I was thinking about this a lot today because I had been having some symptoms of pregnancy, and while the pee-stick told me I was not, it brought up some stuff. I love kids. I love my own kid. I want more kids. But Badr and I are not at a point, financially, where having kids makes any kind of sense. I was still so sad when I got the – instead of the +.

I used to pride myself on being a good mother. It was one of the few things in my life, I would say to myself, that I had done right. Now that illusion is quite shattered, and while I really was a good mother for the first few years of Bear’s life, I certainly let him down in the end. I couldn’t even pull myself together enough to get to his 6th birthday party. I think that will haunt me forever, along with all the innumerable other missed school pick-ups, weekend get-togethers, etc. Not to mention I had my head stuck so far up my own ass I wasn’t even there emotionally.

It’s hard, sometimes, to come to grips with that. I abandoned my own child for my own selfish reasons, and while his father certainly picked up all the slack admirably, it left behind a huge scar, on my heart and his. I had THE TALK with him, explaining what had happened, and where I was for all those nights and months and years, and he handled it really well. I’m not sure how much of it really sank in, though, and I know it is a talk I will repeat probably more than once in the future.

It’s just… how do you make up for that?

And the answer is, of course, you can’t. And that’s hard for me to accept sometimes. I want to feel that if I am good, and do the right thing, and “act right”, somehow it will all disappear. But I know it won’t, and that makes me very, very sad.

Hell, that makes as much sense as the real reason, which is that I missed one day, and then I got all guilty-like, and avoided even looking at the computer for the next day, and then I felt even more guilty, and then I developed some variety of teen-age-esque defiant attitude about how if I didn’t want to write in my damn blog, I damn well didn’t have to. And then I felt guilty some more. And then I kind of forgot, cause I started playing the Sims 3 again, and GuildWars.

But guess what? I have something to actually write about now, so here I am. Bear came to stay with Badr and I for 2 weeks!! *dance* And it was awesome. We went to Quakecon, which was pretty sweet, and Bear basically melded with the Wolfenstein demo and there were free tshirts and general geekery all around. And we spent lots of time in the pool (that kid has an imagination on him, boy-howdy) and playing video games, and even managed a quick DnD session and a rodeo. It was wonderful, and I remembered why I had been doing all the stuff I have been doing over the past months.

Unfortunately, it had to end, mostly because he’s going into 6th grade on Monday. Middle school. I remember middle school. I definitely count as old now. :)