Seven years ago, I ran away from a life that I had never chosen. I had strayed onto a path that wasn’t mine, and in late 2016, a voice inside me insisted that I get out. My escape wasn’t noble or elegant, but I did what I had to do to initiate myself into a new, authentic reality.
The image still haunts me – How to Conceive Naturally And Have a Healthy Pregnancy after 30 was the title of a book that sat for months on the arm of the sofa in the house I shared with my ex-husband. In early 2017, I would start trying to get pregnant. This too was a decision I hadn’t intentionally chosen, it was just what you did. You got married, you bought a house, you got pregnant. I wasn’t raised in any form of traditional anything, and yet the volume of this cultural expectation was so loud that it drowned out any viable alternative.
There wasn’t an immediate shift. For over a year after getting divorced I still fantasized about having a baby. I was still so far away from myself that I subconsciously believed a baby would give me the meaning, purpose and identity I craved.
It wasn’t until I began to form a new, fulfilling life for myself that my idealization of motherhood started to melt away. Part of this was coming to terms with the deeply traumatizing relationship I’d had with my own mother.
Part of it was meeting women like my friend Jenny Kellogg, who had initially planned on having children, but allowed her struggle with infertility to show her that the universe had something else in store. She transmuted the disempowering experience of not being able to get pregnant into an empowering and intentional decision to walk away from what wasn’t meant for her.
Another part of it was recognizing the deeply narcissistic reasoning I’d used to justify becoming a mother in the first place. I knew I couldn’t rob a child of their autonomy by birthing them into this world in order to make myself whole. There was no guarantee that I would have an exceptional child. There was no guarantee that I could be a better mother than my mother had been. What I did know was that I was put on this earth to surrender, to relinquish control, and to unravel the anxious neurosis and enmeshment that had been passed down through my maternal line. Ultimately, it became clear that choosing motherhood might prevent me from doing the work I knew I was here to do.
Another aspect was also exploring and embodying my sexuality, and stumbling upon lesser-known feminine archetypes that spoke to me at a depth that was unmistakable and profound. Vesta, Lilith, Mary Magdalen, the sacred prostitute; their stories were my story, and slowly, over the course of several years, I came to feel that I finally had a structure on which to rebuild my own mythology — the mythology of a fully embodied, initiated woman; a woman dripping with devotion and meaning; a satiated, fulfilled, gracious woman, without children.
I find it disturbing that even after all our “feminism,” a woman’s decision not to have children is still considered anti-woman, anti-body, anti-life. When I speak about my decision not to have children, I am frequently met with pity, sorrow, or skepticism. “Well, you never know, maybe you’ll feel differently about this one day,” they say condescendingly.
I find it disappointing that biological motherhood is still regarded as the sole, pinnacle experience of what it means to be initiated into mature, embodied womanhood. “Motherhood is the most effective, the most profound, the most initiatory, the most life-changing…” I hear over and over again spoken by women who don’t hear how exclusionary, self-righteous, and close-minded they sound to women on alternative paths.
To be clear, I fully support a modern reclamation of motherhood — moving away from what we were forced to do into what we want to do. But I also worry about how easy it is to repackage age-old cultural and religious expectation as new age enlightenment.
Are we truly free from the shackles of patriarchal expectation? Have we truly moved beyond the guilt and shame that’s been bound to women’s sexuality, their wild inhibition, and their ravenous desire for tens of thousands of years? Or are we still frightened by what it means for a woman to be whole, nourished, worthy, and fully embodied without children? With a twenty-five billion dollar fertility market, do we truly believe that women are encouraged – even allowed – to feel complete without children?
Are we genuinely comfortable with women who embody fecundity, desire, and wild inhibition? Why do we insist these women are still “maidens”? Why do we still associate embodied, shameless sexuality with promiscuity and immaturity? Why can’t we understand that womanhood extends well beyond childbirth? Why is our culture still so insidiously infected by the Madonna-whore complex?
Aside from the women who choose not to have children, there are so many more who are physically unable. What do we have to offer these women as a path to embodied womanhood? Where is their salvation? Where are the stories of empowered, loving, fully-formed women without children? Why do so many stories about childless women portray them as bitter, disappointed, or disembodied?
I fear that these stories are missing because we are still fearful and ashamed. I fear these stories are missing because we are still not free.
I am a childless woman, but I am not a victim or a maiden.
I am a childless woman, but I am still a woman.
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While these thoughts and questions about womanhood and motherhood have been on my mind for some time, I have to credit a passage in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel Thrust for inspiring me to finally put something down on paper. Additional thanks to those of you who responded so positively to the first iteration of this piece that I posted as an Instagram story.
We are currently reading Thrust for our book club. It’s the second book of Yuknatich’s I’ve read. The first was her memoir, The Chronology of Water. Both are fantastic, and Yuknavitch’s writing reminds me how much freedom and innovation there is to be discovered through writing. I have yet to come across another writer who inspires me to write as much as she does.
Here is the passage that inspired this piece -
“Before I die, I want to give everything back. To mothers. Everything our mothers took from us when they couldn’t understand how to exist inside impossible contradictions; everything that was taken from our mothers as a means of keeping the house, the country, the world in order.
I would give them back their arms, their legs. Return them to their heads, their hair, their lips and eyes. Mothers, here are your bound and heavy hearts, stricken by the beatings they tricked you into. Mothers, I give your body back to land, your original intimacy. Most of all, I give mothers back their breasts, their wombs, their cunts, their desire.
I would set us free from the word ‘mother’. May your body be yours again; may your blood belong to your again. Even to the dead mothers: May your body belong to whatever you might have become, had you not been strapped to the service of breeding.
And to the blossom of every girl ever born: May the violent rush of cosmic possibility in your body, between your legs, be let loose from reproduction. May you open yourself to the cosmos, creating new constellations. May it wreck the wrong world back to life.”
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