Nobody’s Mother

There's a grey farmhouse in the distance like the one in Andrew Wyeth's famous painting, windows boarded up, the roof caved in. Beside a tilting shed sits an old tractor, half-buried in a dome of dust. The wind blows over the broken field, sucking any colour from the earth, any hope from the human heart. This is the landscape of my body.

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This is the woman without. Is it any wonder most people look at me with awkwardness and pity when they ask me about children and discover I am childless? A word brings a whole history with it, an alphabet of attitudes, a cultural reading that translates its dictionary definition into what it really means. Several of the other synonyms in the thesaurus's childless section begin with "un," the prefix that turns something into its opposite and usually affixes "the lack of" to the root word's meaning. Language becomes the most interesting at its points of fracture, those moments of tension and failure when all we mean to say can't be said.

If you ask me, I'll tell you I am a woman who has no children, but I am not without, I am not less. Should I list, instead, all that I have and then decide if there's something missing? The available vocabulary calls me unproductive, wasted and dry-wombed, and I can't find one fit, fearless word to throw a punch and knock these bullies off the corner. There's no pleasing substitute for "childless" working its way from silence to the tip of my tongue.

Living outside of what we usually mean by "a family of one's own" is a complex state that evokes every emotion, including sadness and relief, so mixed together that any attempt at description reduces me to a sigh. Maybe that's because when we speak of a woman without children we're speaking of The Other, one of those who lives on the edge of what our language and culture feel comfortable with. If mother is one of the most powerful words in our mother tongue, what is its antonym? How do I speak of what is not-mother in the scanty vocabulary we have? How can I describe the day I stepped through the door marked "Those Without Children," and no alarm went off?

In some ways I chose not to have children; in other ways, I didn't make that choice as much as it made me. Throughout my young adulthood, unlike many of my friends, I didn't go soft-eyed and giddy at the idea of holding a sweet-smelling bundle swathed in pastel woollens. There may be several reasons for that, including ones I'm not consciously aware of, but except for a few years in my mids, I didn't long for a baby.

I didn't feel any need to extend my genes into the future; there were enough humans in the world without my red-faced resemblances squalling into the light. Children were not a way of ensuring happiness or endowing my days with meaning. That hard task was mine alone. I am, of course, my mother's daughter. She's proud of her two children and she takes the time to say so, but, good daughter that I tried to be when I lived at home, I could not erase her parents' cruelty; I could not protect her from my father's selfishness and drinking; I couldn't move her from the ratty little rented house where I grew up or pay her higher wages for the cleaning jobs she took on to make ends meet.

I couldn't raise her self-esteem. And today, I can't make her less lonely as she spends another holiday by herself with a turkey and all the bounty that goes with it on a prairie table over a thousand kilometres away from where I now live on the west coast. From the time I hit high school, I was a wound-up fury heading out the door, in love with words, with the plays we put on in the school gym, with the passion I was learning about in the back seat of a car. And though I did my best not to act like a "brain" in school, I was determined to get educated enough to break away from my small town and lead a self-sufficient female life free of my parents' poverty and my mother's dependence on my father, who was mean with money and with love.

At university and during my first teaching job, my arms didn't ache from the absence of a baby. They ached from a pile of books and the weight of all the other things I tried to carry to make up for the cultural dearth of my childhood -- Rilke's advice to a younger poet, Germaine Greer, good shoes, Bertolt Brecht, Cabernet Sauvignon, avocados and tall jars of olives, Bob Dylan, Yeats and Akhmatova, curries and rare roast beef, Ibsen and Bergman, freesia in the house in a milk-glass vase.

My life without children did not feel empty. Nor does it now. Admitting this sometimes makes me feel like a stranger among others of my gender. Recently at a dinner with six women, I was asked, as I often am, if I wished that I'd had children. From experience, I know the expected answer is "yes," or at least, "sometimes," but I responded with a question, "Do you wish you hadn't?

But she went on to say that a positive answer would have meant that she'd be wishing her present children out of existence. Would her response have been different if I'd worded the question another way? Do you ever wish that you didn't have children? Some women who, like me, have spent their working lives as teachers might have responded differently to my dinner companion's query. In similar situations, I've heard them say their students are their children; they don't need any others.

Though I've been fond of many of my students and though they keep me connected with generations other than my own, they're not there to fulfil my maternal needs. I do my best to be a good teacher and mentor, but with one or two exceptions, they already have mothers, thank you very much. In our time together, which is relatively brief, it's my job to challenge them and care for them in a more detached way.

I am nobody's mother and never will be

Others claim animals as their children. Again, that equation doesn't work for me. I feel squeamish when someone calls me the mother of my cats. I wouldn't mind even a small amount of their grace, quickness of eye and felicity of ear, but I don't have these feline qualities in my genes. The two cats who share my life are distinct creatures of another species. I adore them, perhaps too much, but they are not ersatz babies in the house.

I am nobody's mother and never will be - CNN

Nor are books, though they've been called a writer's children, especially if that writer is a woman without a family of her own. The metaphor is a thin rationalization for a condition that seems to need an apology or explanation. Surely there is no substitute for a daughter or a son. Either you have a child or you don't. I don't fault people who have kids, but it does make me feel kind of like an alien -- like I made a choice that goes against the grain, violates some kind of societal expectation. I'm not helping perpetuate the population.

I'm not contributing to the next generation in the same way as millions of mothers out there. Recently, friends and I attended our mutual friend's baby shower. We sat with her pregnant sister and three other women: After the typical conversational courtesies they asked: All of the ladies smiled politely and nodded at me before they started discussing sleeping patterns and developmental milestones with my mother-friend.

My childless friend and I shared a secret glance and wished the baby shower had an open bar. Without children we didn't exist. For me, the whole topic of kids is a complex one.

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After divorcing in my late twenties, I was glad I didn't have children. For a time I believed I didn't want kids at all. But in my mid-thirties when my younger sister got pregnant, I absolutely struggled with the choice. The reality that I wouldn't have kids, that my nephew wouldn't have cousins, that I would only wear the title "aunt" and never "Mom" struck me. There were many teary-eyed conversations with my husband. All led to the same conclusion: We would have no help and I'm not crazy about day care. Keep in mind I also didn't want to be a stay-at-home parent. Overall, I like it well enough I suppose.

Jan 21, Katherine rated it it was amazing Shelves: My favourite essay in this collection was by Jennifer Wise. It was sort of harsh, but totally spot-on and awesome. All the other essays were great too, but that one really resonated with me.

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