To Landon Kirk Ryals:
Hopefully, your mother will save this column for you. By the time you’re old enough to grasp what I have to say, it will be timeworn and yellow, and there will be streaks of gray in my hair and in your mother’s.
You’re barely a month old now, but someday you’ll be a man. Even then, it will be hard for you to understand what your mother did for you, or what other women who make the same decision she did still go through in our society, even in the year 2001. I’m asking you to try anyway.
Like most single women, I’ve occasionally awoken from a nightmare that I’d somehow become pregnant, a nightmare in which I had to make an agonizing decision. I could explain to my boss, my friends, the neighbors and my parents that though I’m not married, though I don’t even have a boyfriend, I’ve had an accident of sorts. Or, for a couple hundred dollars I could hide my secret and have my child forcibly removed from my uterus — and then live, one day at a time, through the lifetime of guilt and self-reproach that often follows an abortion.
Either way, as a woman, you lose. As a man, you’ll never have to make these decisions, Landon. You’ll never cross your arms over your swelling stomach and grit your teeth through questions by well-meaning strangers about the husband they assume you have. You’ll never have to look your dad in the face and say the four words that tear at a father’s heart.
“Yes Dad, I’m pregnant.”
You won’t feel compelled to explain to present and future friends and acquaintances that you really don’t fit society’s stereotype of the typical unmarried, single mother, that you’re an educated, responsible person who happens to have fallen into that small percentage who take precautions but lose at the fertility roulette game that even the most responsible woman plays.
In our society, for the most part, it’s the women who pick up the pieces that men leave behind and make a life out of them with little support and even less appreciation. It’s women who raise the kids when a marriage splits up, women who bear the larger burdens and responsibilities of family life.
That’s what makes your mother Bonnie and women like her so extraordinary, Landon. She didn’t wake up one day and find herself a single parent with no help from a former husband. Instead, she weighed the personal cost of giving you life in the same careful manner that she weighs everything, from her checkbook to her exercise regimen. On the day you were born, she began paying that cost so that your little soul wouldn’t pass briefly through this world without feeling the sun on your face or falling asleep to the lullaby of crickets on a warm summer night.
That’s why I’m so awed by what your mother has done. She and others like her didn’t have to do what they did, but they chose it anyway, though it was by far not the easiest way. As a single mother on a small income, the cost she and others like her will pay to bring their children into the world is particularly profound — and rarely if ever recognized by our society.
At 25, her life was just gearing up. She was finishing up college, living on her own and enjoying the freedoms of being young. On the day you were born, that changed forever. Without a husband to share the burden, her days are now spent mostly inside, monopolized with your care.
She’s alone now in a way that she never quite was before. The things of the past — concerts, clubs and friends — have been relegated to the now-alien world of youth. That will improve a bit as time goes on, but the part of her that was still a kid is now gone forever.
It’s what she gave up that twists my heart when I see my sister, haggard in her bathrobe, leaning over your crib for the second feeding and the third diaper of the day. I so clearly see the price she’s paid, even if she can’t. But then, she’s too caught up with your double chin and dimpled behind these days to notice much of anything else.
So respect your mother, even when you disagree with her. If you do nothing else for your mother and our family, make something worthwhile of your life. It was a beautiful gift that was given to all of us at a cost we are only beginning to understand.
But it’s a cost, I know, that our family would pay again and again to have you here with us. Welcome to the Servatius family, Landon.
Love,
Your Aunt Tara
This article appears in Oct 13-19, 2001.
