Sandra (Sandy) Sjollema
Ever since I was a child, I have hated thinking and talking about the future. And yet, in my family of origin, the future seemed to be a preferred topic of discussion, especially by my father. For example, he liked to speculate on just how many sons my brother would have one day to pass on the family name. As the family historian who had taken many trips abroad (to Europe from Canada) to investigate and document family history, my father had a keen sense of history, time and legacy. It was pointed out to me that, as a female, this notable task of carrying on the family name was not mine to be had.
No, my job – and the expectations made clear to me by family and society – was to not to pass on the name but to do my part to continue the family lineage, i.e. have children. This directive came to me in hundreds (thousands?) of ways and moments throughout my life, for example, through comments about my weight (boys don’t like stalky girls), my dating life (how come my relationships were short-lived?), my choice of clothes (I dressed too much like a boy), my intelligence (boys don’t like girls who are smarter than them) and the list goes on. Of course, the idea was that I had to be feminine enough to attract a man with whom to settle down and have children to contribute not only to our family tree, but to the greater tree of life. To contribute to the future.
Wilkinson (2018) describes this path of coupledom, marriage, and childbearing as heteronormativity.
And yet, my relationship to femininity, heterosexuality and heteronormativity has always been fraught with a disquiet, and a sense of resentment that I was supposed to feel, desire, and behave in prescribed ways to reach future goals that were not necessarily mine. Don’t get me wrong: if people, and specifically women, truly want these things in life, then all the power to them. What I resented growing up (and sometimes, even today) was that this was the ONLY path presented as being acceptable and meaningful for an adult woman: anything else, and you have failed.
With the stakes being so high, it is not surprising that I hated talking about the future.
But from my girlhood onwards, I have never been very feminine and consider myself to have an androgynous side; as of my twenties, I knew that I was attracted to more than one gender; and in my forties, any hope of participating in what Edelman (2004) refers to as ‘reproductive futurism’ i.e. having children, crashed and burned. Even in terms of coupledom, I have been married and divorced twice, and my current partnership, although longstanding, is one that I would describe as non-normative (i.e., not conforming to societal norms).
Edelman calls this non-conformism with societal standards, especially the childless part, ‘queer defiance’ and sees it as embracing a ‘non-future.’ Others, such as politicians in the U.K. and the U.S., have interpreted this ideaas meaning that if one does not have children, one cannot be invested in the future, not only in one’s personal or family life but in the life of the nation. Indeed, they have blatantly stated that those who are childless have no stake in the nation’s future.
Although I think these ideas are idiotic, I did struggle with the notion of the future in my adult years: I was plagued with the feeling that I had no future because I either could not see myself adhering to the imposed norms, or when I did try, it did not work out. Yet, at the same time, I could not envision meaningful alternatives for myself. In addition, due to having lived with CPTSD (complex post-trauma) and an anxiety disorder, as well as recovering from substance abuse and being a low-income individual, among a host of other reasons, it has often taken all my resources to make it through the day, never mind thinking about the future.
Archetti (2020), referring to the celebrated psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s story of survival in the Auschwitz death camp, recounts that it was usually the prisoners who lost any sense of purpose – and with that, a sense of the future – who gave up and let themselves die in the camp. In retrospect, I see my plunge into what I describe as nihilism as an adult as being the result of the lack of purpose and meaning in my life.
Now in my early 60’s, I can see that what saved me was that I had the willingness, ability, support and resources to struggle: specifically, to struggle to uncover, discover and live out my own sense of values. Indeed, I have become committed, for example,to being there for others, to community, to personal well-being and development, to creativity, to learning and to activism (justice). These values have guided and supported me through the loss of the possibility of having children, through divorce, through the loss of my parents, loss of job, loss of relationships with friends, and through increasing health difficulties as I age.
What these values and living them out have permitted me to do is to connect with others and contribute to something larger than myself, and by doing this, to give my life meaning and purpose and perhaps, as a by-product, to contribute to a future that will extend beyond me (for example, through writings of mine that have been published). And I do this while living a Queer, non-normative life that I have increasingly come to embrace, societal approval or not.
With my parent’s generation passed on, I now speak to a cousin who is the guardian of the family tree about family matters. I recently contacted him to ask him to add some updated information to my section of the family tree.
I can’t help but picture a future member of the family looking at my entry and reading the notes about myself (my cousin adds short biographical notes about family members) and being curious as to who this relative (me) was, because, in my family tree as elsewhere, my path shows itself to be a unique one. But even if that doesn’t happen, the focus for me is on living now, in being myself and embracing values that I hold dear. And that, in the end, for me at least, is enough.
Bibliography
Archetti, C. (2020). Childlessness in the age of communication: Deconstructing silence. Taylor & Francis.
Edelman, L. (2004). No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Duke University Press.
Wilkinson, E. (2020). Never after? Queer temporalities and the politics of non-reproduction. Gender, Place & Culture, 27(5), 660-676.
