The Childless Writer

Finding meaning as not-a-mother

I have seven brothers. One of them is dead. Two of them married their high-school sweethearts. One of them was arrested. One of them is liberal. The rest of them are not. I am the only girl.

Raised up in a house brooding with boys, a mother who joked about being pregnant or nursing for near twenty years straight, a father who sulked until he shouted and then sulked until he shouted again, with traditional roles for what boys can do and girls can do, and being the only girl who could do for many of those years, I knew there was only one thing to grow up and do: wife someone and mother more someones.

Goals I write at 13:

• To wife a man.

• To mother children.

Not to become a wife and mother, but to morph into a receptacle and incubator, to define myself only in relation to the ones I laid my body down for.

I know there are some who share that goal who see themselves not as receptacle and incubator, but as supporter and nurturer, and others who embraced the goal who see it as glorious and the highest calling. But I am a romantic with a bleeding-heart. As a child, I am writing the story of my future as if it will be a good story, as if a good story is possible, as if belovedness is the only bed upon which my body will be laid, and I will settle for nothing less.

I do not marry the man who hemmed himself around my homemade skirts and head coverings. I do not marry the man who kissed my mouth first. I do not marry the one who flirted with the idea for a decade, who finally outed himself as gay. I do not marry the one who made me laugh, the one who made me cry, the one who would not change his theology, the one who promised he could. I do not marry the first man I promised to marry and the one I wanted to marry would not marry me. I marry the man who makes me beloved and I make him mine, and by that time, the children do not come. It is too late, maybe?

I do not birth children. I lose children. I lose them in church bathrooms and in shower stalls and in toilet bowls and under surgical knives. I cannot define myself in relation to them. A wife, finally, yes, but not a mother. Not like that.

In all that time, I learn to define myself in relation to me. Or to the world around me. I learn to find meaning in vocation, in work, in payment for services done. I learn to work hard, to be resourceful, to find skills that lurk beneath the acceptable ones. I find a voice, a strong one. Also, sometimes, a scared one.

Meaning comes in other ways. Mentoring, maybe, it scratches the itch but always bites back when it’s done taking. Publishing freelance, sure, but it’s a lot of work for no or little money. Teaching, yes, there is meaning there, but then someone swipes my curriculum and I wonder What is the point? I curve inward to myself, find safety in smaller spaces, quieter places. I break open a vein, like the writer said, bleed onto a screen. No one watches me there. I can do what I like in private.

But publishing is not private. Pressing send makes it public. Makes it fodder, makes it judged, makes it blessed, makes it a blessing, makes it a curse.

I lose friends over the words.

I lose myself over the words not said.

I do battle with myself. I define myself in relation to myself. A number, a gift, a personality. Who am I? What am I? What am I doing?

What am I doing?

I am doing this. I am sitting down at a rough wooden desk every day, excavating the resourcefulness, the hustle, the candoitiveness that made me who I am because I did not wife and I did not mother at 19 and 22 and 25 when all my friends did. They found their own resourcefulness in different ways. But this is mine. This inability to relate to myself as anything other than what I am and what life has made me into, this is mine.

Ida Binney

I am writing a story, a novel. I gave some of you a peek at it a few weeks ago but it is a story about who and what we are (and what we become) when life doesn’t turn out as we planned. As I write, I wrestle with all the ten-thousand nos in my life that did, for better or worse, lead to me this yes. I am not the person at 44 I envisioned when I was 19 or 22 or 25. I care about different things and care less about other things. I do better work and faster, too. Although, a lot of the time, slower. And I have decided some work is no longer for me. That that work only worked if I kept one of the two goals I’d had at 13.

My third goal:

• To be a writer.

Check.

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