
She pulled out her cell phone and scrolled to show me a picture of 4 people. Her children, all adopted. 4 months after they married, her husband was involved in a car accident and lost the ability to have children. He asked her a few months afterwards, if she wanted a divorce. She said, she was devasted that he would think, she would leave him because they could not have children. He was her love. She told him that she could not imagine being in the world without him and said they would be parents of children who had lost theirs. They would adopt. Each of their children were orphaned because the parents had been killed in car accidents.
Sometimes you cannot get the seat on the plane you want. I like the aisle seat, however that afternoon a window seat was mine. It was perfect for what I had to process. Thinking about her bravery and love, for her husband, and the last thing she said to me, before we parted, brought tears to my eyes. She asked me if I believed in love. I told her I did.
She said, when you find that one person to love and he finds you, that is the first surrendering, in a relationship. It is the "playground" for the adventures you will have together. She said you never know what type of day it will be on the playground, you never know who will be out there with you, but you are there with your dearest, and that is all that matters. The second surrendering occurs when God throws you a curve ball, as it did them with her husband's accident. They could have divorced, however, because they had played so well together, everything that happened in their lives since then, stemmed from the first surrender to love. Their love for one another was the basis from which love grew into their lives.
That is wisdom at its finest, isn't it? Glad I could not get a good flight into LAX, that weekend, otherwise we would have missed one another.
The anguish in me is gone now. It took a week or so.
It was the fear I had surpressed for so long, because of mammary ductile carcinoma which visited my body about 10 years ago. My life was saved by a wise surgeon who was able to remove the bright light, as it appears in a nuclear x-ray and had only to perform a lumpectomy. He saved my life and "the ladies" as he called them.
Because of it,however, I am unable to have children. This happens sometimes to women with certain types of carcinomas. Doctors may not mention the risk, however mine did, and, so, it came to be. I was happy to be alive and well, and the secondary effect did not bother me, until I began dating a man, about two years after the operation. We had a few dinner dates, some kissing and hand holding. Then one afternoon, we got into one of those more personal, "fishing-for-similar-goals" discussions, we all have when dating someone new.
He was a nice guy, good teeth, knew how to hoist a sail, and actually had a career he was good at and he could dance. Oh, ya! Well, the short story is when he found out I could not have children, he stopped calling. I could see it upset him as he could not hide the STOP sign, when it appeared in his eyes. He was kind enough to tell me that it was a "major" goal of his to have children (from his own seed, I gathered), so I deleted his phone number from the address book, that night. (No, we did not have sex.)
Why am I telling you this? Because, there are a lot of people out there who cannot have children because of things like this, and probably have the same worries I did. Guys, is it your blood line that needs to continue? Will it cause you to walk away from maybe the love of your life?
Is it that important or is it the raising of a child, who carries your name, with someone you love, important?Are you going to require your bloodline continue and walk away from the love of your life? It happens, as it is true for women who want to experience the physical wonder of birth, and would have walked away from a husband, in a car accident, who could not produce semen.
Just trying to get it out there, that love is all around and anything is possible, as was for that lovely woman and her husband. It all worked out because they loved-- Nothing else mattered.
Being a "beautiful and charming woman", my worry since that health challenge was that a man would come along who loved me, who wanted children. How could I tell him it was impossible, after the sailor boy quit calling incident? To not give someone I love, the one thing they desire, would be a sorrowful travesty for me. Evidently, as she reminded me, sailor man wasn't The One ;). Her story made me realize that I had to trust in love, and the First Surrender.
From that love, all else would flow.
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