Colleen Addison
I woke up this morning to the sweetness of my tea, a comfort in a cup. Through my window, the clouds were gathering outside, the dawn a new darkness. I sipped, though; all was quiet and the rare sunbeams lit the road.
And I remembered something, another woman I met yesterday. She was lovely, pushing her walker along the street as I stepped through, on my way somewhere. We chatted for a time, and then she leaned on her walker’s seat.
“These are my grandchildren,” she said, leaning on her walker and pushing her iphone nearly into my nose. “Aren’t they beautiful?” I barely glanced at the screen.
I’m 50 now, years too old to have a baby, at least in my mind. I’ve had a hysterectomy. I’m in love with a woman who is herself also past menopause. Neither one of us wants to add a child to our relationship. I’m done, in other words; I no longer dream of being a mother in the future.
But I did want a baby once, and so this interaction was hard for me.
How hard? Years ago, I wanted a baby and badly too. I’m not sure now, looking back, why precisely I wished for motherhood: did I succumb to societal messaging? The romance novels I read voraciously promoted motherhood like it was an automatic addition to the happily ever after of love and marriage. Meanwhile, the other side was horrible, with non-mothers as the villains of movies like “Fatal Attraction” and “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle.”
There’s no doubt, though, that I did want to be a mother, and the loss of that dream broke my heart.
I’m 50 now, and I’ve been dealing with this childless grief for a decade, maybe more. It’s not an open wound in my heart; it’s a scar.
Scars can ache, of course, and maybe mine was, with that walker-supported woman.
What’s surprising me today, though, is not that there is grief in my heart. There is, and for more than the loss of motherhood.
I am angry about having been sick, the fact that doctors didn’t believe me about my pain; the fact that endometriosis has been studied so little; the fact that my health problem from twenty years ago, an acoustic neuroma found in my left ear, has resulted in so many comorbidities in recent times.
I grieve two of my friends who have died, Ann from cancer and a second from a sudden stroke. I grieve my father who died too young from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the fact that he didn’t seek out treatment soon enough for it to be of any help.
I regret some of the choices I made, not wanting to be friends with an ex who asked, not standing up for myself when I was fired after my father died.
I mourn, too, the environment in which I grew up, in which sexism and homophobia were rampant because both of those affected me, and I mourn the biases that were present that affected other people, some of which biases I acknowledge that I myself have.
And I am still upset over not having a child.
But all of this doesn’t break me down, not any more. I am 50, and there are many choices I wish I had made, and many that I am glad I made.
I guess I’m saying I like my life now. I like the tea I’m drinking, and the fact that a woman and I chatted for a while before I learned she was a new grandmother (and annoying in that role). I like the rare sunbeams that are falling even now, and even the fact that I’ve been too sick to work for a few years now.
Sometimes I wonder, though, if my life would have been better or more special, if I did not have the losses for which I grieve and the choices which I regret. Sometimes I wonder about a life with children, too. I will never know any of this. The answer is maybe. And it’s also maybe not.
Sometimes this is how I picture my life. Years ago I was in England’s Lake District, that glorious walkers’ joy of valleys wrought by ancient glaciers and hills of rugged rock. Even when I was there, that area is touristy beyond belief; the hills were crisscrossed with footpaths. I am not a planner. Instead of selecting one lone path, I wandered, following lines of footprinted dirt at random.
I went the wrong way a few times, I admit it. As I recall, I staggered down a rocky outcrop, seeing the “Closed” sign far too late, and once rain fell on my unprotected head. At the end of my day, though, I came to Tintern Abbey, which loomed gloriously against a miraculous sunset, the Norman flying buttresses throwing themselves across a pink and orange sky.
Did I make mistakes? I made mistakes. Maybe I could have ended up a mother, if I’d chosen the right paths. If I’d planned my life better, I think sometimes, I would have gotten everything I’ve ever wanted.
It’s possible, though not a guarantee. At my hostel in the evening, I met other walkers, guidebooks in hand, who had made selections: results were mixed.
No one else went to the abbey. Or if they did, they arrived earlier, and missed the sunset scene.
Only I got to see that. Only I got that glory.
That’s my life, a bunch of oopses and mistakes and falling rain, and Tintern Abbey in the fading sunset light. I regret things, and my heart is scarred. But here I am. Above me the buttresses fly.
