Avery: A Story of Learned Desire

This is a longer version of a post I wrote about seven months ago, so parts might sound familiar. At the time it was too emotionally sensitive to post in full, but I’ve developed some space from it since. Maybe someone out there can see themselves in this story.

Sometimes I wish to God I had never met Avery. Then I would still be indifferent to children.

* * *

I started babysitting Avery a month before I graduated with my M.A. I had worked two summers as a research assistant for a professor in my department, and she was hiring my dad and husband to build kitchen cabinets for her new house. I drove out to my dad’s shop to join their first meeting. I hadn’t talked to her for a while as she had been on maternity leave for the last couple of months. When she half-jokingly suggested I could work for her again as a childcare provider, I asked, “Really?” I loved the idea. I was thinking about going off the Pill soon and trying for kids. I thought this would be a great opportunity for some life experience.

At that point I still only wanted kids on a theoretical level. I had done the math and decided in my brain that now would be an appropriate time to start reproducing. There wasn’t any emotion behind the decision, only logic.

I had never been drawn much to children. They had never struck me as particularly interesting or desirable. They were needy and irritating. I had never been interested in cuddling or kissing or playing with children. I’d never had a flickering moment of desire for physical contact with a child.

That remained true, that is, until Avery.

The first couple of times babysitting were awkward. I hadn’t handled a five-month old in over a decade, when my littlest sister was a baby. I didn’t know how to coddle or play with him. I just talked to him like an adult – “Are you hungry? Are you in need of a diaper change?” – and watched him as he lay on the floor or sat in his baby chair. It was all right, though. I liked him all right.

One of the most shocking and confusing moments of my life was when I was babysitting Avery for the third or fourth time. I was carrying him in my arms, walking in circles around their apartment to get him to stop fussing, when he suddenly calmed down and decided to plop his weight forward and lay his head against my chest.

In an instant, something completely new and alarming ran through my body. I didn’t know what it was.

I was horrified. Stunned. And permanently altered. I suddenly recognized the feeling: it was pleasure. And I have never been the same since.

I got weak-kneed and had to sit down. I shifted his weight away from me slightly. What was happening to me? I was not the motherly type. I had no idea how to respond to this strange new feeling.

A few months later, something worse happened. When he flung himself against me, as I was now accustomed to him doing, he put his cheek against mine, causing my lips to inadvertently brush against his face. Instinctively, I half-kissed him. I was shocked by my own behaviour. I had never done anything like that before. I was immediately electrified with guilt and shame. My skin burned. I felt . . . almost dirty. I moved my face away quickly and shut my eyes against the tears. I had never felt such intense desire for someone before in my life. It almost choked me.

He wasn’t mine. I almost felt like an adulterer – enjoying someone who didn’t belong to me.

It was a very confusing moment. I made sure our faces never came into contact again after that.

Ever since then, my desire for a baby of my own has been almost physically painful. I have spent so many hours weeping because I don’t have a little one to kiss and hold. And the sensation was made worse by the fact that it was so new and came on so suddenly. When did I become this person? Who was I, really? How did one deal with such emotions? My newfound desire for children was confusing and disorienting. I’m not a woman, I’m an academic! Or . . . at least, I was. Now that I was out of school, planning to become a mother but decidedly un-pregnant, I didn’t know what I was.

Interestingly, Ben fell in love with Avery, too. We once babysat him together in the evening when his parents went to a concert. Avery liked the feel of Ben’s beard, looking him straight in the face as he patted Ben’s chin, and we let him play on our laps as we watched a movie in their darkened living room. Ben always reflects on that day with a melancholy smile. “I wish we could play with him again,” he’ll often say.

I continued to watch my little borrowed angel on a weekly basis until he was a year old. I went from bottle-feeding him to feeding him solid foods; I cared for him as he learned to sit up and then handle toys and knock down the block towers that I built for him. I learned which books were his favourites and which blankets he liked to sleep with. Then he was old enough for full-time daycare, and I got a good-paying job as a research assistant for a different professor.

I was hopelessly and irrevocably in love with Avery. It was a strange experience, like falling in love with a married man. It was painful to be around him, knowing that our time together was not forever and that he would leave a cavern in my life when the job ended. But I also delighted in his presence. I looked forward to our afternoons together and couldn’t wait to sit with him on the grass at the nearby park. I understood now what it felt like to love someone you could never actually be with.

Through Avery I fell in love with all babies. I see children with changed eyes. I feel a pang in my gut every time I pass a school yard at recess or a chubby face glancing up from a passing stroller. I can imagine myself as their mother. But I’m no one’s mother.

Fifteen months have come and gone since I first met him and decided I was ready to be a mother. Seven months have passed since I last cared for him. I’ve learned enough about my body and fertility to recognize that motherhood will probably not be a part of my life anytime soon. Every month when the menstrual cramps begin to seize my uterus I curse the day I met that cherub-faced charmer with his clear blue eyes and hair that matched mine, making him feel like he could almost be mine.

Just the other day, Ben leaned over me to see a new picture of Avery that his dad had put up on Facebook and he repeated with his adoring chuckle, “I wish we could play with him again.”

I don’t understand why or how God allowed me to fall in love with a child – and through him, all children – at the exact moment when I discovered I couldn’t have any of my own.

It feels like a cruel joke was played on me. Someone was being tricksy and mean. And I do my best to forget that I ever wanted babies. I wish I had never learned to love something I couldn’t have.

Photo courtesy of Hapal.