I’ve shared a few times about my relationship with my biological dad, my relationship with my stepdad, and the fact that my biological dad and I have been estranged for a long time.
I don’t really have anything new to report on that front.
But the closer I get to becoming a mother, the more I find myself thinking about it.
And not just my relationship with my dad.
I keep thinking about my mom, too.
Because my mom actually had a very similar situation growing up, except hers was worse.
Her mother took her from California and left my grandfather behind. Then, at some point, my mom was left with aunts and uncles in Texas while my grandmother continued on to Mississippi. My mom has three other siblings, and from what I understand, pretty much everyone was dropped off at different points between California and Mississippi.
Eventually, my grandfather got his children back and gained custody.
My grandmother wasn’t really in my mom’s life for a very long time.
And as a kid, I was furious about it.
Not necessarily because my grandmother had done anything directly to me, but because I was angry for my mom.
I remember thinking, How could you do that to your own child?
Then my grandmother came back into my mom’s life when I was a teenager, and I remember still carrying that anger. I couldn’t understand how my mom could let her back in after everything.
But my mom forgave her.
And eventually, so did I.
I think I’ve always understood forgiveness as something you do for the other person, but I’m starting to understand that sometimes forgiveness is really just putting down something you’ve been carrying for way too long.
It doesn’t mean what happened was okay.
It doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
It doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences.
It just means you don’t want that hurt to own you anymore.
And now I’m pregnant.
And somehow, pregnancy has made all of those old family wounds feel a little closer to the surface.
Because suddenly I’m thinking about my mom as a teenager.
And I’m thinking about myself as a kid.
And I’m thinking about my dad.
There was a point when my mom connected really deeply with “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” She eventually sent the song to her mother because it was her way of saying, You hurt me. This is how I feel. I don’t know how else to say it.
And honestly, I wish I had done something like that.
I wish I had the courage to have sent my biological dad the song that would have said everything I couldn’t.
Because there are things I wish he knew.
I wish he understood how I felt.
I wish he knew what his absence felt like.
I wish I could have explained the parts of growing up without him that I didn’t know how to put into words at the time.
And maybe that’s why I connected so strongly with Kelly Clarkson’s original version of “Piece by Piece.”
Not the rewritten version after her divorce. The original 2015 version.
The version where she’s singing about her father and the way that experience shaped her.
At the time, I didn’t even know that Kelly Clarkson was pregnant when she sang that version on American Idol.
Now I’m sitting here pregnant myself, and that detail feels almost surreal.
Because I understand that song differently now.
I’m not just hearing it as someone’s daughter anymore.
I’m hearing it as someone’s mother.
And that’s a completely different kind of gut punch.
Because I’m about to have a daughter.
And I’m suddenly thinking about all of the things my parents did right, all of the things they did wrong, and all of the things I desperately don’t want to repeat.
I’m thinking about the kind of mother I want to be.
I’m thinking about what my daughter will remember about me.
I’m thinking about whether she’ll ever sit in her room as a teenager and wonder why I did something the way I did.
I’m thinking about whether she’ll ever be angry with me.
And honestly, I hope she is.
Not because I want to hurt her, obviously.
But because I want her to feel safe enough to tell me when I’ve hurt her.
I want her to know she can be angry with me and still be loved.
I want her to be able to tell me that I fucked up.
I want to be the kind of mother who can hear that without making her feel like she has to protect my feelings.
Because I know what it feels like to have things you don’t know how to say.
And I don’t want that for her.
At the same time, I’m not trying to stir up drama with my biological dad.
He has said that he wants to be there for the baby.
And we’ll see.
I’m not going to deny him the opportunity to have a relationship with his grandchild.
The same goes for Hector’s family. I’m not going to deny them the opportunity to know her either.
But I will say that, in both situations, I want to be present for the interactions.
I don’t trust either side enough to leave my child alone with them.
I know some people will disagree with that.
And honestly, that’s fine.
People can have whatever opinions they want about how I handle my child and my family.
But I’m not willing to gamble with my daughter’s safety or my own peace of mind just to make someone else feel comfortable.
Maybe that changes someday.
Maybe it doesn’t.
I don’t know.
And that’s the thing about becoming a mother.
I suddenly have all of these questions about the future that I can’t answer.
I don’t even know if I’m going to have another child.
Everything is expensive. Life is expensive. Babies are expensive.
And getting pregnant wasn’t exactly as simple for me as I thought it would be.
I didn’t get pregnant when I expected to.
For a while, I wondered if it was even going to happen.
And then I ended up pregnant without even knowing I was pregnant.
I wouldn’t change that for anything.
I truly believe it happened in God’s timing, even if it wasn’t my timing.
But being grateful for this pregnancy doesn’t mean it has been easy.
It hasn’t.
There have been a lot of stressful moments.
There have been health concerns.
There are things I haven’t really talked about on this blog because, frankly, they’re scary.
There are some things that become a lot more frightening when you’re not just worrying about yourself anymore.
I’ve been on bedrest.
I’ve had to deal with not being able to work the way I normally would.
I’ve had moments where I’ve been scared about what was happening with my body and what it could mean for my baby.
And I think that’s part of why all of these thoughts about my family have been coming back.
Because when you’re sitting still, literally forced to slow down and spend a lot of time inside your own head, you start thinking about things you normally keep moving past.
I’ve been thinking about my grandmother.
I’ve been thinking about my mom.
I’ve been thinking about my dad.
I’ve been thinking about the little girl I used to be.
And now I’m thinking about the little girl I’m about to meet.
It’s strange realizing that I’m carrying not only a baby, but so much family history with me.
There are things that happened before I was born that still affected me.
There are things that happened when I was a child that shaped who I became.
And now I have the opportunity to stop some of those things from continuing.
I can’t change what happened to my mom.
I can’t change what happened between my parents.
I can’t go back and send my dad a song when I was younger and say, This is what you did to me. This is how it felt.
I can’t make my childhood different.
But I can make choices now.
I can choose to communicate.
I can choose to listen.
I can choose to apologize.
I can choose to give my daughter room to have feelings that make me uncomfortable.
I can choose to love her even when she’s angry with me.
I can choose to break whatever pieces of this cycle I can.
And maybe that’s what becoming a mother is really doing to me.
It’s making me look backward at the same time I’m looking forward.
I’m grieving some things.
I’m forgiving some things.
I’m questioning some things.
And I’m realizing that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.
But I do know one thing.
I want my daughter to grow up knowing that she was wanted.
That she was loved.
That she was safe.
And that no matter what happens in her life, she will never have to wonder whether her mother showed up for her.
Maybe I can’t change the family history I was given.
But I can decide what I hand down.
