Balancing begets balancing. For many years, most of my friends were women with children. I got the vicarious taste of mothering through them. But now, unbidden and unplanned, my friendships grew to include women who didn’t have children. Most of these women were sure, had always been sure, and they called themselves childless by choice or childfree. Or they didn’t use child at all to define themselves.
Other women called themselves childless by circumstance. Sometimes the circumstance was poor timing: no man in their lives and being of a generation that discouraged women having children on their own, or because their love was for a woman and their fertility had happened during a time when it was forbidden or, at a minimum, more complicated, for two women to have a child. Or, like me, they were with someone who didn’t want children.
Others had faced infertility. Some of these women were open about their regret; some found wisdom from acceptance of what is.
What should I call myself? Childless by circumstance, from being with a man who didn’t want children? Or by choice, because I chose him and never chose children? I decided it didn’t matter as long as I defined myself by what I had, rather than what I didn’t have.
I was like a woman who’d been thirsty for so long and she finally found water in the place she hadn’t been looking. A surprised relief filled me daily. Relief at no longer carrying the weight of resentment. Relief that the wanting was gone, and in its absence, joy was a frequent presence. The relief was most intense when I talked with women friends who were still wishing for a child.
The English friends, Jan and Alan, whose marriage we’d witnessed in Greece, had been trying for a child since not long after they married, and the story of that trying was present every time we visited them in London.
They tried the regular way, then fertility treatments, then adoption. Disappointments and delays became a part of their lives. They kept us updated on the progress, which sometimes didn’t seem like progress at all.
On one of our visits to London, after they’d started the adoption process, Jan and Alan showed us how they’d added on to their home to be ready for a possible little girl from China. Another bedroom and bathroom, a larger kitchen, a secret garden with a place to play in the trees and green.
They showed us how they’d made one of the three bedrooms into a child’s room. I admired the room politely. For Jan, this expansion was for just one thing: a home ready for her future child. But I was happiest that the addition to their house meant a guest room when we came to stay. And our own bathroom.
In the mornings, I went into the almost-empty bedroom meant for the little girl they hoped for. Jan kept the hair dryer there for us to share. I looked in the full-length mirror at the room behind me as I dried my hair. Pale green walls with pink border, white shelves holding dark-haired dolls. A few stuffed animals on the floor.
I felt a flash of sadness, and couldn’t tell if it was in me, or in this room. Jan had held her longing for so long, kept her heart around this possible child.
The sadness shifted away quickly and left behind a calm sense of relief. My old ache for a child was a memory in me. Like someone I’d once loved, now long gone, and that love was a memory too.