I came into young adulthood with an invisible metal suit that came between me and my body. I didn’t so much have a body as observe it, and sex was something that seemed to happen to me rather than something I was a full participant in. Having been powerless against an adult abuser as a child, as a young woman my sexual attractiveness gave me a power over men that I relished; my anger sheathed, I used it like a weapon, feeling very little, even as they blamelessly fell in love in with me. It took me falling in love with the man I married when I was twenty-six for me to gradually thaw enough to believe that perhaps I could create a better life for our children than I myself had experienced and, after initially not wanting to have children I changed my mind and we started trying for a family when I was twenty-nine.
You know how the next bit goes; it didn’t. I was unable to conceive and, as my thirties unfolded and our marriage unravelled, sex became mechanical and even lonely; I went back inside the metal suit again, banking on the baby that I was convinced would one day come to heal the gulf that was opening up between us. My then-husband and I were both traumatized children in adult skins and the weight of his addictions and my codependency and infertility became too much; when I fell apart at thirty-seven and needed him to be the strong one for a change, he simply couldn’t do it. Years later he told me that at the time he’d thought I was ‘bullet proof’ – that’s how strong I looked to him and to the outside world. That damn suit again. However, that ‘nervous-breakdown-slash-spiritual-awakening’ (as Brene Brown famously described it) was what pierced my armour and made possible the birth of the woman I am today.
Divorced and dating again at forty with the singular mission to ‘meet someone and do IVF’ I was totally ignorant of the likely success rate of under 5% for someone my age, not that I ever got to test it; neither of my post-divorce relationships were right to even try. Once again, my sexuality felt like some kind of weapon but, so linked was it to my failure to reproduce, this time it was trained on myself. In the aftermath of that second relationship breaking down in my mid-forties, I faced the chilling and heartbreaking reality that childlessness was not some inconvenient way-station on the way to motherhood but my final and irrevocable destination. At that point, I entered a period of voluntary celibacy as I had no idea what I was looking for in a man if it was not potential fatherhood; I decided that until I did know, it was probably best
to focus that energy elsewhere. And so I did. Having been on what felt like a massive and fruitless reproductive detour from the ages fifteen to forty-five, I quit.
All along there had been a relationship in my life I had been neglecting: me. Once I left the fray of dating and mating and started paying attention I was faced with a pile-up of midlife angst: divorced, single, childless, deeply in debt, peri-menopausal, anxious and depressed. No stranger to hard times and already training to be a psychotherapist, I threw everything at it: nutrition, meditation, medication, therapy, 12-Step groups – you name it – but it wasn’t until I did a weekend training in bereavement as part of my psychotherapy training that the penny dropped and I understood something that none of the professionals involved in my care, nor Dr Google, had mentioned: grief - I was grieving. And I wasn’t just grieving my childlessness, I was grieving my life, my marriage, my childhood, my youth, my fertility, my body, my hope, my entire belief system. Childlessness had been the final Jenga piece that had brought the
whole tower down, leaving me to pick through the rubble, barefoot, bloody and alone.
My relationship with myself at the time was deeply toxic; had it been with anyone else I would have walked away from it. I hated my body for failing me and the idea of ever having sex with a man again, knowing that I would never be a mother, appalled me. I would stand in front of the mirror, my lip curled with disgust as I grabbed the womanly fat on my hips or belly and imagined slicing it away. I could not see the point of myself as a sexual being, as a woman, if I had failed to have a child. Alone in my own head with the poison of pronatalism dripping through my mind, I seriously wondered how I was going to get through the rest of my life feeling this terrible; I understood now why my own mother had never been able to be single; out of the distraction of a relationship, even a bad one, I had to face myself.
This was the place I was in when I began the blog that became Gateway Women a decade ago. I was one year into my psychotherapy training and had become a grief junkie, learning everything I could about it. I looked for books on childlessness but apart from a couple of excellent ones by Pamela Tsigdinos and Lisa Manterfield about married women coming to terms with childlessness after failed fertility treatments, I couldn’t find anything for those of us who were single and childless by circumstance or untreated infertility, so after a couple of years, I wrote one, Living the Life Unexpected. And through my work exploring the topics that so many of us wrestle with, such as the changes in our relationships with friends and family, the large and small injustices at work and in society, finding new meaning and purpose in our
lives again, I also came to understand the roots of the sense of betrayal by our own bodies that so many of us feel. Through self-compassionate nurturing, combined with a proactive willingness to forgive and befriend my body again, I worked on healing my relationship with my body and soul. And in doing do, I also began to reframe my relationship to my erotic self.
When I stopped seeing myself as a failed mother, a defective vessel, but instead as a perfectly imperfect human being living my version of a messy, imperfect human life, something shifted in me. I began to see that my body was not a ‘thing’, a ‘product’ constantly in need of updating but actually something quite miraculous. I realised that although the miracle I’d wanted to experience was childbirth, I had already experienced that – by being born. I was already a miracle, and it was time to start treating myself with the tenderness, love, care and respect that I would have given to my own child, or any child.
Although I no longer feel overt body hatred towards myself, it can easily creep in and I have to be very mindful about how I speak to myself when I see my reflection so as not to reinforce any of the sexist, ageist propaganda that lives rent-free in my head. Looking at myself through the male gaze, I see an ageing woman, that most devalued and shamed sexual being in our culture, but just as I refuse to be defined by society’s ideas of me as a woman because I don’t have children, I refuse to let it define me as an erotic being as I age. Having fought so hard to reclaim her, I refuse to surrender my erotic self to the patriarchy. It’s not easy, but none of this is and when I look at photos of myself as young woman my heart breaks to see her fierce vulnerability behind that armour.
Now, as I tip towards my sixties and am fortunate to look forward to my old age with a wise and loving mate I met in my early fifties who treasures all of me, including my invisible scars, I wonder what’s next in terms of learning to embrace my erotic self? Because she is about so much more than sex, relationship and reproduction. She is the young girl that revelled in the natural world and spent hours up trees and in brooks, watching fishes dart around her ankles; she is the mature woman who adores walking headfirst into a strong wind on wild Irish beaches; she is the energy that connects me to writing, activism, spirituality, cooking, creativity and community.
My erotic self is my joy in being a body, not having a body. She is a survivor, but she is so much more and, if I quieten down enough to hear her speak, what she has to tell me is this: You are enough; you have always been enough. Run free, wild girl, run free.