I have everything I could ever want - except you

The job, the travel, the freedom, the pet, the money, but not you

Lately, I see him everywhere—

On the streets near the apartment, in the playground swing behind the Airbnb, in plane aisles, wobbling into the sea on Montenegrin beaches, even next to me on loungers by a pool in Croatia.

I notice mini checkered Vans next to bigger, daddy-sized counterparts, and lost pacifiers on the streets of Bosnia.

Swim trunks drying in the European sun. A toy-sized Beemer parked in the lobby. Empty snack wrappers, abandoned near trash bins.

Memorabilia of a life I’m so sure I’m meant to have - of a son I’ve yet to meet. Or maybe once, did. Because it all feels familiar. As though I’ve lived it already. Like I’ve been a mother with the dirty pacifier that fell out of the stroller.

I see little boys, with toothy smiles, their chests puffed out and tummies full of french fries as they stumble into new adventures on tiny feet with those microscopic nail beds.

I watch energy-ridden toddlers, and their fatigued parents willing the European vacation to be memorable, and I’m jealous with the desire to be just as tired. What I would trade to be as back ached, yet inherently alert. Because parenting, it seems, means being endlessly wide-eyed. No smoke breaks. No lunch pardons. On the clock.

I see fathers scrolling their phones as their children learn to somersault in the pool and I want to gently push their hand down from their face, whisper: watch them.

Watch your children be so charmingly childish. Look at them discover the world in front of you. Isn’t it endlessly fascinating, to see them become? To witness their brain close the quiet, astonishing gap between unskilled and skilled.

Their little faces when they break through the pool water, alive and innocent. Big, toothy grins and red-eyed from chlorine. Spitting pool water from their cheeks as they take air, never-minding the mutual disdain of other adult guests who see it, too. Let them wince. Let the guests look. There is no shame in joy, even when it arrives drenched with splashes and squeals and the chaos of becoming. Your child is being a child. And it will all be over so quickly.

To this, I wonder:

How is it, exactly, that I have everything I have ever wanted — except for you, my child?

And how is it that at 36 everything I do have feels so meaningless without you?

The feminist in me curdles at these thoughts which plague my 4AM sleeplessness. But, the mother in me yearns anyhow.

If success is defined by freedom and fulfillment, then yes - I’ve built exactly what I set out to.

I am financially sound. I enjoy my career, and serve as my own boss. I work remotely in a time where everyone has been ushered back into stale offices and HR-enforced happy hours.

No one tells me where to be or when. I fly anywhere at anytime. I am free, physically well, vanity-speaking socially acceptable, and more importantly, I remain adventurous — even as I age. I seem to never tire of the next big unknown quest whether it’s smuggling the cat to Croatia to get her EU pet passport or living in a Van during a pandemic.

Age (and money) seem to only embolden my adventurous nature. And with that, I feel I’ve got life half-licked: to not allow age to dampen my curiosity, to keep a sense of wonder about what there is to see and believe in this world. Really, I think you have life mostly figured out when you choose to not let it embitter you.

And somehow, in the midst of all the bullshit in this world, I still keep a childlike excitement about what there is to experience in it.

Only, I’m tired of exploring it alone. In my quest for freedom, in all my foot stamping “I’ll show you” ambitions and adventures and career beginnings and flight changes — it seems somewhere down the rocky road of existence I lost grip of the very thing I want the most:

To be needed, without end. To love another, eternally. To be endlessly a mother.

“I thought it would happen by now,” I find myself saying to no one in particular.

How am I not a mother, yet?

Haven’t I loved so many? Lived entire chapters? Woven myself into so many lives? Tried on more ways of being? And, even if I left, hadn’t I loved each of these experiences more than the last?

Wasn’t this all life building toward that ultimate thing? The climactic ending of a family and home?

Wasn’t all of this supposed to lead me to who I’m meant to share the rest of my life with? And have children beside.

To end one book for the next, full of chapters of bed wetting and Christmas Eve nights by the fireplace, putting together plastic toys from Santa at 2AM:

I don’t understand how it hasn’t. As if I haven’t been my own maestro, I find I look around lately for whomever else to blame for this catastrophic misstep.

My ex for his immaturity. The ex before that for his X, and that one before that for whatever character issue I couldn’t align.

But, I see many of them move forward - quite a few in fatherhood - and I know to deem them culpable of my motherless womb is to lazily beset my own responsibility in all of this misstepping, too.

So often, I was the one to leave — even if I felt I was given no choice but to do just that.

I just never thought leaving would mean ending up here — 36, unsure of what comes next, and even more unsure of who I’ll share it with.

I thought the first book of my life would be finished by now.

Instead, here it is dragging on, like a Hallmark movie with its copy/paste script. Chapters droning of pretty sunsets, good wine, passing nomadic friendships, 12-hour work days, solid bank account statements, and an unsettling sense of impatience.

Lately, I can’t help but wonder: have I done it all wrong?

My freedom, it seems, will only ever be appreciated once interlocked with the understanding that, as a mother, I can never be free again.

That’s the kind of captivity I’d welcome.

Until then, my child, I’ll keep building a life you’ll be proud to land in — and I watch for you, everywhere, on playground swings, in beach waves, and every pair of tiny checkered Vans that pass by.