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A child… Ours!
That was what I remembered saying after getting over the initial shock when she told me I succeeded. I had always talked so casually about it but meant every word I said in those days. Sometimes slowly dropping hints that I wanted a child with her, sometimes saying it outright with no hesitation. Back then I thought a child would complete us, make our union more definite, more real. It was the most logical and natural step to further our bonds. I still remember that day when I spun her around and carried her to the garden. The joy I felt unrivaled by the blue sky was something I’d never experienced before. Yes I had two sons prior to our daughter and yes I was happy when they were born… However, it was our child that I had wished for so badly that I felt for the first time what it was like to wish something and receive it. To want something from the woman I had learned to love so unexpectedly.
It is with these thoughts that I started asking myself if I were being fair to my sons. To not have felt the same joy when I heard the news. To have only felt gladness… Perhaps that’s what made my union with Tokio all wrong, that a union like that marginalized my sons happiness and my response to them. It was only later that I fell in love with my sons, not because they were a child of love but because they are my sons, my own flesh and blood. Does this make me a bad father? It is a question I always ask myself.
But even with a child borne out of love does not guarantee her father would be a good man, much less worthy of that child. It’s as I was told, after the initial joy wore off things changed which was not a lie. I -changed-. Suddenly I wanted more… I wanted it to be -real-. I wanted no doubts and most of all I wanted everything I did in the shadows to be -right-. I started having doubts when I didn’t get the things I wanted or thought I needed even when they were -wrong-. There was a time that I even thought she found me inadequate… That I was negligent of her condition… Even going so far as to thinking she was using the child against me. To begrudge me. I did not know what to do with that child, much less her mother so I distanced myself. My thinking back then was deplorable. I was told that that I had indeed accelerated to a wolf that I was not meant to be.
I have forgiven myself for the mistakes of my past with regards to Hide. I had never been a perfect man and our situation was anything but perfect much less -right-. Going to Ito required that I pretend to have forgiven myself, even if only for a short time. But the past plagued me even more as I realized that pretending to have forgiven myself when the reality was right in front of me slipping through my grasp -again-… I was told I could learn to be a good man again if I forget my past, which I did. But to learn to accept it, to truly forgive myself, I had left my fate to her I loved the most.
I have forgiven myself for being angry, for being manipulative, for lying, for being inconsiderate, for not being there… But I have never found it in me to forgive myself for the way I acted towards my child, a child that I have wanted so -badly-. That was the reasons I didn’t want to be introduced to her as anyone else but an uncle, a distant relative. Why of all the things I could’ve done, was I hesitant of the child? Why did I even think she was using the child against me? Why didn’t I become the father I thought I could be? These thoughts never did leave me. These thoughts shame and vex me to no end. I know these were the reasons why I never asked her to have a child with me again. Yes we had dreams, we talked about them… But on my end, it was nothing more than lip service. I didn’t have the right to ask. I didn’t deserve another one. Not when I treated all my children so -badly-.
That day she told me of Makoto, I saw in her eyes -disappointment-. It was probably because I could not say anything. But when it sank in, how the world changed and I saw her happy with me as well… But last night, by mistake I found out and by mistake she told me. I couldn’t do anything but just sit there and I have to wonder if I had disappointed once again. I don’t deserve another child. I don’t even deserve the children I have now. She tells me not to think of the past but it’s difficult to turn a blind eye to the few I could not yet find answers for.
A child who has learned to hate. A kind child who I lost to another. A child I wished for but who at times I resented even before she was born… I should be ashamed.