Aimee Ruiz
As I neared my mid to late 30s, I told myself that if I wasn’t married by the time I was forty I was going to kill myself. This was a compromise because a few years prior, the deal was if I didn’t have kids by the time I was 40 but there I was single again and unsure of my future. I honestly didn’t want to live anymore feeling that alone. It was too much. I had endured enough life-altering heartbreaks and losses to leave me feeling abandoned and unlovable. And I didn’t understand it because I had always known I would someday be an exceptional partner and mother. I knew that I wanted to be pregnant and give birth to a baby of my own at home. I had built my whole livelihood around pregnancy and childbirth after all, supporting other people to have babies as an acupuncturist. It was the world I lived in so it didn’t make sense that it wouldn’t happen for me too.
And when it didn’t, when it felt like all of my friends moved forward and created their families, I felt left in the dust. The thing is, I was genuinely happy for them. I love babies more than the average person so I rarely, if ever, experienced feelings of jealousy when the people around me became parents. I wanted everyone to have babies if that was what they wanted. I just wanted to have them too.
But as time continued to pass, I could feel my life becoming more and more separate from those around me. As people coupled up and many grew their families, I felt like an outsider. As hard as I tried to find a partner to have children with, nothing was sticking. Somehow I met and even fell in love with people who didn’t want children and those relationships didn’t work out because I was so clear on my goal to be a mother, and no one was going to get in the way of that. It was a confusing and lonely time to feel like I was so close to being chosen and getting the life I had dreamed of.
In the book, Lab Girl, Hope Jahren writes,
“Within certain social circles of the married, a single woman over the age of thirty inspires compassion similar to that bestowed upon a big, friendly stray dog. Although the dog’s unkempt appearance and tendency toward self-reliance betray its lack of an owner, the way it gravitates hungrily toward human contact suggests that it might once have known better days. You consider letting it eat on the porch after you confirm that it is not mangy, but then you decide not to, vaguely worried that it might start hanging around because it has nowhere else to go.” She then writes about how she met her husband at a BBQ and he was also a stray dog (I’m sure they live happily-ish ever after).
But when I first read this passage, I thought her storyline was going somewhere entirely different. I imagined that she wore out her welcome at some point. That the invitations started to slow down until they stopped altogether. Perhaps her presence was just too much to bear for her coupled-up or married friends and having this stray dog around wanting to be a part of something it clearly wasn’t had become a burden. Did she hold a mirror up to them invoking fear of what they too could become if they weren’t paired up with just one other person? If just one other person decided not to be alone with them too. Perhaps being with that one other person made them feel whole in an acceptable way and being without a companion or a love-filled home, would have made them undesirable, dirty, and flawed. I can see the desire not to have the stray dog around staring them in the face. Or maybe I was just thinking about me.
You would be invited if you were in a pair. Some people even said so. If someone else was around to claim you when the party was all over, making you suitable enough to come inside and sit at the table - someone who would guarantee that you would leave at some point and no one would have to feel guilty about any of it, or worse, pity. Then you could stay. Until then, you were not invited in.
The same thing happens when it seems like you are on the shelf for too long. If no one has picked you up for keeps yet or all your relationships so far are deemed failures because they ended too soon, people start to assume something must be wrong with you. They might even pass you by because of it, disregarding your gifts because other people must have too. Then I met someone who said they wanted everything I wanted, so I tried desperately to make it work because I’d been waiting so long. I wanted so badly to belong and to be chosen and deemed lovable once again.
So there I was on the night of my fortieth birthday, sitting across the dimly lit dinner table from my on-again, off-again boyfriend of 3 years at the end of what had already qualified as one of the worst days of my life. And he said to me, “Maybe I’m just not the right guy for you,” and right as I looked up, I saw three servers approaching our table with cake and a lit candle, singing “Joyeux Anniversaire a toi.”
It was then that I realized that I didn’t actually want to die but I definitely didn’t want to spend my life with someone who made me feel so incredibly terrible about myself. I realized that I’d much rather be alive, single, and childless than feel as desperately alone and unloved as I did in that relationship.
That night, my 40th birthday, one that I’ll never get back, provided the moment of clarity I needed. It had to be that loud for me to see that I wanted to be chosen so badly, to feel closer to the possibility of mothering that I was willing to sacrifice my own happiness to show the world that I had been worthy of being chosen. I realized that only I can give myself that feeling of worthiness. I will never find it outside of myself. I could stay and fight for this relationship that left me with an undeniable emptiness and maybe even get to have the family I thought I wanted. But it wasn’t worth it.
I can feel now, in this moment for the first time, a feeling of gratitude to him for releasing me.
