I forgot the sun rises before 9am. Im not sure if it was my IBS or the poison oak rash burning my thigh that woke me up at 4am but it was certainly my thoughts that kept me awake this morning. The sexiest way to start, I know. The cats encouraged me to stay in bed as long as possible, so I read the rest of Swing Time and a Patreon post from fellow trauma survivor, comedian friend, Emma Arnold. The two pieces, together, coalesced with my thoughts- the needing of rest, the having of time. The cats. The end of an empty life.
Each time my fantasies about life, in the most general terms (career, kids) detours, I get a little closer to laughing at myself. This nauseating process of indecision has plagued me almost to the point of comic exasperation. Yesterday I interviewed, no wait, excuse me, I had a “discovery conversation” with a company that sells, mostly life insurance and ironically, a sense of security. “Are you ready to start your career as a financial advisor?” Um… its May, I haven’t done my taxes, am currently on unemployment and this is the most money I’ve made my entire “career,” so yeah, 5 out of 5, very interested!
It is not for lack of opportunity or inspiration that I have ended up in this life eddy, approaching 35 with a blog and paddle board to show for it. My long time, older and much wiser friend Nancy and I talk about children. She is one of the only people bold enough to ask me about how I feel about having them, a kind of intimacy in conversation I only realize I crave when she calls. Nancy has two daughters, each have two children of their own and she is in love with all of them.
She’s brought this one moment up many times in this conversation. “I’ll never forget when I first asked you about children, you said, ‘I don’t know if I could share my body like that.’” I think that moment stuck with me in part because her reaction to it was so strong, maybe she sucked her breath in or paused, startled or stopped the constant motion she is in when bustling around the kitchen. Somehow she manages to impreganate the smallest moments between activities and logistics with meaningful converation. I think it also stuck with me because sometimes what comes out of my mouth when I talk to her, or to any rare soul who really listens, can shock me in its raw honesty. Like I turn around to see who said that, like I didn’t know I had it in me, or didn’t even know I thought that or felt that until I heard myself say it in a voice that comes out so much more confident than the one in my head.
I initially interpreted her reaction to that statement as a shock. That it was an unnatural thing to say and I felt shame about it for a long time. I didn’t understand what I said, I didn’t know why the idea of a living being inside of me, seemed so foreign. I imagined everyone else seemed to feel that for women, having children was the most natural, primal thing your body could do so the fact that it didn’t feel right meant there was something wrong with me.
When I was with my former partner, we visited Nancy. She could see he loved me, unconditionally, told me that, asked me again about children while we drank cold white wine on her back porch and he made us blackened fish tacos. She said she’d come help me take care of the baby, “I love babies,” she said with a giddiness I felt too when I held one. That offer made the idea almost bearable and deliciously tempting. A mother, to teach me to be a mother? What a heartbreaking illusion. I didn’t have anything honest or clear to say then, I was just coming to terms with my inability to securely attach in any relationship, and was far away from being able to make my own decisions.
A break up, a couple years and a one new partner later, she brought it up again. You’d think the idea, that having children was the best possible thing, would have cemented in her mind after watching the birth of a couple more grandchildren but Nancy surprised me. She wasn’t stuck on the idea, she was turning it over, looking at it from a different angle. “Do you remember when you said…” I told her she wouldn’t let me forget. She talked about someone else she knew, who didn’t want children, who had had some trauma in her childhood but whose partner really wanted children and now she was pregnant and coming around to the idea. I told her what I relief I’d felt when Sam, within 12 hours of arriving back in the state for the season, made clear that he didn’t want children in a process that felt like vetting. That he found it fundamentally and immediately important that we agree, less go our separate way, gave me some relief. I told him it was complicated, said I didn’t know if I wanted children or not but that I didn’t think I could handle the experience, mentally or physically. I cried and lamented the premature loss of the fundamental and awesome right of motherhood, as a woman while he held me and seemed to accept that as good enough.
Nancy said it was refreshing to see so many women in my generation making the choice. That what was important was that it was a choice. That it was our choice. That statement is the one that sticks with me now, replaces the previous one about the shadows in my body. I flashed back on the feeling of relief I’d had when Sam made clear his terms. I thought then that it was because I felt suddenly relieved of the burden of having children but now I think maybe it was the relief of having to make the choice.
I can’t imagine selling life insurance as a career. It would mean asking potential clients, multiple times per day, “Is there anyone in your life you would like to be taken care of after you pass?” And when they say yes, faking the ability to relate. If someone asked me that, I’d say no. Just the cats. I don’t mind the idea of being a spinster cat lady, but I don’t want to end up one. I have to choose it. What’s important is to choose a life you can bear. The narrator in Swing Time had no children. The two women whose lives she lived through, her employer and her friend, each had many and the book ends with a simple image of her friend and her friends children dancing on a balcony while she stares up, empty from a place below.