The way it probably wasn't

Okay, so, I need to tell this story... because. Just because. Facebook is a breeding ground for trolls who try and yell at me because I am not like them. So, here is a story.

When I was fifteen years old, leaning toward sixteen, I had a recurring dream. I was married. I was twenty-six. I was in a hospital bed, in labor, and the bed was tilted up so I was kind of sitting. My belly was swollen. Cramps and contractions forced me to bear down, and somehow I knew it was with the same muscles used to move my bowels, except I'd had an enema. I had no idea how the pain was, so in the dream there was extreme pressure with menstrual-type cramps, and I was sobbing. Someone was holding my hand - my husband. I looked at him but his face was shadowed. All I could see was that he had bright blue eyes. I knew his voice was a tenor voice. I cried, "This will kill me. I can feel it. I'm going to die." My husband said, "No, no, sweetheart, you will be fine. What should we name her? Our daughter?" In a fit of pain, I screamed, "Amara. With your grandmother's name in the middle. Amara! Everlasting! Immortal! It will kill me but she will live!"
A doctor told me to PUSH, and I PUSHED, and I very clearly, intensely, felt SOMETHING being pushed through my vagina, something huge... and then it was pulled, PULLED. I was sobbing and screaming and I could feel my hips shattering. A voice said, "Don't cut the cord yet, wait until the fetus takes all the nutrients." And I sobbed softly, "Taking everything. I give myself up."
My husband's tenor voice said over and over, "There she is. I love you." All I could see, through a haze, was a human-shaped thing covered in blood and white goo, squealing like a kitten. "Everlasting immortal voyager through life," I murmured, and I closed my eyes.

I just remember that pressure, that disconnection, the thing TAKEN OUT OF ME, the way I couldn't feel anything below my waist afterward. I don't know if I died. I don't know if I went comatose. I just know that I was twenty-six, my husband had blue eyes and a tenor voice and his name ended in -m, and it was the most horrific experience I could imagine.

And here's the thing: When I was twenty, I met a man with bright blue eyes and a tenor voice, named Adam, with two grandmothers who had names starting with B. One grandmother was named Beatrice - "Voyager Through Life" - and when we dated and considered future kids, he suggested that a girl's middle name could be Beatrice. But then we decided that children were not for us, not after I became so ill with various disabilities.
We got married when I was twenty-six years old. The wedding was one of the most stressful and frightening experiences of my life.

Now, those people insisting that I should have children, that "I would be a wonderful mother" (an insulting slap in my face), might see this as a premonition. It was a premonition. I predicted the person I would marry. I predicted the age at which I would go through an extreme change in my life. I predicted that I would go through an intense, frightening series of medical problems that would change my life.
But it had nothing to do with pregnancy or childbirth. Nothing at all.

This is what I wrote on my Facebook:
"Dear certain people with children who are being very annoying and loud and religiously fervent:
Yes, yes, your children are beautiful and amazing and the greatest creations you have ever created and the absolute loves of your lives and the brightest stars in your sky and your reasons for living and the greatest most talented most gorgeous most intelligent children ever, I get it, I get it. Good for you. I'm thrilled, truly.
Now quit insisting that I must have children of my own. I don't want any. Never wanted. Will never want. Do not want. Medically should not have. I have reasons. I don't care what you think of my reasons. Go away and stop talking about this to me. I don't want children, I don't want to get pregnant, and I don't want to automatically love your baby. If I have to save this and use this as a Standard Response every single time, I shall. Stop telling me I must experience your overwhelming joy, the way you never knew true love and pure happiness before your children. It appears that you are experiencing plenty of overwhelming joy and true love and pure happiness, so you seem to have more than enough. Please enjoy. I will be over there, not being you."

The reason I revealed this dream was to explain that not everything means something literal. And also that I often have precognitive dreams - which is hard to do, since there are so many futures and they're all fluid. Maybe in an alternate reality, I did have a child. But not in this one. Never in this one.

Jewelry: It's not just for beauty.

Some people have been asking me why I wear so many specific bracelets in varied order. It isn't because the stones are beautiful, though they are. It is for neuromuscular and sensory processing balance. See, since my left arm, affected by spastic ataxic cerebral palsy, often feels ghost-like, I wear multiple gemstone stretch bracelets to give weight to that arm, so I can feel that weight, look at my arm, and think, Oooh, pretty stones, and oh, right, I should use this arm. Raw amber, charoite, lepidolite, kyanite, tourmaline.
On my right wrist, the balancing act is more of a counterweight. The raw amber, polished amber, fluorite, and lepidolite help me concentrate on my total physicality. I am inside my mind too much. My body needs me just as much, even more.
It is the same reason I wear gemstone rings: charoite, lepidolite, seraphinite, kyanite - the gemstones that work best for me, alongside amber resin. On my left hand are my green gold wedding ring and my inherited yellow gold band. On my right hand is my heirloom engagement ring. I need balance, once again. So I wear a ring on my left index finger and two rings on my right middle finger. Balance is vital for me with my particular set of neurological damages. It helps that all these stones have metaphysical properties that work perfectly for me.









I do wish my left hand would not tremble so badly, even when propped against a surface. But that is what I live with and I respect it while I seek to improve and strengthen it.