Because of the memes and reactions to the Republican vice presidential candidate's criticism, I'm revisiting an essay I wrote about not having a child. I recently found documents from my grandmother's life. In rural Latvia she spent a good amount of her years, pregnant. She had her first child at 20 and the last at 43. We have choices.
At a family picnic I pick up my friend´s one-year old son. He fits perfectly in my arms and for a moment I have the sensation of an emptiness filled. Within seconds he´s squirming to be freed, a mass of jelly bones in motion.
On my way home on the bus I watch a woman with her eight year-old daughter. ¨Don´t do that.¨ The woman is referring to the girl clicking her pen over and over. ¨It´ll break.¨ In a flash the pen hits the mother in her face. The mother goes quiet.
These moments of motherhood will never be mine to experience as the direct protagonist. At my age, it´s too late. I won´t be holding my own baby nor will I seethe at the misbehavior of my offspring.
How could I escape the longing to have a child? I considered myself lucky as I watched women go through the physical and emotional ordeals of artificial insemination, donor egg implants, and microsurgery. I´ve watched some women give up and travel to China to adopt.
Having children was equated to sacrifice. My mother´s closet held few new clothes while my sister and I wore the latest fashions. Her schedule was our schedule; when we arrived home from school she was there waiting. When we did our homework she was always on hand to answer any questions. Mother with a capital M, was her identity. She died before I was able to understand something of her own dreams. I suspect having children was only part of what she might have wanted to accomplish.
My first experience with small children was when I worked as an au pair in Paris. I was in charge of a three- year- old girl and a baby boy. My afternoons were filled with the baby´s cries, which ranged from high pitched shrieks to desperate sobs when he could hardly catch his breath. They required my absolute full attention. There was no possibility of picking up a book or even catching a few minutes of a talk show on television.
I had never held a baby before this moment and I received no information whatsoever about how to take care of children. Simply being a female meant I was supposed to know automatically how to burp a child or change a diaper. Soon I was fighting off anxiety attacks at the very thought of reporting to work. One afternoon, a neighbor dropped off her son and I had three screaming children. The au pair experience may be responsible for turning more than one young woman off to motherhood permanently.
All these years later and small children make me smile, or cringe, depending on their behavior. I see then as beings trapped in bodies that will take decades to comprehend. Sometimes they remind me of little old people, silent but knowledgeable, seeing more than I can imagine.
In my parents´ generation having children, if you could, was a given. There was no great analysis of becoming a parent or any difficult decision to make. Babies came by accident; an accident that changed one´s life irrevocably. My rural high school suffered from a high teenage pregnancy rate. Two friends became pregnant in their senior year; one is now a grandmother many times over.
I receive an announcement, similar to a birth announcement but this one marks the arrival of a puppy. I catch myself smiling at the lab in the photo with more delight than I usually feel when I receive baby pictures. Am I missing a gene for nurturing? Often I consider the care that my childless circle of friends lavishes on lovers, pets, and work, and I wonder if this care would be more rewarding if it were given to a child.
Then there is a childless future to consider. There will be no milestones to mark the passage of time like baptisms, christenings, and graduations. There will be no fun as Grandma awaiting me.
This a new territory to consider. In Spain where I lived, for many generations the childless woman was considered useful because she dressed the statues of the saints in church for processions. Fortunately, we´ve moved beyond that limited role society once marked for her. Spinster is a word that is no longer widely used.
We make our own families out of circles of friends and siblings. We find meaning in our work. Our emotional lives have no boundaries. Our new world is enough, and I am grateful for it.
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