What Love Looks Like
By: Katherine Lacaze
Tags: Motherhood, Parenting, Unwanted Pregnancy, Love, Pregnancy

I knew this moment would come. I had been anticipating it — anxiously, in fact.

My 5-year-old, recently obsessed with pregnancy and mothering and all the supposed glory and excitement it brings, came to me with half an LOL Surprise ball under her shirt to emulate a gestating belly. Bubbling and cheerful, she asked me, “Were you so excited to have me?”

Her intonation indicated she wasn’t actually curious, but rather asking a question to which she was fully convinced she knew the answer. Because of course her mom, who loves getting to know and spend time with her now, must have been anticipating her arrival. It only makes sense, right?

Because she’s 5, and because she’s not looking for truth but for validation, I hesitated a mere second before lying, “Of course! I was so excited to have you.” Satisfied, she followed it up with further rhetorical questions: “You just couldn’t wait to have me?” “You were so excited to meet your daughter?” Again, I answered emphatically and in the affirmative. Lie after beautiful lie.

Like I said, I knew this day would come, and I’ve deliberated about how I would handle such inquiries. Honestly, I thought she would question me about my experience — or rather, our experience — when she was older, when the temptation to explain the complicated, nuanced truth would be stronger and potentially worth indulging. Since it happened sooner than I expected, the necessity to oversimplify my answers to the point of dishonesty was much more obvious.

And here is the truth: I wasn’t excited when I found out I was pregnant. I had, in fact, recently realized I didn’t have to be a mom if I didn’t want and decided that was probably the best option given my independence-loving personality and career aspirations. So when the medical professional at the walk-in clinic I visited stealthily one day after work returned to my examination room with a piece of paper bearing a single line of indisputable truth — I was pregnant — I started crying. I was alone. I was scared. And I was completely unprepared.

Over the next several months I researched adoption agencies and contemplated whether I could successfully produce the baby and give it to someone else without my family finding out. Arriving at the determination that I would keep and attempt to mother her was the result of a long, emotionally arduous, and grief-soaked process during which I vacillated between the various options. It required tiny, hesitant steps and the accumulation of support offered by my siblings, parents and co-parent. Also, the accessibility of WIC.

Will I ever communicate that to her? Is it even necessary to do so?

Some people would say it’s decidedly not. They might even think it’s cruel or would cause her to feel hurt, unwanted, and, ultimately, unloved. At her current age, yes, that’s undoubtedly valid. The truth isn’t necessary because she wouldn’t understand it. But I sort of hope one day I could be honest with her. I think it matters because the fact that I wasn’t excited to have her doesn’t change the fact that I love her. What it does change significantly is how I love her, and what that love looked like to begin with.

My love did not look like joyfully calling my friends and family with the news of my pregnancy. It didn’t look like me scouring parenting websites, creating a gift registry, and counting down the days until her arrival. It didn’t look like me researching the best practices for being a parent. It didn’t look like excitement.

I planted and cultivated my love a different way, by choosing to have her, even when I wasn’t ready and when I knew it would derail the immediate future I had planned. These days, I demonstrate my love by picking her up from school when she’s sick and spending the afternoon with her, even though it means having to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning to finish work that had to be postponed. My love looks like working hard to provide for her, taking her to doctors’ appointments, shopping for foods I know she’ll enjoy, going to the restaurants she prefers, watching Yo Gaba Gaba repeatedly, and making sure none of her needs go unmet. And thanks to who she is and her boundless charm, cleverness, and humor, we laugh and have fun, and now I do get to be excited to see her.

This is the truth I want her to know, because it doesn’t discredit my love. It merely gives it a different look and makes it my own.

I want her to know that although my love doesn’t look the way I believed love for a child would — or was taught it should — I love her whole-heartedly in the best ways I personally can. As to why I feel it’s important for her to one day know this, I’m still trying to figure that out. Maybe I just hate the idea of lying to her about anything. Maybe I feel she could learn from experience something she’ll eventually apply to her own life. Maybe I just want assurance that it’s enough. That the truth is enough. That my type of love is enough. That I’m enough.

I mean, at the end of the day, isn’t that what we are all searching for?