Every time I talk with people in my family about my friends’ children or future children I hear the glimmer of hope in their voices that one day I will use the love with which I describe them to describe children of my own.
People look at a woman who chooses not to have children like she’s a magician refusing to cast a spell. That gaze can call a lack of desire into question. Women have been writing forever about the tension between the pressure to become a mother and the desire not to. Throughout the course of a lifetime the tension wraps and unwraps us until the moment when motherhood ceases to be an option. Then the tension dies. It sits in the field of life like a petrified tree.
As I write this, one of my best friends is pregnant. Her pregnancy, desired and hard-won, has colored much of our friendship for the last year or so, a cycle of uncertainty and encouragement and, on my end, learning about things I’d never had occasion to know. The day of my 30th birthday was the first or second day that, according to the doctor, the fetus could hear in the womb, and my friend and I delighted in the fact that the first sounds it perceived would be people gathered around a few tables outside, eating and drinking in celebration.
This morning, a selfie taken by a friendly acquaintance flashes as I thumb through Instagram stories, and I ask her in jest whether she will accept some grandma-like commentary on the sex of her baby. I have a feeling it’s a boy because her belly is high and round. I am unsure where I learned to tie these two things together, but I am delighted to feel some otherworldly kinship with my dead grandmother, who insisted while I was still in my mother’s womb that I would be born a girl, when everyone else was convinced I’d be a boy.
Last night I walked into the basement of my building to take out the recycling and noticed a child-sized chair someone had put out in the section of the basement where people leave the things that they don’t want anymore but are too nice to put in the garbage. I took a picture of it and sent it to my friend who is the mother of a three-year-old asking if she wanted it. She said yes. I took it up to my apartment. This morning I laundered the sky-blue slipcover over the top of it.
When I think about my friends’ kids, I think about how much I love them, and I think about how much I love that I am not their mother. I think about how much I love that I am not anybody’s mother.