As he has released me more and more, I have been left to feel both
a child's abandonment and an adult's relief. I have turned toward male
lovers with more freedom and more hope, no longer seeking my father's
twin or opposite, but simply a man who can give and receive love.
As I write this piece, I am in midlife, sitting by the warm
fireplace in my mountain home. I let the music go still. The silence
feeds me more these days, opens out into a shapeless, timeless container,
a womb in which I feel the restless stirring of growing things.
I add a log to the fire and step back into the soundless container,
pen in hand, facing the empty page, feelings of grief and loss welling up
into squiggly fines meant to transmit this moment of my very private life
to another, an unknown other, perhaps a woman like myself who also has no
demands of feeding schedules or dirty diapers, no breasts that fill at
the cry of a small one, no babysitters to find or preschool to choose.
Another perhaps who is grateful for the absence of these messy
interruptions but who wonders, too, in her quiet moments, about small
smiles missed, small hands and feet unseen, silky skin untouched, and the
first step not taken.
Does she feel as I do that childlessness is a separate state of
consciousness from having children, as distinct as waking is from
sleeping? Does she feel as I do that she has taken from her father his
most precious dream?
To my father, childlessness is a stain on my womanhood, a blemish
on my worth, a failure of maturity. Adulthood for a woman means in some
profound way to birth and care for young ones, helpless and dependent
ones, so that to remain childless means to remain a child.
To remain childless means to avoid fulfilling a female mandate, to
betray a biological gift. I refer here to an inner wound, as if we were
meant to grow two arms but grow only one--an amputation to our potential
as women.
The feminist in me rages at this feeling--I was not born to breed!
I am enough as I am. I can live independently--without a child--and I
shall.
But as a single woman coming to terms with not having a child, soon
to be incapable of having a child, I carry a secret terror of meeting new
men, assuming they all seek to impregnate the one they love, they all
seek to re-create themselves, they all dream the dream of family
life.
And I carry a secret shame that no matter what I could produce or
create that would make my father proud, I have utterly failed him because
he has no young ones playing at his feet as he grows old.
This is my fate; and so it is his.
And I ask myself in this moment, How do I stop seeing the world
through the eyes of a daughter without becoming a mother? How do I become
a woman who did not give birth to children--but did give birth to
herself?
Tags:
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childless,
children,
daughter,
drought,
elusive dream,
evening dinners,
family,
father,
flocks,
grand hotel,
grandmother,
graying hair,
hotel lobby,
lace,
longing,
loving friends,
nooks and crannies,
satin,
sounds of music,
spirituality,
unrequited love,
white birds,
young girl
