“What Is It Like, Being Childless?”
I had no idea what to say when my therapist asked this question.
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How do I explain what my life is like to this man, with his nails half-painted (a lovely detail; I will steal it for a character later)?
His pen scratches after my most key statements, his wrists jangling with mala beads. He is clearly a father: his shelves bloom with photos.
I have no idea what his life is like, and I stop myself before speculating.
What would it be like to be a therapist, to live your life littered with the debris from others’ deepest, most painful experiences? I have never asked. What would it be like to have children?
What is childlessness, he asked and to this I have a myriad of answers.
You can be childfree, in that you never wanted children. You can be childless by choice. You can be infertile or childless by marriage (where one partner does not want children and the other does). You can be childless due to illness or childless by circumstance (where you never found a partner).
I myself am a combination of the last two.
But this is just information, labels to shortcut the experience so I never have to explain. What is it like?
I will say this to him: I can tell you that it has changed my life, beyond the obvious. I can tell you that I hoped to have children, that I hoped to be healthy, and that now the word is complex for me.
When people say “I hope,” it is like that moment when someone speaks a language you once also spoke, but that has long drifted into the morass of memory. You are surprised to find the shape of the words still in your head. Ah hope, I think.
Give me a minute. It’ll come back.
I can tell you that there are good aspects to it. I will be shy to say this, because I’ve seen the pictures on your wall. You look happy in them; your children smile so broadly that I can see the growing stubs of their adult teeth.
I can say that I am sometimes happy I didn’t have children, and that there is guilt in that. I keep this secret, the moment when I pour my too-large glass of tea in the morning and savour the quietness of drinking with a cat snuggled against me.
I can tell you that there are bad aspects and that I veer away from them. I don’t look at babies and avert my eyes from pregnant women. I do not make friends with mothers or even women of childbearing age.
I can tell you that one reason I am talking to you now is that the other available therapists were women with children. I thought a man would be easier, even though I speak about private female things like endometriosis and pelvic pain.
I can tell you about “I could give you one of mine;” about “you probably don’t care what happens to your assets, if you have no children;” about the blanketing silence that follows a negative response to “Do you have kids?”
I can tell you about “being a mother is really hard;” about the reading I have done on the politics of motherhood and caregiving, about the sympathy I want to give and the exhausting way that sympathy is never returned.
I can tell you this, but I fear your response in the way I fear all such responses.
There is a gap between mothers and nonmothers, between parents and nonparents, and if you have never seen these gaps, it is because you have never looked.
But I think I will say this: in 2018 I journeyed to Portugal.
Portugal is a land of explorers; from these shores men unfurled the sails of galleons. After a bus trip I emerged onto the rocky outcrop of Cabo da Rosa, that most western point of Europe. I walked to the edge of the cliff and looked not down but out, out into the waves.
That too was indescribable: the grass and the way it ended visible from the corners of both eyes; the blue of the ocean and the waters, the way they stretched out harsh and beckoning in front of me.
I pictured the early explorers, all those names I once knew, Ferdinand Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator. (Were they all men? But I think so.) I pictured these men setting sail, the moment just after the water caught the bottoms of their great ships and they were afloat.
This is what I think of childlessness.
It is that moment: the shock of the spray, the gasp an explorer might take when he realizes that he is by himself on this ocean and no one will help him or reach out to him or blow wind into his sails.
It is the freedom of that and the pain. It is the silence and the solitude, the joy of it and the way it might cut into an explorer like the wind’s knife.
My childlessness is the path that stretches out before me, the hard cold way no one has ever travelled it before and the way no one will ever know what it is like, because the waves will erase my own travels, leaving no legacy.
It is the way nothing will fill my arms but the wind.
It is the way that idea is unbelievably, inexplicably sad, and the way that it is not. Sometimes the wind is enough.
It is the colour of the water in my metaphor, an icier blue than the nail polish you wear. It is the way that both of those colours, the water and the nails, both are absolutely beautiful, because they have been seen with my eyes, the eyes of the person I am now. It is the way that in this image the waves are jangling on the shore like mala beads, and only I can make that comparison.
It is the way that if I had children I would be someone else, utterly and profoundly. It is the way that the me I am now would be lost if I had had children and that the loss would have been as sad or nearly as the loss of my imagined children.
It is the way my room looks different than yours, and pictureless.
It is being alone, really alone, on a wide wide sea.
This piece was previously published on https://worldchildlessweek.net/
By Colleen Addison.
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I want to leave a comment, but I am speechless at how well you nailed the feelings and in such beautiful language. I am going to save this and read it again and again. Thank you.
This is absolutely beautiful. I've been feeling the exact same emotions lately, and this piece is exactly what I needed to read. I identified with every word. Thank you, thank you!