Chapter 23: What Am I Fighting For?

These are chapter-by-chapter excerpts from my book, Fertile Like a Mother, Fertile Like a Lover. If you’re just finding your way here, you might want to start from the beginning — each piece builds on the last.

It occurred to me that this struggle was tapping into some of my deepest wounding — my oldest story of victimhood. I kept telling myself that if he really loved me, he would want to be the best version of himself for me. That he would see what I was longing for and choose to be that man.

I was fighting and begging for it, but beneath the fighting, on an even more primal level, was an old belief that I didn’t actually deserve that kind of love. If I truly believed I deserved it, it wouldn’t have been something I was still trying to wrestle into existence after all those years.

Instead, I could see what wasn’t available and, from a clearer sense of my own worth, I could finally make another decision.

Who I believed Dean could be if he were willing to do his work and grow with me … that guy was perfect for me. But I had to accept that what I was desiring was a version of him he didn’t want for himself.

I had been fighting and pushing and begging for him to be that guy. And for over a decade, in one way or another, he’d been saying the same thing:

“No.”

I just hadn’t wanted to hear it.

I had been focusing on and fighting against his unwellness because actually accepting it as something that might never change forced me to feel the next truth: that it wasn’t enough for me. He … not future version, but this version… was actually not enough for me. The pain of that reality hit me like a ton of bricks.

I began to see that the part of me still fighting for love was my little one—the child who had needed her mother to become well for her. She had spent years demanding to be seen, to be made important enough for someone else to heal for.

But for the past several years, I had been tending to her. When I felt lonely or unseen, I was the one who reached for her, nurtured her, offering presence and validation.

By not denying my own needs, by no longer directing anger at others for not meeting them but instead meeting them myself, the part of me that was used to not being met grew less frantic. My needs were being me, at least in part by me.

The version of me who had been fighting was the one who didn’t really believe she would ever be met. Once she was, the compulsion to keep fighting for what was clearly unavailable from Dean began to ease.

I had been equating his availability with my deservedness. Once I could meet some of my own needs, I began to recognize how deserving I truly was of having them met—regardless of anyone else’s capacity. As Big Me became enough for Little Me, Little Me’s need to fight dissipated.

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