“LIZ THINKS. ‘I’M SORRY I HURT THEM. It would probably have been
better for everyone if I’d never had kids.’
I’ve never heard such a candid expression of remorse, the kind
whispered at confession, if at all. Procreation is exclusively a liturgical
discourse of the ‘miraculous’ and the ‘blessed’ – a child is the ‘treasure’
salvaged at the end of a shipwrecked marriage or the postpartum ‘gift’
of a disfiguring birth or even one in which the mother dies. Having
kids is a life choice, like any other. We don’t crucify people who regret
their marriages, career choices and other life-altering decisions. Why is
motherhood a protected species?
‘But then you were happy when you left, yes?’ Yasmin asks. She is
working relentlessly to discover Liz’s happiness, a devotee.
‘When I wasn’t feeling guilty.’
‘Sounds like you were screwed either way, luv,’ Cate says. ‘I don’t
know why we think it’s unnatural for a mother to leave her kids. It
happens in Nature all the time.’
Liz rubs her feet. ‘I can’t imagine they’ve developed the antidepressants
I would’ve needed if I’d devoted my life to raising a family.
Someday you just have to look in the mirror and face the truth about
yourself. I love my kids. But I chose myself over them.’
I, by contrast, kept choosing my kids. Right here, I’m thinking,
might be where I failed. Of my many errors of affection, the one
that has returned to cut me most deeply is that I over-wanted a
family.
While most kids hunger for more time and attention from their
parents, mine probably would have preferred less. I don’t know how
to love anyone casually, or just enough. Everything I do is over
the top. I hadn’t considered how that might make a child feel. I spun
my love into a technicoloured dream coat, too weighty for everyday
wear. As much as a child needs to know they were wanted, perhaps
it’s exhausting to be that wanted.
This parenting gig screws you, whether you take the left or the
right turn. Pursue your own dreams, and you’ve abandoned them.
Stay and you’re overbearing. Liz left, and Chloe doesn’t speak to her.
I stayed and Jamie hardly talks to me. It’s inevitable – we will burn
the rice whether we watch it or walk away. It’s perplexing, really, why
I don’t feel more liberated.
This here is a new conversation, the kind I have longed to have.
Among these strangers, it feels safe enough to wonder aloud why we
assume living in packs is what humans were made for. Or why we
pretend one size fits all when anyone who has ever wept in a dressing
room knows this is gaslighting of the most pernicious kind. It seems
natural to outgrow a nest and to keep moving when we’ve exhausted
the land, like indigenous people do to give it a chance to regenerate.
“The person who at one time might have said, ‘Hell no, I fucking hate curtains.
I adore French shutters,’ is no more.”
Maybe families should have expiry dates, like medication and processed
food, so we know, ‘This is good for a while, but be warned, it may
go funky.’
For years, I’ve showered with other peoples’ underwear, swimmers
and cycling shorts hanging over the tap. I’ve sighed silently over milk
left on the counter to spoil. I’ve cursed at peaches in the vegetable
crisper bruised by beers plonked on top because ‘there was no other
place in the fridge’. I’ve lived with dumbbells under the coffee table,
a toolbox in the dining room just as Frank has put up with piles of
books next to my bed, and the clutter of cosmetics by the sink. I ate
beef sausages and spaghetti bolognaise once a week for fifteen years
when they were all Aaron would eat. I said, ‘Sure, why not?’, when
everyone wanted the 77-inch flat-screen tv and sat through Mission
Impossible 13 because that’s what everyone else wanted to see instead of
A Star is Born. Frank still wakes me every single night when he comes
to bed after midnight, pilfering my rem sleep as if it were sidewalk
furniture for the taking.
My efforts with Frank have been valiant, if not flawed and disappointing
in ways neither of us could have predicted. A family is the
Milwaukee brace on our free spirits. But it’s fair because everyone
is compromising, shaving themselves down so that the alignments don’t
cause nerve pain in others.
I’d always regarded my pliability as a strength, not a weakness.
Adults compromise. Grown-ups cooperate. Only toddlers and teenagers
can’t or won’t share. The middle ground, devoid of non-negotiables,
is a sturdy foundation on which to build a family. I’ve bent
willingly, lovingly, to make room for what makes Frank and the kids
come alive.
But these small refrains from asking myself, Is this okay?, have accumulated
like a build-up of cholesterol in the arteries. My identity
has begun to sag. And now, in my midlife, the self against whom
these questions might have been measured – the person who at one
time might have said, ‘Hell no, I fucking hate curtains. I adore French
shutters,’ and ‘I’d rather have a piece of Aboriginal art as the centrepiece
in our living space than an enormous flickering screen’ – that person is
no more. I reached in one day, and my hand moved straight through
her, as if she were a ghost. The neural pathway of ‘I want’ has died and
all I know now is ‘I’ll have what they’re having’.
And this is why I’m sitting in this circle in a cave, in a cove god
knows where, instead of in front of the tv while Frank guesses the right
answers to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”
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by Joanne Fedler
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