Anyway this rings so true with me. Neither of my children were planned, but neither were they mistakes. I always intended to have them, it's just that I didn't know when they would come along and bless my life.
The tears I cried at my 16wk ultrasound were those of joy! It's a shame they were mistaken for the grief of an unplanned pregnancy. My special moment was undermined by well meaning reasurances of a lovely GP who just didn't understand my philosophy in life...
Now that the children are in their late teens and their twenties I still occasionally find myself reassuring them that they were a part of the bigger picture. That they were not mistakes. I sometimes feel the term family planning is misused and misunderstood which is a shame. Maybe it's that I'm old fashioned, quirky or excentric, but I sincerely believe that things happen when they're meant to happen.
Young people these days seem to take everything so seriously, they find themselves in 'relationships' when they're just dating for the first time instead of just enjoying each others company and having fun together while it lasts. I wonder is this how we genuinely felt way back when or is this the influence of modern society and social media? Did every parent through the generations find themselves telling their children that this is just a practice run and not to take things too seriously?
Yes! There were broken hearts and sadness from time to time, but this was generally because one of the 'couple' had moved on to pastures greener. That of course because they were the love of our lives and our dreams of living happily ever after were shattered. But we got over it and in times moved on to our own far away hills.
These days boys and girls are self harming because so and so didn't reply to a text or message within an instant? No! For us it was differenct. We waited patiently in a magical dreamlike state for the time they'd arranged to call or meet up and generally we kept to those arrangements. Often this meant that we didn't see each other from one end of the week to the next, but somehow we managed and in a way it was testiment to the adage that 'absence makes the heart grow fonder!'
From the age of twelve growing up in Ireland meant that there was a waiting list of roughly 10yrs for telephone instalation. Ours was fitted once I'd left home. We made our arrangements and tried hard to keep to them. I'd be at the phone box down the road from my digs with a pile of 50p coins anxiously waiting for the person inside the box to finish their call in the hope that the person on the other side hadn't got fed up of waiting for me to ring! That was just one of the many uncertainties of life way back then but we coped.
The point of this is that try as we may, we cannot have control of everything. Babies arrive despite the best of planning & they also fail to arrive regardless of how ever much we might want or try for one. Even IVF isn't a surety of parenthood despite the financial and emotional strain undertaken on its behalf...
At the end of the day things do happen if and when they were meant to. The sooner we accept this the happier our society will be. As a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment