SOMETHING LIKE MOTHERHOOD

CAROLYN MEGAN

I’M DRIVING MY NIECE AND nephew to the museum of Science. At the end of our outing, when I take them home, their father—my brother John—will tell them that their mother’s latest cancer treatment has failed and that she will die. But for now, my niece, who’s nine, rifles through my glove compartment and discovers a tampon. She tears open the wrapper, ejects the tampon, and begins swinging it by the string.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a tampon,” I say.

“What’s it for?”

It seems like a loaded question. To understand tampons means first understanding menstruation, which means understanding the whole life cycle. I have no idea what John and my sister-in-law, Sarah, have told her up to this point. “Well, you know how babies are made, right?”

“No,” she says.

My nephew, thirteen, who is playing with his Game Boy in the backseat, says: “Oh, boy. Here we go.”

“What?” she says, sitting upright.

How should I respond? I don’t want my niece to feel awkward about her sexuality, and anyway I want John to have the opportunity to discuss this with her himself. I begin to talk around the edges but pause as I approach a toll booth, at which point my niece drops the tampon and reaches for the radio dial. I’m off the hook.

Later, when I tell John about the conversation, he replies, “I can’t tell her what it is to be a woman. You’ll probably be the one who helps her with all of this.”

I realize he’s probably right. Over the past eighteen months, as Sarah’s condition has worsened, I’ve assumed more than a few parental duties. I’ve driven to my niece’s and nephew’s soccer games, attended school events, gone to pediatric appointments. I’ve lain awake at night rubbing their backs, tried to relearn algebra, studied the Civil War, bought McDonald’s, nixed Chuck E. Cheese’s, doled out medicines, done loads of laundry, said no more times than I’ve felt comfortable, said yes more times than I’ve felt comfortable.

During this time I’ve found myself moving into situations with a calm parent-like demeanor while admitting on the inside that I have no idea what I’m doing.

After delivering the children to John and Sarah at their house, I wait outside the room where they meet. The plan is that John and Sarah will tell the kids together and that I will then enter to be with them as they process the news. When John opens the door, he whispers, “They’re devastated. They want you to come in, but they don’t want to talk.”

I walk into a tableau of shock and grief. Sarah sits on the couch, half asleep under the influence of pain killers, resting her hand on my niece, who is sobbing. My nephew cries and walks around the room with his arms crossed in front of his body, so much the body language of a teenager now.

I walk over and hug him; he leans up against me, letting out stifled sobs, his arms still crossed. In that moment some part of my heart opens and a new love pours out, not a recalibration or reconfiguring of the love I have, but a new well tapped. No separation of myself with him. And in that moment I think: I will do anything for you.

But will I?

Early in Sarah’s illness, when John was already imagining a world without her, he asked whether my partner, Michael, and I would consider moving in with them. “You won’t have to do anything. It would be just to have you there as a presence in the house.”

I never answered him. I said things like “We’ll see how this unfolds” or “Don’t go there yet.” Stall tactics. Each time he asked, I felt trapped, an impending sense of desperation and doom. It’s the same feeling I had years ago that led to my decision not to have children.

The decision came from my desire to be fully in my life as a writer rather than to raise a child. Having a child was not how I wanted to make meaning of my life, not how I wanted to give back to the world. And the reason for this was my sense that I would love too fiercely, too desperately, at the cost of my self.

I knew my children would always come first and my art second, and I sensed the resentment I would feel about that. So I made a choice and said no to the idea of a child. But my niece and nephew are alive and here and need taking care of now. And I have stepped in without hesitation, something I could never regret.

Yet the very concern that informed my decision not to have children has come true: all my energy, love, and passion are focused on my niece and nephew, and I mourn the loss of a part of myself that has been pushed aside. In essence John’s question of whether I might move in leaves me once again choosing whether or not I want to have children.

When I’m out with my niece and nephew, strangers already assume I’m their mother. I ask the sales clerk at a clothing store where the kids’ T-shirts are, and she asks, “How old is your daughter?”

“Nine,” I say. She points me to the girls’ section, where there are a number of shirts trimmed with flowers.

“I might have better luck in the boys’ section,” I tell her. “She’s a tomboy and would much prefer a soccer shirt.”

The clerk laughs. “Oh, one of those.”

It’s so easy to slip into this role, so comfortable. Easier than explaining my not having kids to people who inquire. Easier than having to assure others that I love kids and that my decision isn’t a reflection of a troubled childhood, not an act of selfishness. It is simply a choice. But in that moment with the sales clerk, I experience the ease of being in the mainstream, and it is a relief. This scene repeats itself: hugging my niece and nephew when they come off the soccer field, waiting for them at the bus stop, hearing my niece yell as she runs in from playing outside, “Mom! We need a drink!” When she finds me in the kitchen, she laughs and says, “I mean, Aunt Carolyn.”

Anyone observing us would assume I am their mother. But I’m not and don’t want to be. Yet given all that has happened, how can I not be?

People have always had their own ideas about why I don’t have children: “Was it the divorce?” “Never found the right person at the right time?” “Biological clock?”

Now the story has a more positive spin: “Isn’t it amazing how things work out?” “You didn’t have kids, and now you can be there for your niece and nephew.” “It’s like it was meant to be.”

Literature is rife with spinster aunts who move in with families when a sibling or in-law dies. They care for the ill parent and stand vigil until death. They step in and become surrogate mothers, platonic “wives” who efficiently take over the ministrations of the household and children.

There is an expectation of sacrifice: your life, your story, for the sake of the new story unfolding.

I’d like to believe that I don’t need to be present all the time in order to be a mother figure to my niece and nephew. I’d like to believe that knowing they are loved and nurtured, whether I am there every day or not, will shore them up and give them the grounding they need to move healthfully into their adult lives.

But the day-to-day concerns pull at me. My nephew has athlete’s foot. Under his littlest toe there is a large crack that he insists is from scraping the toe on a pool. A small matter, really, except that my brother hasn’t had the chance to buy foot ointment.

Other worries: clean clothes, the lice outbreak at school. Why is my niece’s friend teasing her? Has anyone talked to my nephew about wet dreams? Is it okay that he shuts his bedroom door to be alone? Is there any vegetable that they’ll eat? Are they having too much sugar? Of course John worries about these things, but he is exhausted. And the toilet is broken, the dryer has a squeaking sound, the dog is limping, there’s no milk for tomorrow morning’s cereal.

And then there is the meeting for parents whose children are in the school production of The Hobbit. My nephew is one of the dwarfs, and this meeting is to discuss the logistics and who will have the coveted roles of stage manager, prop master, and costume designer. There are only women present.

They talk about last year’s production, laugh, and claim intimacy with one another and the process of putting on a show.

“We need to discuss how to get the working parents involved,” one of the organizers says. The others nod in agreement. “This needs to be a community event.”

I am there because I don’t want my nephew to feel as though he doesn’t have someone supporting him. I’m there because a friend of mine, whose mother died when she was young, once told me that she always felt like an orphan being fobbed off onto various caretakers. I don’t want my nephew to feel like an orphan.

Yet I feel like an imposter, an outsider. I couldn’t care less about the power struggle for who will be the stage manager. I am bored. I’d rather be home and am anxious to get back to my writing.

But I find being away from the kids a continual ache and worry.

I wonder how they are and miss being near them, touching them. I’m interested in their stories, in the young people they are becoming.

And although I am not a mother and never will be, this pull feels like it must be a kind of motherhood: as difficult as I expected, yes, but also full of wonder.

Carolyn Megan writes and teaches in Portland, Maine, and can be contacted at mainewritingworkshop@gmail.com. This essay appeared in September 2005.