A different type of mourning:
With childlessness
As childless women often do, I have had to grapple with this, the decision to remain childless and the journey it took to get me [t]here.
Grapple.
What an interesting and funny word.
Though, as a wordsmith and lover of literature and poetry, I really enjoy a variety of words, this one almost always comes to mind when trying to describe something that took a while to figure out…with the options presented and when the choice that I made was not always so clear-cut and simple.
Grapple is defined as “to engage in a close fight or to struggle without weapons,” or “to wrestle.”
That seems a pretty perfect description for me in accepting my childless state as a middle-aged women… in this patriarchal culture where our notions of what it means to be a woman are hopelessly intertwined and knotted—for good measure—with being a mother.
The idea of grappling to me elicits images of trying to shove a messy and ill-folded sleeping bag together, to go back into its rightful place, so you can carry it along, on your journey.
I also think about all the efforts I had made to refold maps in their appropriate way—long before the days of google maps—and I would usually fail, impatient and folding them the wrong way. They would look very awkward, and then I would fold and unfold them again and again, before I realized that I had folded them incorrectly so many times that the maps now had permanent wrong creases on them.
This is how I feel about my self-journey of [trying to] have children, miscarrying, and coming to terms with the acceptance that I will not have my own kids.
It is not a simple matter.
And even though, I am very happy to be childless for all the reasons that I mentioned in previous posts, there is also this—
I realized this the other day as I was looking at beautiful pictures of a former yoga instructor’s pregnancy. She and her husband gazed at each other lovingly, at one another and at their baby, growing in her womb.
I felt a gnawing sense of envy.
These feelings are not unfamiliar to me, but this one is different—
It used to be desires for my own partner and child, but that is not the case anymore:
Because it is true all that I have recently written about in not wanting my own children.
And also—
I realize that, as someone who is thoughtful and self-aware of the family that I come from, with all the wounds and emotional inheritance and intergenerational trauma, the mental illnesses and the suicides—
That’s a hell of a burden to pass on to a child, genetically.
Ie—how did Grandpa Donelson die?
or
What about Uncle Jeremie—why did he die so young?
…While filling out the family tree for school?
I realize now, that when I mourn and envy those who are pregnant—classic to an Enneagram 4—what I mourn is a stable and simple life with a solid family—
I ache for a family that I did not have, but often wonder if I could have had—if circumstances were different—
What if…my uncle and aunt hadn’t died and had those effects on my parents? What if my father didn’t become an alcoholic? If my mother had gotten all the mental health help that she needed to recover and heal and be healthier? What if they were still alive AND functional and healthy? What if my childhood were different, if I grew up differently.
If, if, if—-
Now, I know: It is a fruitless endeavor and a rabbit hole that doesn’t end. Better not to nose dive into it.
But—when I mourn, I mourn that—the possibilities of what could have been with a different family.
I also mourn what could have been if not for the uber-intense American hyperindividualism and capitalist culture we are in, that I reside in and call home. Because, as someone very family-oriented (ironic, ain’t it?) and for someone who thrived in a community and collectivist culture—I realize that if I raised kids in a different culture, was born into a different family, had a different idea of what it could be—I may have chosen to do that. Happily. I wouldn’t have had to grapple.
I have lived in a different culture and traveled the world and I have seen and witnessed other cultures. I have listened to how other cultures do it—raise kids. And I don’t believe that the American way is the best way. I know that this runs privy to the whole “America = greatest country in the world” line, and that this idea is largely subjective, and it is. But still—
I don’t love my country and culture enough, and certainly, what it is becoming, to want to raise kiddos in it.
Now—
I know that we don’t get to choose our family. I know this better than most.
I know the lessons and painful experiences of that, and while I am not advocating for all of us who have fucked up families to not procreate—(some may scoff and then retort—then who would have kids?!?)
For me, it is the right choice.
I have neither the money, nor the desire to spend the money I have, to go at this parenting solo.
I also do not have extended family or communities of support to do so, especially important since I do not have a partner.
I think a lot about the effects of having children and the life that I could afford them. I had a mother who was pretty hell-bent on making sure that I had a better life than she had had. She made that happen for me. With very limited resources but I know that it was immensely difficult for her, to say the least.
Our society does not make this child-bearing situation easy for women—an obvious reason why the birth rate is plummeting. What with no federally mandated maternity leave—even amongst many who profess and advocate for “family values.”
In a society where many women must work, for economic reasons, even if/when they would rather be at home, raising children, with the rising costs of day care, etc, etc.—-
I understand the realities of the situation. Of my position. Of my extended and nuclear family, or lack thereof.
And I choose not to participate.
But I wonder—the nagging, what if, things had turned out differently, idea, that comes to the forefront of my mind.
Just because I made the choice, and I do not regret it, does not mean that I do not mourn.
I mourn, but I do so for many reasons. I mourn for what this decision, my decision, also carries with it: the truths that it tells about my culture, family, childhood, and life’s realities and my life story, as they were presented themselves to me.
I am an Enneagram 4, always wondering about and pining for other realities.
I am also well aware that social media and that the mostly happy moments shown on places like Facebook and Instagram are intensely misleading and they fuck with our minds. FOMO and what not. I know all of that. I am well aware. I’ve thought about it, read the studies and news articles on it, talked to my students about that.
And yet, still—
As someone who also dives into critical imagination and is prone to considering those branches of fruit, as choices on our paths, in the tree of life, I often wonder—
If my soil had been tended differently, would I have bore better fruit? More healthy and robust? Fruit more likely to survive and thrive, and not rot? Would it then have been more enticing to pick and eat?
Perhaps it is fruitless—pun intended—to speculate about such things. Sometimes I cannot help myself.
And so, much like Sylvia Plath’s tree—this particular fruit rots, spoiling, heavy and falls to the ground, beginning its inevitable process of decomposition.
I let it go, but still, for a moment—
I stare at it, on the ground. Wondering what it was. What it could have been…if its nurturing environment had been different.
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila, and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar