I was contemplating moving beyond childlessness from my tiny cabin overlooking Lake Superior when I met a woman about my age named Martha. We took a walk and fell into conversation like we were old friends and I found myself thinking what a kind, interesting and beautiful woman she was.
As I’ve moved with and through my grief for a long time now I was comfortable sharing pieces of my life without children. She was interested but never asked intrusive or inappropriate questions to find out more or why. She showed so much empathy I began to wonder if she was childless herself until she made a fleeting reference to her daughter but she never made her daughter the focus of the conversation. As most childless women know these are two pretty big hurdles in a conversation and I was encouraged to have moved through them so effortlessly.
The conversation roamed through literature, culture, and stories of our lives. At one point I mentioned the discrimination childless women face in the workplace and she was angry for the injustice of it. Some time later she shared her frustration with her family’s dismissal of her concerns and disrespect of her time and I reciprocated the anger over the injustice of it. I could easily relate to her experiences with her family but wondered how she came to relate to my childless experience. I realized as a writer of historical fiction she quickly grasped the perspective and missing voice of ‘others’ in a cultural narrative but it seemed more than that.
Throughout the walk we were peppering our conversation with little comments about menopause and living on the other side of fertility. Our lack of caring if our hair was gray, making friends with our body’s new ‘lumpy’ shape, looking back on a career of being underpaid and overworked, the challenges of relationships and the future challenges of aging in general as a woman. We laughed a lot and I found a lightness and freedom in our conversation.
Martha and I were in our 20s when The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf was published (1991) and our personal experience lent the book’s premise credence. For those who haven’t read it The Beauty Myth is not really about beauty, it’s about influencing women’s behavior. By shifting women’s focus onto their appearance and setting an unattainable goal of beauty through images of airbrushed ‘girls’, women’s self-esteem and self-worth plummets and it creates a hunger in women to channel their energy and financial resources into the Health and Beauty industry to achieve some level of acceptable appearance. Appearance became a job qualification on the one hand and it became the reason women were sexually harassed on the other hand.
I remember those days of having no idea what to wear because we needed to be ‘dolled’ up enough to be at work but not too much because it might cause unwanted attention and Martha remembers not being able to find a single pair of comfortable dress/business shoes to buy. We found our way back to the present to laugh out loud about the Netflix show Grace and Frankie, appreciating the way they exposed the impact of The Beauty Myth on elderly women with humor while showing how two women who lived completely different lives found a deep and abiding friendship at this stage of their life.
I never thought it would be so easy to talk with a ‘mother’ but Martha is conscious of the many influences that impact us and that seems to make all the difference. My consciousness as a childless woman was hard won and messy and I can imagine my younger and still grieving childless sisters may find my story hard to relate to but there are some upsides to having moved through menopause into my elder years.
One of my slightly younger childless friends asked me once if the ‘baby lust’ would ever end and I said ‘Yes, after you go through menopause’. When your estrogen no longer rises enough to release an egg and when your progesterone no longer drops enough to have your period, the highs and lows of your cycle are softened, the waves are smaller but still present and your testosterone becomes more obvious. I used to see a baby and my arms would ache to hold them but now, with less estrogen, I see a baby and my heart remembers my desire but my arms no longer ache.
My body wants something else now. With more obvious testosterone I want a different outpouring of creativity, my voice and my hands want to speak and do the work that fills my heart with meaning and purpose and that’s not child raising anymore. A year later, post menopause, my childless friend called me excitedly to say I was right.
My conversation with Martha continued with a rich sharing of important books and other influences in our lives. I shared with her a book called If Women Rose Rooted: A Life-changing Journey to Authenticity and Belonging by Sharon Blackie, a story of women finding their way back to their connection with the Celtic ‘Otherworld’, nature and the wellsprings of life they traditionally tended to reclaim their roots and flourish, a true heroine’s journey. She recommended the book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plantswritten by Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist seeking to change her field by not just classifying plants by what they look like but instead to embrace a more indigenous approach to plants emphasizing listening to the sentient nature of the plants and how they are connected and interdependent with one another.
As we talked I felt a kinship with Martha beyond childlessness and wondered again what it was that drew us together. I’ve been reading a book by Peter Sterios called Gravity and Grace: How to Awaken Your Subtle Body and the Healing Power of Yoga and in the forward Eoin Finn says:
In yoga and in almost all aspects of modern living, we have lost the ability to listen to the wisdom of our bodes; instead, we seek the approval of others as the source of our happiness. As Peter points out in this book, one of the basic questions people need to stop asking is “Am I doing it right?” Instead we need to tune in to the “rightness” of the pose by how it FEELS.
My conversation with Martha FELT right because we had both made the journey to break free of The Beauty Myth to a place where we listened to our bodies, hearts and minds and not to what appeared to be the right way to grow old as a woman. My childlessness didn’t matter and her mothering days didn’t matter because we shared common ground in wanting to make a difference in the world in our unique ways from where we stood now and for what time we lave left.
We sat on the rocks on the shore of Lake Superior and soaked up the sun. I reflected on how many years we both lived in a world drenched in the perspective of beauty offered to us by our culture’s many many images. As the waves crashed in their soothing rhythm I let the freedom to age with grace, wrinkles and common ground with my Elder Sisters wash over me.
Martha was regaling me with another story and the more she talked the more beautiful she became to me - - lumps, wrinkles, gray hair and comfy clothes - -she was shining with life, purpose, laughter and love.
And so was I.
Elizabeth Grambsch
(Photo credit: Lake Superior, Marilyn Lamoreux)