You who never arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don’t even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment. All the immense
images in me– the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and unsuspected
turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods-
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house–, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.
Streets that I chanced upon,–
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled,
gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening…

-Rainer Maria Rilke

I have loved this poem for about eight years now. I first read it when I bought a poetry compilation book called “Art and Love”. It seems like such a long time ago… back then, I had not even met my now-husband, my darling cat wasn’t born into this lifetime yet, and I was madly in love with a short green-eyed dentist who didn’t know I was alive (the latter seems quite funny now that I’m over it, but it totally wasn’t at the time!).

The first time I read this poem I was absolutely stricken by its beauty and the imagery within it. I could see the mark of a truly good poem and poet- that feeling that the writer has written your feelings better than you could’ve written them yourself. Even now when I read it I can feel its vastness; that aching kind of emotional swelling that you get when a sorrow encompasses everything, that quiet (and even sometimes sharply pleasant, before it turns for the worst) sadness that comes with having to accept that a dream just might not ever come true.

At the time I discovered it- and for a long time after that- I thought of “You who never arrived” as a love poem. Now that I am older (and wiser? ha ha, probably not), it seems to apply to so many other areas of life. It applies to my relationship with my friend Steve (long story),  and it certainly applies to my childlessness.

There comes a point in infertility when you see your “non-existent” children everywhere. You catch glimpses of their reflections when you pass by a mirror, you smell them in the rain and the cold nighttime air of winter and in your husband’s skin. You hear their voices in the static on the radio and in the noise of crowds. Everything you look at and experience has a funny, distant, poignant feeling to it, like you are watching a movie of someone else’s kinda sad life.

Despite what other people may think, this does not mean that the infertile person experiencing this is “crazy” or “weird”. It’s just a form of grief and loss- albeit one that many fertile people can’t understand. It’s kind of like… like the way after someone you love dies, or a romantic relationship ends, it is all that is in your mind. Everything else fades to the background and becomes unimportant. You think about it when you wake up in the morning and you are still thinking about it as you lie in bed and try to fall asleep. But in this case you’re mourning something that never was instead of something that was and is no longer.

I find that this is the part of infertility grief that a lot of people have trouble with… including the person experiencing it. To me, it is one of the toughtest parts of being a childless mother: getting people to understand that the grief and pain are real… getting them to see that while I physically have no children, the desire for those children is so strong that they have become something nearly physical in my life.

So yes, “you who never arrived” now means different things to me. But in a way it is still a love poem, only now it’s a love poem to the babies that only exist in my mind and heart, and have not yet found a way to this world through me.

“Who knows?
perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, seperate, in the evening…”

There is hope yet, and I need to keep remembering that. There is hope and time yet.