C. V. Addison
“You’re so lucky,” said a friend of mine. I heard her clearly down the long-distance phone line, even all the way from Germany where she now lives. “Lucky you don’t have children.” It’s a good thing it was a phone line, and not FaceTime or any of the other technological ways we have tried, because at that phrase I felt my face fall. “Lucky,” this woman was telling me. “Lucky,” as if she’d forgotten the other conversations we’d had, about my health troubles and the fact that my health has prevented me from doing lots of things, being a mother chief among them. “Lucky,” as if that’s what I thought I was, sitting here in my one-bedroom with my cats beside me. My beloved cats … but no children.
I love my friend. We met years ago, as English teachers in Prague, Czech Republic, bonding over beers and ex-boyfriends. This is our fifteenth monthly phone call since she wrote a year and a half ago, the email winging its way back across the Atlantic to where I live now in Canada, making my life as a single academic. Winging its way from her home in Germany where she is a wife and mother.
I love her, but I feel a plant of bitterness growing at her words, the thorns spiking into my heart.
I almost said no to that first initial email. Women with children and women without don’t mix, I thought for a long time. It’s hard for me to know what to say to the stories I hear about kids, the motherhood minutiae I’m greeted with when I meet some women. “Oh,” the women say, disappointed. “You don’t have children. You won’t understand.” Well no. You could try, I suppose. But I probably won’t.
I didn’t say no. It was my friend who was sending it; surely we could overcome the mother-not mother split I have seen happening?
And we could. I have enjoyed our calls, even though they come with the same minutiae sometimes. I am allowed, sometimes, to present my own stories. My friend knows about my health. She knows about the motherhood dreams my health prevented. She knows.
But now this: lucky.
What is it about luck and this strange attribution of it? That was the word that came out of my friend’s mouth: why was that the one she chose?
In some contexts, people don’t pick that word to describe me. Quite the opposite, really. Last week I saw a specialist, an elderly man with thick glasses who made his notes old-school with pen and paper. “Medical history?” he asked, and then as I began, his eyes widened through the lenses. “Oh,” he said at the end over a page now full of ink. “Not the best of luck, eh?”
No, I haven’t had luck. But my friend, the one I thought knew, didn’t seem to remember this. It was instantly forgotten as she related the difficulties she was having with her eldest daughter. It’s so hard with Charlotte right now. You’re so lucky.
In a way, I get it. My friend is indeed suffering. Her relationship with her daughter is complex, and my friend feels guilty. In that guilt, I think I may be seeing an inkling of what mothers talk about, too. It would be hard to be a mother. Not just the day-to-day caregiving responsibilities and the fact that those responsibilities fall more heavily on the women involved. That would be bad enough, but there’s also something I am becoming more and more cognizant of as I grow older: the stigma of motherhood.
Stigma is defined as a “deep discrediting of self” (Goffman 1963), and mothers do face that. I wanted to be a mother so badly I have to force myself to remember this, but it is true. In Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother, Shari Thurer tells of the myriad ways motherhood has been defined, and how women have been censured for not being “good” at raising their children. The debates are legion. Do you stay at home or go to work? Do you have a few children or one or many? Do you …
Even the basics are questioned. Do you hug your children or not? Thurer asks, and at first I think this is a silly question. But the answer has shifted throughout history, and if you’ve hugged at the wrong time, well. You face society’s wrath in a way that, as a childless woman, I do not.
But there are other selves, and other ways you can be discredited. As a childless woman there is criticism, yes, but more; there is … forgetting. My friend is not the only one with whom I have felt my life’s story slipping away. There are no books I can find that detail the myths of childlessness, the perceptions society has of me, whether they have changed or not. In a way, society has few perceptions: a few caricatures, a crazy cat lady or two, a pitiful spinster. I am mostly not noticed. My story is lost. At the doctor’s appointment I felt nothing so much as surprise at his attention. I was expecting … nothing. A comment on my good luck.
“I am sorry for you but what about me?” I think, and that is a tough phrase to find yourself thinking. What about me, and I think: I love my friend. I should care about her, and I do. I am pleased that we have overcome the differences in how our lives turned out. I am pleased that we phone now, that we have a friendship again.
I am pleased and I am sorry that she is having trouble. I see the criticism, and know she must see it too. Her life must be hard, I think sometimes. Motherhood must be hard. I wish her a moment in a doctor’s office. Not the best of luck, eh?
My friend and I have recently reconnected after a long time apart, so I wish something for both of us together. I wish for another moment, another conversation down a long distance phone line, carefully timed for both our zones. “Lucky?” we will say to each other. “Yes you are.” “No you are not.” Lucky? Let the plants of bitterness retract their thorns. Lucky? There are no four-leaved clovers for either of us. Let us stop looking for them. Lucky? Let us look up instead, see across the chasm between us. Lucky? Let us reach out our hands to help.
Photo by Alexander Andrews on Unsplash