As a parent… by Jody Day
Sometimes, I still wonder what I would have been like had I become a mother. I was so desperate for that fixed identity, so hungry to prove that I’d be a good mother myself after some very poor role-modelling, that I have a hunch that I would have thrown myself at it with unthinking gusto: put my children’s photo as my profile pic on Facebook; referred to myself as “little so-and-so’s mum”; over-shared on social media and at social gatherings; sent in reams of cheeky photographs as hopeful modelling submissions to the Mini Boden catalogue. One of those mothers.
Perhaps that’s why I’m quite tolerant of the many empathy failures I’ve experienced from parents over the last fifteen years – I have a sneaking suspicion that, had the tables been turned, I might have been quite like them – boring for Britain about my brilliant children and maybe, one day, in that sliding doors life, my brilliant grandchildren too. One of those women throwing bingos around like, “I never knew love until I had Cornelius,” or “So what is it you do with all that spare time?!”
But instead, and not by choice, I took the path ‘less traveled’ as Robert Frost called it[1], the path of involuntary childlessness. After a decade of unexplained infertility in my marriage, I found myself divorced, single and childless at forty, having been smugly-coupled since my early twenties. The pain of losing my marriage, my in-laws, my home, my business, my career, my income and my health all at once were quite character-forming enough. But nothing could have prepared me for the way people now saw me as some kind of failed left-over woman; unwelcome in any home, at any social gathering. Forgotten by almost all (bar an exceptional few) of those friends who’d stood by my side and encouraged me to leave the sinking ship of my marriage. Even all these years later, that hurts.
It was like waking up in a parallel universe, becoming childless. Over the next few years I gradually realised how utterly and embarrassingly tone-deaf I’d been to the experience of those women outside the safe patriarchal heteronormative identity of partnered with a man and childed. For so long, I’d considered myself a ‘mother in waiting’ – I’d never thought of myself as childless, never used the word ‘infertile’ to describe myself or connected with other women struggling to conceive. I was absolutely sure that I was going to be a mother, that my friends and in-laws children would be my children’s playmates – it was just taking me a bit longer than expected, that was all.
Becoming childless was like learning to live without a protective skin. As a white, middle-class-passing, heterosexual, able-bodied, cis-gendered, well-educated, slim-enough Southern English woman, I hadn’t had a lot of experience of being ‘othered’. Sure, I’d had a tough and broken working class childhood, had moved around a lot, had never really fitted in at school due to my height, my accent, my experiences, my aspirations – but that was all in the past, wasn’t it? After I’d arrived in London as a cocky nineteen-year-old, knowing no one and ready to take on the world, I’d forged my own path, found my own tribe. We thought we were bohemian, counter-cultural artistes but I now see that we were a bunch of lost children. Not all of us grew up. Including some of those who became parents.
My childlessness has shown me what it’s like to live on the outside again, for no reason other than an accident of fate or timing. It broke my heart and in doing so broke it open with empathy for all those who ‘don’t fit’ for whatever reason – ethnicity, sexuality, gender, nationality, ability, age, class, religions, looks, life-experience, etc… the ways we can not fit are legion. Maybe that’s why the locked door of motherhood was so inviting to me? I wanted a safe identity that I believed would protect me from the storms of otherhood. After a difficult start in life, I so desperately wanted to belong.
Sometimes, mothers still say to me, “Oh, but you’d have made a wonderful mother!” as if they are tossing a life buoy from the ship of motherhood for me to grab onto. They probably think this is empathy but what they are actually doing is trying to push away my experience by invalidating it. Whilst I was still grieving, I couldn’t understand why this comment would make me feel so shit, when it was meant so well, and never knew how to respond. These days, no longer grieving, and more connected, post-menopause, to the feisty young women I was before I got on the motherhood-mania train I might respond, “And you’d have made a wonderful childless woman too…” As a parent, I don’t think they’ll use that line again!
Jody Day is an integrative psychotherapist, a World Childless Week Champion, the author of “Living the Life Unexpected” and the founder of Gateway Women.
[1] The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken