Mother Load
"I think you'd make a fantastic mother." I blinked a few times at my phone screen as his words sunk in. They shocked me. Our connection was mostly driven by my requisite fawning over his athletic prowess (which was, granted, impressive and atypical for men his age) — any of my talents and interests were purely secondary. So that he even saw me clearly enough to know what I might offer in the way of parenting skills was a total surprise. But more than that, his declaration went against everything I had ever been told, and so believed, about myself: I lack the innate aptitude to care for children.
I wasn't all that interested in playing with dolls when I was a kid. I much preferred Barbies. (Yeah, I know. It was a different time.) My Barbies threw dinner parties, taught classes, and organized neighbourhood events. You can ask my uncle — he was one of my favourite playmates when I spent Saturday nights at my grandparents' house when he and my aunt were seniors in high school — how much he loved acting out these elaborate dramas I constructed, replete with plentiful costume changes. It's no secret that only children, which I am, tend to mature earlier. So it doesn't seem all that out of place that I would gravitate to adult role-play at an early age. Except what other people saw and projected onto me was something else entirely. And they were vocal about it.
"She has no maternal instinct." It's the phrase I heard, or one like it, every time we'd show up to gatherings and I chose playing checkers over playing house. "She doesn't like children." It's what people said when I chose playing summer sports over babysitting for money. "You're missing out" I was told when I planted myself in the kitchen with the adults rather than with the noisy tangle of kids at parties.
I have no doubt that hearing these things as I was growing up affected how I perceived myself. But the moment I discovered I had no business even contemplating motherhood was quite separate from those adult judgements. Instead, it was children themselves who delivered the message.
One of my favourite weeks of the year when I was in grade school was literacy week. There were read-a-thons, book fairs, and, my favourite event: create your own book. It required each of us to write stories, illustrate them, and then stitch pages into a binding and glue coloured endpapers onto the inside covers. We were author and publisher rolled into one, and it fostered the sense that creativity and storytelling was an utterly natural thing — such a contrast to the perspective of most adults, who patted me on my head and asked, "But what's your real job going to be?" when I said I was going to be a writer when I grew up. So when my grade 5 class was paired with kindergarteners one year to create books in older/younger duos, I was excited — I was getting a chance to share just how cool books are.
The night before the collaborative event, I asked my mom to help me curl my pin-straight hair, dampening and rolling it up pink foam curling clips so that it would look fancy. Hair bouncing at my shoulders, I asked to wear one of my best outfits to school the next morning, a pair of periwinkle corduroy knickers with a chenille sweater striped in a palette of blues, accented with burgundy. My wine-coloured loafers pulled the whole ensemble together. I was ready to mentor!
I can still see the classroom scene with crisp clarity in my mind's eye: the kindergarten class having been ushered into our room and lined up across the carpet at the back, and us grade 5s sitting at our desk islands in clusters of four. Those of us facing the chalkboard at the front swivelled around and I remember smiling my brightest smile at the youngsters, my eyes moving up and down the line to search out whom I might make a connection with and wondering what kind of a story we would cook up for our book.
The kindergarteners were instructed to find an older buddy. One by one they left their place on the carpet and walked out amongst the desks to stand beside the grade 5er they were selecting to be their book co-creator. It never occurred to me that I wouldn't get picked. But as the line of little people dwindled, doubt began to weigh down the corners of my smile. I strained to keep my expression upbeat and shifted in my chair, craning my neck in some sort of silent call to the remaining kids, letting them know I was still unchosen and eager to unite for the creative project. But as the last child walked out to select their partner, the space beside my desk remained empty. I was one of three students in my class left unchosen.
I remember feeling numb as our teacher asked the three of us to find a place at the back of the classroom and an activity to occupy us while everyone else worked on their books. She made some sort of stumbling apology about not realizing there'd be more of us than them, but that didn't help the stinging shame I felt as I took my curly hair and specially chosen outfit to a chair near the coat closet and read a Nancy Drew mystery for the next few hours, trying to ignore the buzz of the classroom as all my friends and classmates shepherded their young charges through the creative process.
At the time the incident wouldn't have registered as anything other than just a flat-out, and unfortunately very public, rejection. But as I look back as an adult, I wonder how it mingled with all those judgements about my unsuitability for and seeming disinterest in motherhood and became a seminal moment on my path of childlessness. That an entire cohort of kindergarteners passed me over just seemed to prove the point others were always making about me. And so perhaps that moment of rejection was the one that would lead me to believe it.
There was a brief period in my first long-term relationship where we thought we'd have kids. It was our first Christmas together and we were still on the high of the honeymoon phase. I was in the back half of my twenties and aside from a few dates and encounters here and there, I had never had a boyfriend proper. For the first time in my life, I felt normal — choosable, like everyone else, finally. The atypical course I had travelled til then suddenly seemed like it was a problem now solved by having found my forever person. Except he wasn't that, and I wasn't his. Neither of us was knowledgeable enough at the time to see that we had unconsciously picked a person to help us replay our deepest childhood traumas — and, of course, fail miserably at healing them. Suffice it to say that relationship conflict precluded relationship progress and we split after 12 years, childless.
At that point just over a decade ago, I considered myself child-free by choice and while I was certainly open to dating men with children in their life, I was positive I wouldn't have any of my own. It wasn't an unheard of way to live, but it certainly wasn't the norm and there weren't the burgeoning conversations that are happening now around the stigmatization of women whose lives don't fit in the usual narrative. So disapproval and discrimination made themselves known in tacitly hurtful ways. Family posts on social media featuring children's birthdays and christenings and first days of school and soccer goals garnered hearts and likes and fawning comments. Meanwhile, my posts about books — publishing is a birthing process in its own right, as anyone who does it will tell you — and activism and self-exploration got relative crickets. To say nothing about the whispers of selfishness — because what else could a single woman living in a big city possibly be doing other than waltzing through her days in a pair of stilettos with a martini in hand à la Sex in the City? (Hint: Try eking out an existence on a single income and doing all the domestic labour while trying to squeeze in moments of joy like anybody else.)
And then there are the ways in which even people who love you fiercely and are open-minded about tradition-breaking show how deeply embedded our societal bias is. They'll tell you what a shame it is for someone like you to be on your own — a seeming I've-got-your-back statement that ultimately pities the solo and/or childless woman for not having the opportunity to check all the familiar boxes. Or, in an act of vulnerable sharing, they'll tell you that they now know there is no love more profound than the one between parent and child — effectively drawing a line behind which lies the most important thing they perceive a human can experience, and to which the childless woman has no access.
In a discussion over dinner at a conference once, a colleague looked at me, her dark eyes sparkling with menace. "No one knows what love and selflessness truly means until they have a baby," she said. Her words were saturated with venom and struck like a snake bite. We had been deep in a conversation about how the pervasiveness of baby culture was painful and alienating for women struggling with fertility issues. I made the point that women who are child-free by choice, like me, are ironically aligned in that we also feel shunned and shamed by this culture, even if the root cause is different. The vitriol in my colleague's retort took me by surprise, but not more so than the reaction of others at the dinner, which was to side with her -- my comment was deemed insensitive. And that was the moment when I learned an important lesson:
Being childless owing to causes beyond your control is acceptable; being childless by choice is not.
"In a life in which there is no child, no one knows anything about your life's meaning. They might suspect it doesn't have one..." So writes Sheila Heti in Motherhood, her 2018 book that explores how we have made this act fundamental to a woman's identity and what it means for those who do not bear children. It's only been in the last few years, as voices like Heti's and a few others have started to emerge, that I've begun to peel the layers back from my experience as a childless woman in what Jody Day calls a pro-natalist society. Day tried for a decade, unsuccessfully, to get pregnant and after a transformative grieving process, has become an advocate for all types of child-free women. Suddenly, in the midst of her work exploring the deep unconscious bias held towards childless women in a society that is essentially blind to its natalism, I felt ... sane. But had I ever felt insane? Have I ever been allowed to?
What the conversations currently opening up around all manner of alternate paths through relationships and intimacy have revealed to me is just how little room there has been to stray from the usually trodden path with any kind of genuine understanding from those in our personal lives or from society at large. For those not opting into traditional partnerships and nuclear families, there are both emotional and financial consequences that we bear invisibly, and in silence. From the weight of parents' disappointment of being denied grandbabies to tax structures that favour families to work policies that exclude singles. (New Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion awareness finally gave me an avenue to point out that group office showers for weddings and babies celebrated only two very select life milestones and ensured certain employees would make an indefinite financial contribution without ever getting their "turn" to receive.)
I sometimes think about the root of my childlessness. Was it those comments people made about me when I was growing up, either on their own or in combination with that awful experience in grade 5? Was it having my own childhood truncated by alcoholism and codependence? (After emotionally parenting one adult and being a surrogate spouse to the other, perhaps I exhausted my mothering capacity early.) Or am I truly lacking the same instincts as other women? A recent appearance of actor and entrepreneur Tracee Ellis Ross on the We Can Do Hard Things podcast brought such a refreshing perspective to these musings. Single and childless at 50 herself, Ross talked about all the ways she mothers through her creativity and caring for others. And I couldn't help but think of the way I've chosen to spend my life in partnering with authors to bring books into the world — it's no coincidence that people routinely refer to their books as their "babies." I also thought of my deep impulse to feed people and the pleasure I take in tending to their physical and emotional well-being in this way. So perhaps my calling has been to mother many through avenues like these rather than to mother one or two beings in totality.
Whatever the answer, if there is one, living outside the norm can be a heavy weight to carry. But if it makes space for others to feel less alone while doing the same, it is a worthy load.
