I was reminded today of this Welsh word. I’ve heard it before but it made me stop and think about how relevant it is to my life, recently.
"Hiraeth - definition - a homesickness for a place that no longer exists or never was; a deep sense of nostalgia, yearning, or grief for the lost places of your past.”
I feel this keenly.
Probably no time more acutely than at the holidays or around families with children.
I used to want to have children, for about 5 years of my life, very badly.
I miscarried twice, within six months of each other.
I never had a rainbow baby.
I refer to this liminal space as ‘the mothers that never were’. (or I guess - ‘the mothers who were never allowed to mother’.)
In saying that I try to hold space for how my identity shifted and I was never not a mother, but I was also never quite a mother to a living being, either.
The distinction may seem unimportant or semantical to many, people who either have kids or who don’t want kids and can’t understand, - but it’s crucial.
Because you can’t reduce my story to - well, thank God you didn’t have kids with him - a narcissist.
Yes, I’m glad I didn’t bring children into this world that were his offspring and that I don’t have to co-parent with someone so emotionally damaged and cruel.
But, it’s not that irreducible. I can’t say it’s that and I’m just happy about it.
And though I am happy about the fact that I am childless these days for oh-so many reasons, it also doesn’t mean that that hurt that grief is gone, either, just because they died.
I was scared but I wanted them. I felt bodily different when I was pregnant. I knew they were growing inside of me. I knew the nausea, feelings of faintness, and running to the bathroom more often - I knew I was physiologically altered by having conceived.
And I turned over in my mind - as my mind as the capacity to - very quickly and in spins and circles - many scenarios and shifting of my unfolded future-when I was pregnant.
So, because of that person, that identity, that loss, that fig that fell to the grown and died, because I didn’t pick it (to borrow a metaphor from Sylvia Plath), and because I am always thinking and reconsidering my choices -
I do wonder how my life would be different. Would I be happier? More fulfilled? I often times believe I would not have been able to heal as I have and certainly would have carried on intergenerational trauma if I did not do that important work on myself.
That’s true, but would I have ceased at all to work on myself if I was a young mother? I think it would be infinitely harder and slower.
But - I tell myself the story that I would not have healed as much - I know - because it’s easier, to swallow and to stand than the other sobering and chilling truth -
Which is that- what if I still made it work?
What if mothering filled my heart - as it does so many - as it did my mother’s - and it all would have been okay.
Perhaps I’m being nostalgic - sentimental - ridiculous because it’s fictitious.
Perhaps - but, I suppose that that is what ‘hiraeth’ is.
Nostalgia need not be realistic.
Perhaps that’s our right as human beings with pulses and brains, for those of us inclined toward self-reflection:
And I think I am allowed. I ought to be allowed - to grieve over parts of ourselves that never were allowed to…be.
I can grieve my babies, not having a solid loving nuclear family, a stable, loving, mentally well partner - because I thought I had them at one point in time. I toyed with that possibility. They felt in reach.
Then - they slipped through my fingers - at least it felt that way at the time.
I have a much fuller picture of that now.
I realize that it was never stable. That I didn’t see much and tolerated a lot more than I ought to have.
I do recognize all of these reasons of why it is better not to have those babies at my side now…turning 5, 5 1/2 this coming summer. (I know this is impossible - it would have been one).
But - it still hurts. I still mourn.
I am still filled with sadness and longing, a nostalgia, for what almost was, and what was never allowed to be-
Hiraeth.