Assumptions and Avoiding the Hook
How do you respond when someone makes an thoughtless assumption about you being childless and says it to your face? How do you respond when all you have ever wanted to be was a mother but that experience has been impossible for you? When you’ve tried everything under the sun to achieve your dream and yet it still eludes you?
Ten years ago I had just extricated myself from a situation that was destroying both my sanity and my marriage. We had been fostering two small boys and we were both feeling depressingly trapped by the new routines of school, football, broken sleep and daily angry tantrums from deeply traumatised children. We were seriously asking ourselves if we had made a terrible mistake. My breast cancer diagnosis was the final stressor which clinched the decision for us. We discussed the situation with the Department of Human Services who recommended that we ask the boys if they wanted to return to their previous foster carers. The boys were ecstatic, ‘We can eat chocolate and lollies again for breakfast and play video games every day for hours, yay!
Soon after relinquishing the boys I spoke at a Climate Change demonstration in our home town. Stepping away from the microphone to listen to the other speakers I ended up standing next to a man who I was newly acquainted with - let’s call him ‘Steve.’
Steve had established a local bulk food co-op that I shopped at. He was a somewhat aggressive advocate for the health of planet Earth. He also had four kids which I thought odd for someone who understood the population crisis and the detrimental impact of our species on the planet.
So I’m standing next to Steve. He knows I live on land surrounded by forest. He doesn’t know about my decades of trying to conceive, the foster care tragedy in our lives, or my breast cancer. There’s a break between speakers and he leans slightly towards me and asks, ‘ How can you live your life out there without kids? You’re just living out there in that forest waiting to die with no kids to carry on your legacy.
I think in that moment I probably could have won an Oscar for my impersonation of a stunned mullet. I stared at him, mouth wide open, struggling to breath, wondering how the fuck to answer such an insensitive attack? Within moments I realised I had nothing to say to this man. That sort of toxicity isn’t something I choose to continue to engage with. I chose not to hook into his unpleasantness, refocused on what I was there for and moved away from him as quickly as I could. I wasn’t going waste any more of my time or emotional energy on him.
What I demonstrated in that interaction, possibly for the first time in my life, is that I have the right to choose not to engage with excessively thoughtless or deliberately unkind people. This incident has also made me fierce in my attempt to never make assumptions about anyone’s life.
I’m trying to keep this short, which isn’t easy for me as I love to write. On my blog page I’ve written a piece called, ‘Burying Dreams,’ which is about one of the main strategies I used in coming to term with being childless. You might like to read it by clicking here
Suzan Muir