Michele L. Walter
I was maybe 7 or 8 years old when I realized that the time between when my parents got married and when I was born was less than nine months. Growing up, that realization never bothered me and I never felt like an accident. Indeed, my mom made me feel like my brother and I were both the greatest gifts she ever received.
But, the notion that I was an accidental human took on a different flavor as I got older and started to feel the pang of existential questions like “what is my purpose?” I felt that I had to justify my accidental existence by leaving a big legacy.
Most people I know define their legacy and purpose through their children–from the lessons the parents pass on to the DNA that will live on after they are gone. So, as someone who is childless not by choice (“CNBC”), I often feel shitoutta luck when it comes to legacy and purpose. I feel deeply tortured by the notion that my DNA, my family’s DNA, and centuries of family history, struggle, triumphs, joy, pain . . . all die with me.
When my mom died suddenly in 2012 from a heart attack at the young age of 58, these questions about how I can leave a big enough legacy to justify my accidental existence began to weigh on me like an elephant sitting on my shoulders.
I was 40, single, and childless when my mom died. Losing her meant losing my biggest cheerleader . . . the biggest connection to my past . . . the one person who helped me feel grounded in who I was.
Also, I was “stuck” in a job as a federal government attorney where I spent most of my time researching and reading boring court cases, arguing with opposing counsel, or nit-picking words in legal documents. I felt so far from any supposed purpose that it was easy for me to question whether I even had a purpose.
Combine that purposeless feeling with my questions about being a childless accidental human with no legacy, and you have a toxic cocktail that left me crying in my closets most nights, wondering if it was even worth waking up the next morning.
I became plagued by questions like:
Would my mom still be alive if I hadn’t been born? Would she have become a nurse like she wanted? How many lives could she have saved?
In what ways was my mom traumatized by an accidental pregnancy–which then resulted in an ugly divorce 18 years later? And how was that trauma passed on to me?
How can I honor the sacrifice that my mom made for me if I don’t have any children to pass on her legacy?
What legacy will I be able to leave?
Why am I even here?
What is the point of my existence?
Yeah . . .my existential questions got pretty dark.
That was seven years ago. Obviously I’m still here. would like to say that my existential questions about legacy and being an accident have gone away. But they have not. Their weight as that elephant on my shoulders has gotten lighter though because I have done a lot of work for myself. I went through a coaching certification program and mindfulness meditation teacher certification program that gave me deep powerful wisdom and strategies to navigate my relationship to those existential questions. I quit being a lawyer and started my own small business to pass on the powerful wisdom and strategies that I have learned.
And, most importantly, I looked for help. As a child of the 70’s and 80’s–a proud Generation X’er–“help” was the only 4-letter word that I did not like and rarely ever used. I prided myself on not asking for help. But as I have learned, there is profound freedom, growth, and insight that can be found in asking for help, especially as I navigate my 50’s as a single, childless woman.
In addition to the help from my coaching and mindfulness practices, I got help from other amazing women: Dr. Adia Gooden, who has helped me address my feelings of being inherently unworthy, and myisha t. hill (founder of Check Your Privilege) who has taught me about the socialized beliefs I have absorbed through the dominant culture of whiteness in America. Beliefs about how my worth is wrapped up in whether I have children, what and how much I produce, how much money I have, my job title, and what I leave behind as a legacy.
Through working with these women and doing my own deep, difficult, and demanding work of liberating myself from the trauma and messaging that I have inherited and absorbed, I have entered a lifelong healing journey. One where I am learning to embrace that my worth as a human being has nothing to do with children, my job, my money, or even, what legacy I leave or don’t leave behind.
I have come to learn that I am worthy as a human because I AM. I AM an embodiment of the creative life force–Spirit–that lives in every single human, animal, plant, mountain, star, and molecule of air that exists. I AM a human being that has given form to that Spirit within me so that it can play, create, and experience life. That Spirit that is connected to everything and everyone. That Spirit is connected to my mom, all of the generations before me, and all other humans–whether we share the same DNA or not–from the past, present, and future.
Ultimately, I am not an accident. I AM what Spirit was called to create. My Purpose is to let that Spirit flow in and through me to others. And my Legacy is in every single moment, every single person, and every single thing to which I am and will always be connected through that Spirit.
I am not an accident. The world is my child. I am my own legacy. And I am worthy because I AM.
