My son

You saw that there was a child. You saw my son.

That future is almost gone.

I got a call from a charity this week, that we've donated to before. Got anything to give us? Household stuff, clothes, kid toys, pots and pans? We'll take anything you use in your house. Sure. Great. Let's get rid of a lot of stuff.

So I spent over an hour on Wednesday night, pulling old clothes from the closet and packing up household things to leave on the porch for pickup yesterday morning. Rather to my irritation, Rob, who needs to clean out his closet much more than I do, didn't devote any time to this, explaining he was much too busy preparing some paperwork for someone.

It made quite a pile out there on the porch when we left yesterday. But when we got back, there was quite a bit of it still there. They wouldn't take the baby swing, the car seat, the kid stove, the dollhouse, or the stroller.

I shook my head at the sight and felt, as always, a particular pang as I looked at the stroller. That damned stroller. Fiona is ten and Delia is seven, and I've been trying to get rid of it for years. It has sat on the landing of the stairs into the basement, sort of in the way whenever I'm carrying a load of laundry downstairs. But I've tried and tried, and I cannot get rid of it. No one bought it at the three garage sales I've held. I took it to a kids consignment shop and they wouldn't take it ("We have too many, and parents want the latest models"). And now this charity won't take it, either. It's a really nice stroller. We spent almost a hundred dollars on it. It goes against the grain to throw away a perfectly useable stroller, when I can see a couple of parents happily wheeling a beloved baby to the park in it.

And that's why seeing that stroller is so painful. I'm never going to have another baby. I'm never going to have a son. I love my daughters, but I wanted a son, too. But we don't have room in our house, and we don't have room in our budget, and I had so many complications with Delia that our doctor said, "You're not going to do this again, are you?" And we had always said we would only have two. But every one of my siblings have at least three, and after I weaned Delia, my arms still felt empty, and I still feel cheated, everytime I walk downstairs and see that damned stroller.

When I saw Return of the King, I felt Arwen's pain in the scene where Aragorn holds Eldarion, and she realizes, That could have been my son. When the boy looked up from the encirclement of his father's arms and his eyes met mine, I felt something lurch inside me, and I wept in the dark, taken by surprise yet again in saying goodbye to my son who never was. He is glimpsed in dreams and wishes, but for me, unlike for Arwen, he will never come to be.

When will the pain ever fade? I suppose it will, but it will never go away entirely.