Last week, my life was transformed in a most marvelous way: I became a grandmother, quite an accomplishment for an infertile person who spent nearly two decades in the pursuit of motherhood.
I’ll spare you the details, but suffice it to say that both my ex-husband and I brought our own biological limitations to the conception process. Either of us paired with someone else might have been able to reproduce, but that really wasn’t the point. Still, when one marries into a large Irish Catholic family, childlessness is a suboptimal outcome. In the end, though, my childlessness enabled me to divorce amicably and without complication after 19.9 years of a marriage that lacked a great deal more than the pitter patter of little feet.
In an ironic twist, I then married Mr. Carolina, a man who’d fathered two sons, then had a vasectomy back in the 1970’s, when this was A Very Progressive thing to do. Now that I’ve turned the corner of menopause, it’s clear that reproduction is off the table… not that I would have wanted children in this marriage. Relations with my two step sons who were in high school and college when I married their father were already strained. The older son (“James”) remained estranged for over a dozen years; the other (“Drew”) who was always closer to his father held out for a short while, then yielded to the inexorable pull of love and enjoyed a great relationship with both of us.