Being 38 years old and childless, there is a chasm between myself and mothers. My not being a mother was a choice regarding birth control for health that spanned decades and became a choice regarding my present and my future. Ask me today, I’d still have the 5 kids I wanted at 20, if I could.
I noticed the difference in me with my own mother first. My adulthood marked the beginning of her failing to relate to me. At 17, she was a high school drop out, a mother, and the wife of a 21 year old ginger haired musician. By 20, she lost her own mother. We hit the wall on demographic commonality before I had sex for the first time. But me, I never stopped looking for it. Or craving it. Empathy.
As my friends began having kids, there’s that phase of baby doll dress up, baby daddy drama, and them realizing the golden age of the mythical stay at home mom had ended. They were more tired than I was. Their financial resources went elsewhere. I felt like a braggart with my bars, boyfriends, nights in the city and 12 noon alarm clock setting.
Friends married, produced more spawn, I had a miscarriage. Friends divorced, remarried, more kids. I moved back home, switched jobs, suffered depression and often felt I was just surviving.
My brother married before me. Within a year, almost to the date, he had a daughter, my niece. I’ve never really told anyone in my family, but it took me 6 months to feel connected to her. Even through some testing and a trisomy scare, I was unaffected, apathetic and surprised at my personal coldness. She wasn’t mine in any way. And she surely wasn’t that baby that would’ve been her 8 year old cousin.
As I dated into my 30s,and saw my brother’s world and marriage unravel, I saw parenthood in a whole new light, a masculine light. I saw my brother, a few boyfriends suffer the absence of their children. It was devastating. Their identity was replaced by their position as appointment keeper and automatic teller machine. Their children would cohabitate with strange, adult men that they didn’t approve. The women they dated, including myself, were judged as over bred harlots, or unequipped lowerings of the survival of the fittest, too flawed to breed.
My mind is now clouded by two decades as a spectator in the world’s failings and successes in parenthood. Yet every child that passes me, catches my eye. Every child I share words with or run my hesitant fingers over in moments of “they’re so cute” burn my heart and the cavity inside me that’s laid dormant for so long. I never made a decision that I didn’t want to be a mother. I never judged you if you did. The only thing that I decided, was that I wouldn’t become a jaded mother or grandmother. That means I’ll make my decision when I have a formidable partner I am looking forward to making that decision with. If that never happens, it wasn’t my life’s plan. I see 20 kids a day I can smile at, be kind to and preserve the Earth for. Don’t pity me. But don’t expect me to pity the plight you may have in being a parent. I won’t be jealous. I’ll just keep doing what I do. The world needs the childless just as much.
BLACK FROM THE WAIST DOWN 