A mother's love

Chapter 39

The fertility treatments proved unsuccessful and after six months they returned to their fertility specialist, who told them that he wanted them to keep trying the fertility treatments for another six months. Unsatisfied with his prescription they sought a second opinion and it was no different. Brenda kept going with the fertility treatments but her hope faded as more time passed without her falling pregnant. After four more months of no success Brenda stopped the treatments and they never returned to their fertility specialist. She could persevere no longer; a year of failure was enough for her to accept that raising a family was not in her future. Adoption was talked about but not seriously. She took six months off from teaching during which she absorbed and sought to overcome the utter desolation she was overwhelmed by when she accepted that she wasn't going to be a mother. She was deeply depressed and Simon was as useless as he'd been during the first months of her fertility treatments. Brenda started giving serious thought to leaving him but there were times when she thought that she may not be able to go back to teaching and couldn't ignore the financial security that Simon provided. Her disappointment over not being able to have children would eventually subside and when it did she was still going to have a life to live and she wasn't going to live that life being single and scraping by on her teacher's salary, not when forty was right around the corner.

She didn't feel a strong enough push to leave and she ended up staying. She and Simon began the adjustment to being a couple that would always be childless and looked for opportunities that their situation afforded them of which they could take advantage. Two weeks before Brenda was due to return to school they went to Italy for ten days, the first of many such trips, Simon promised. He was good at those sorts of shallow things, and with the prospect of having children gone such enjoyments were all they had to look forward to. The money that they had been saving to spend raising their child went on bi-annual trips abroad, interior decorating projects that Brenda took on, and a 1971 Dodge Challenger that Simon planned on restoring by himself. Over time Brenda actually came to enjoy their casual life; she still ached when she heard the topic of children being talked about but it was nothing that she couldn't handle, she had made peace with the fact that she wasn't going to get to experience motherhood. She lowered her expectations for what she was going to get from Simon when the occasion called for him to display sensitivity and by doing so she created the conditions for them to find their way back to each other.

Five years later when she first suspected that she might be pregnant she had to keep her emotions in check to guard against the precipitous plunge she would experience if she got her hopes up and them learned that she wasn't pregnant. She had missed her period and thrown up once, too little for her to take the risk of becoming too hopeful. She didn't tell Simon that she might be pregnant and went to the doctor alone to get tested. She was in the middle of a class when she got the phone call confirming that she was pregnant and had to turn away from her students to have some degree of privacy in which she could absorb the news and go on with her lesson. The news that she was pregnant proved too much for her and she couldn't contain her reaction to it. She ran out of the classroom when she felt tears in her eyes that she wasn't going to be able to stop from falling and made her way to the faculty bathroom down the hall. Once she was safe inside she released all of the emotions that she had been fighting to contain and they all burst out of her. She cried uncontrollably as surprise, joy, relief and hope forced their way through her. She was joined in the bathroom by one of her friends and colleagues, Angela Kinsey, who'd seen her running down the hallway with her hand over her mouth and had followed her into the bathroom see if she was okay. Brenda told her the news and when Angela hugged her she had the support that she needed to let her emotions out of her in a somewhat controlled manner. When Simon returned home and she shared the news with him he was similarly overjoyed but it didn't take long for his natural inclination toward pragmatism to take over and for him to start ruing all of the money that they'd been saving for when they had a child that they'd spent on frivolous things. Brenda's excitement wasn't dampened by Simon's short-lived enthusiasm; nothing could dampen her excitement.