Julie Greenan
Note: this is a summary version of a monologue that will at some point be performed on stage. Meanwhile, I’ve surprised myself by being able to abbreviate it!
I’m nearly 68. I’m single - well, divorced, but that was a long time ago. No children.
My much-older brother and sisters all had children. But I went to university. It was the 60s, 70s, when my expectations were formed. I have no recollection whatsoever of the nuns or other teachers at Notre Dame High School for Girls making me think that babies and being a mother were my destiny. It was college, to be a teacher, or a nurse, or university to be… unspecified. I was in the ‘top stream’. We were clever girls. I had the usual convent girl’s curiosity about sex and boys. Marriage was such a long way off and so far down in my priorities. How could I possibly wait ’til then?
My partner from age 19 to 30 was a divorced Catholic, always supposedly trying to get his marriage annulled so we could get married in church. It seemed to matter to me then. The whole business was a mess of lack of communication, assumptions, heads in the sand and naivety. In the end I left him for a ‘safe’ man I worked with. I had the marriage, the honeymoon, but not the pregnancy. I began to haemorrhage, 2 weeks every month. We were having fertility tests. The choice was a hysterectomy or continuing to try to get pregnant with these massive fibroids in my uterus and a low sperm count. We applied to adopt through the Catholic Church and had one visit from a social worker. Then he said he couldn’t take on someone else’s child. By now, I had had a laser treatment which removed the fibroids and left me my chances of conception ambiguous. I had met someone else. I had fallen for him with all that was in me. I left my marriage.
Between 37 and 40, I conceived twice, to my sheer amazement. The second time was just after my mother died. I knew it was the right time of the month. I felt a primal urge to be fertilised. It lasted a month. The first time, it was my Kate, who lived inside me for 8 weeks. I woke one morning and knew something was missing. Her heartbeat.
Things got very hard. At home, at work. My mother’s death, my lost babies. They took my job away, claiming ‘reorganisation’. My partner, my passion, left. He had someone else. I knew he did. After he left, I wept to a therapist ‘where can I put all this love I have?’ She had no answer.
A job was found for me. They had to, it was illegal not to. I was saved by the other women in the new office. A Irish lesbian, an older single woman from Bradford and an Asian woman. They were kind. So kind. They understood humiliation and injustice.
One day I left work, a huge pile of papers on my desk, and did not go back.
I never really recovered. Never regained my ‘place’. The house was sold and I rented. Eventually got another job, colleagues who made me laugh. We did things together - we were all single. Life was OK. But buying a house, having a mortgage on my own was beyond me. I was in temporary, part-time jobs. People said ‘find your passion, find your niche’. They said ‘you will find someone when you are OK with yourself’. Platitudes, easy words usually from women with partners and sometimes with children too. Well-meaning sermonising. But I grasped at anything that might help. There seemed to be no-one else like me and I believed so deeply without even knowing it, that there was something wrong with me and I just needed to get it right. At the back of my mind, I saw that people found partners and had children without ‘loving themselves first’ and without waiting to be grown-up enough to be ‘good mothers’. But I was alone with these thoughts. Where were my people? Others like me?
I never owned my own home again. For some time, I lived on benefits and worried constantly about how the little capital I had could last long enough.
No one, no one said ‘you are full of sorrow and loss. You have lost your partner, your love. Your babies. Your mother. Your profession. Your security. Your home’ You have to come to terms with being single, a life you never chose and do not want.
No one said ‘you can buy a place, it’s possible to get a mortgage, even though your job is temporary, things have changed. We will help you, be alongside you, you are not alone.’ I just survived. I cleaned and ironed for other people, for cash in hand. I took my clothes off as an artist’s model. At least doing that I felt part of a world where I felt I belonged.
I have never really recovered from those years: the losses, emotional and material. The loss of status, as a single childless woman. I hoped and tried to have belonging with a partner. For years I would push myself out to dreary, awkward parties, hoping there might be someone there that I would connect with. I joined thing. I joined choirs and sometimes felt part of something good, some belonging. I was invited into my sister’s family and then I was distanced from true belonging. Nothing I could rely on. Could never know that there would be somewhere to go at Christmas.
I have got over not being a mother, yet I know there are fathomless wells of love in me that could have found their home in a child.
I did things. I cycled. I went on cycle tours alone and with a new boyfriend, a passionate cyclist. With my nephew through the Western Isles. I wrote. I worked with people with dementia. I worked in a bookshop and loved it until someone took exception to me for no apparent reason and I was no longer welcome there.
I longed to escape but couldn’t see how it could ever be. I yearned to travel and to be part of Europe, the Europe I’d first felt when I was 16 and went on the overnight train form Paris to Provence. When I’d first feel that warmth through the train window. Tasted petits pois. Had lain with the French Algerian in the hot afternoon drinking anis, the light filtering through the pale green gauze curtain.
I trained to teach English as a Foreign Language. I juggled three jobs, some English teaching, some work at a retirement village - reception and waitressing - and the cleaning/ironing. My sister said ‘well, if you just carried on like that it would be OK wouldn’t it?’ It wasn’t a question. It was a judgment. Like when they stopped my sickness benefit because it was government policy to get the figures down and she said it was ‘the best thing that could have happened to you’.
Somehow, step by step and with the support of a gifted GP, I got to Spain as a volunteer English participant on a total immersion English residential for Spanish people. A week in a nice hotel, speaking English with Spanish learners, 16 hours a day.
I stayed in Spain. Got a job teaching English in Madrid. A place to live, lodging with José. We laughed a lot. A lot. We argued then we laughed again. He took me to music festivals and got me dating Spanish men. I had a lot of sex. I went on a yacht to Formentera, which was both heaven and hell.
I gave José English classes and took him to England to make contacts. He moved to England so I had to leave the flat in Madrid. I went back to England for a summer, to recoup some strength after a wounding affair with someone I had thought ‘a good man’. He wasn’t. He was a Jekyll and Hyde and I suffered.
I went south to Cádiz and found the turquoise sea and the rooftops and singing. I learned to dance flamenco, in my fashion. I joined a baroque choir and we performed in the cathedral in Cádiz and in Jaén and in Africa.
One day I was chatting in his salon to Pepe, my friend and hairdresser and suddenly everyone was talking about ‘the virus’ and a ‘state of emergency’. It would begin in two days. No one would be allowed to go out except for shopping and emergencies. No one could leave the city. Not even go out for exercise. not walk down the street accompanied. I cycled to the end of the city before the lockdown took effect. To see the vast beach stretching away before the city gates were closed.
My time under Spanish lockdown is another story. I painted, wrote a little, Zoomed a lot, exercised on the rooftop while listening to Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy. After the initial comfort that we were ‘all in it together’ and despite having found Gateway Women that spring, I felt lonely and overlooked by people around me. And trapped. In a lull between the two sets of restrictions, I moved to Almuñécar, south of Granada. I hoped for a community. But the accumulated stress and trauma was taking its toll along with health worries that were difficult to resolve in this new place.
I had to leave Spain for the UK in August 2021, too full of crippling anxiety to carry on living alone abroad. I stayed with a friend, my only option. I had given up my rented UK house in 2015, unable to pay two sets of rent, so I had no permanent address in the UK.
I’m writing this in a seafront tapas bar in Cullercoats, a beautiful bay just north of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I did a bike tour around this area and was invited to stay for as long as I wished with a woman of my age, a cyclist and Hispanophile. I have my online writing group and I practise my recorder. I still pay rent on my Almuñécar flat.
Covid. Brexit. The world has changed. I have to make a decision where my future will be… the UK is costly, for everyone but especially compared with Spain.
And I ponder: am I simply the product of my experiences? Who would I be now, if I had been a mother? If I were now a long-partnered woman? Who would Julie be now? Would I be calmer, less bitter, less envious of the lives and happiness of others? Would I be one of those proud, oblivious grandmothers posting their photos on Facebook? Would I have found ‘my people’? Feel secure and grounded, safe in the world?
Would I be me?
27 June 2022
Two years later: I gave up the flat in Spain. I found a lovely place to rent in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I swim in the freezing North Sea regularly. I know lots of people and I’m building a life, hoping and working to be close with people I care about and who care about me, and who are not blood relations. The UK is so expensive. Sometimes I long so much for my previous Spanish life. Spanish breakfast at a street café. The moon from my rooftop. The language all around me. The sheer humanity of the Spanish people. But I’m 70 now and it feels too scary to grow old as a single woman, in a foreign country.
I’m writing this from France, where I’m about to embark on a long-distance walk for a couple of weeks - in Edinburgh, I fell in love with Robert Louis Stevenson and the walk is called Le Chemin de Stevenson, so I’ll walk in his footsteps. And maybe lie dow in my bivvy bag in the same shade he found.
