I never dreamt about having children. My sister did. Every year she asked for baby dolls for Christmas which she would cuddle and bottle feed religiously. If I wanted a doll at all it would be a Patti Play Pal which was a two foot high 5 year old who I could buy clothes for at the Thrift shop. No, I never ever dreamed of having children.

I dreamed of being great. I wanted to be a movie star because they were great. They were famous and rich and everyone looked at them and admired them and wanted to be around them and wanted to be married to them. I wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor.

I worked and worked all through school singing and acting and reaching for my goal of greatness.

In my twenties I got pregnant a couple of times and I ripped those things out of me so fast it would make your head swim. The men stood by in mute astonishment. There was nothing they could do about it because that little spec of flesh was gone and that was that.

I managed to become a working film actress and my cousins in Michigan thought I was great, but the odd thing was I never felt remotely great. I figured it was because I wasn’t a movie star yet.

But as the years rolled by my hope that I would achieve that goal was dimmed by harsh reality. Either I really didn’t want that kind of spotlight on me or I just didn’t have the stuff.

When I turned 35 and that boring procreation clock started ticking I began thinking things like, “Is having a child a life experience I should miss?”

But it was so scary. One thing that always appalled me about having children was the commitment involved. I always felt lumbered by people and is it any wonder since I had a father who was all over me like a cheap suit, expecting me to live life for him. I did not need something new sucking the life out of me.

But still my intellect persisted in asking, “Will you regret not having a child when you get to menopause?”

Finally I said to myself, “The greatness thing is over. I’m getting older and I don’t have anything much to do so I might as well see what this marriage and kid thing is all about.”

I met Alan Ormsby whom I decided would be a great sperm donor, both genes – wise and father –wise (He had two sons whom he had custody of!) As it turned out he was much, much more than that but I am not going to talk about Alan in this story.

We got married and embarked on conceiving a child. But it didn’t happen.

After a year and a half of trying, we looked into in vitro fertilization. When we realized the cost and the effort involved we decided not to do it. It was too much trouble and actually, kind of icky.

And then a strange thing happened to me. With my last hope of having a child gone, I felt saddened by the thought that I would never have a child. It was the first time I had any emotions attached to having a child.

I told Alan that I had changed my mind and would it be all right with him if we did this in vitro thing after all? Him being Alan, he said yes, of course.

When one does in vitro fertilization the process begins when you get your menstrual period. You have to start on fertility drugs on the first day and it goes on from there. Alan and I waited for my menstrual period so we could begin the process.

But my period never came…because I got pregnant.

Austen Ormsby made his way into the world on July 18, 1991. I was 42 years old.

You can describe my parenting skills as “I let Austen do whatever he wanted to do.” I rarely said no to him but when I did, he knew I meant it.

The only thing that I asked of him was that he do well in school. I never had him do chores. School was his work and he knew it. He could play video games, watch TV and eat candy for hours as long as his homework was finished and he was doing his job at school.

The reason I never had Austen do chores was I wanted motherhood to be easy for me. I didn’t want to nag. Once I gave him piano lessons and when it got to a point where I was dragging him to the keyboard to practice, we quit piano. And the same happened with baseball and soccer and drama class. When he didn’t want to go he stopped. I preferred to have kind, loving feelings between the two of us rather than have him know how to make a bed, take out the trash or play the piano.

If Austen and I ever had a difference of opinion I would stop everything and sit down with him and talk about what he wanted and what I wanted and we would come to a compromise. And if what he said sounded reasonable to me I would go along with what he said and change my mind. I talked to Austen with the same respect that I would talk to Alan or any other adult.

I also was extremely lucky because Austen was naturally good in school. He has an organized mind and took pride in being able to do his schoolwork well. I often wonder what I would have done if he had not been good at school. But I believe that if he told me he had wanted to be a ditch digger I would have taken him out of regular school and put him in a ditch digging school.

Austen had a pleasant, unspectacular childhood with school and parties and vacations and big family get-togethers on holidays. Life was good.

And then he reached puberty. He developed acne and it became the bane of his existence. He chose to retreat to his bedroom and play War Craft on his computer for hours on end. He was doing his school work so that was all right with me. He had few friends and few experiences from the 9th grade to the 11th grade.

When he was in the 11th grade his half-brother, Ethan, my stepson, died of cancer and although this will forever be one of the great traumatic events in Austen’s life, it also had an oddly perverse effect as well. It made him not care so much about everything. In his senior year in high school he became a part of life again. As he said, “He didn’t give shit.” Amazingly, he played Scrooge in the Christmas production of a Christmas Carol, he starred in a fashion show for prom tuxedos and went to the prom.

He got accepted to the University of California at Santa Barbara and after four wonderful, fun-filled, crazy years he got a Bachelor’s degree with two majors in Anthropology and Spanish.

Austen had always said since he was a little boy that when he grew up he wanted to be a millionaire and he wanted to change the world. These two things came together when he got himself a job selling solar power at a company called Sungevity. He knew that marketing was a way to make lots of money and he knew that solar power was going to change the world.

He’s now 23 years old, is making $45,000 a year, has medical benefits, pays his car insurance, has a girlfriend he respects and loves and never fights with, has lived on his own, paying his own way ever since he graduated from college, eats healthy and works out. He comes over to the house and sits with me and cries about our dog that is gone and asks for my advice and gives me advice. He tells me he loves me before we hang up the phone. He hugs me every time he leaves. Okay, so he smokes marijuana and gets plastered with his pals every now and then, but he is the grand master of his own life.

He recently got a promotion. Sungevity is expanding and starting up a new office in a city that many new young companies are gravitating to. Austen will be getting in on the ground floor at Sungevity in this new location. He’s leaving Los Angeles and will be moving to Kansas City, Missouri as of April 13, 2015.

I write this and read it tonight so you may help me to know what on earth I will do without him.

I never wanted to have children. I wanted to be great. It is an old and extremely boring story but – I finally became great when Austen happened to me.

 

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