by Emilie Pine
And despite one in six couples having trouble conceiving it feels like everywhere, everyone has kids. That work peer I decided must do nothing but work, as she zooms ahead in her career, has twins. That conference keynote speaker? Two books and two children. Do either of these women ever sleep? Or sit down? Or finish a cup of tea? Sometimes it feels like we’re all still competing at that worn-out game, ‘having it all’. Only, of course, I don’t. Pregnant bellies spring out at me. People’s social media pictures show not only their bumps but the proudly smiling co-parent too. I scan so many profiles looking for that rare thing – a happy couple without kids – that I feel a surge when I catch a re-run of Sex and the City and hear Carrie asserting the value of a life without kids. Has it come to this, life lessons from a fictional shoe addict?
Other things have shifted too. A younger colleague, who definitely wants kids, asks me if I think she should wait to get pregnant till her second book is done. Unhesitatingly, I say, ‘Don’t wait’. Am I telling her to lean out? This is not how I would have responded a few years ago, but she and her husband really want a baby, she has tenure, so go for it, I say. Take the time. In fact, looking at my own record (as I belatedly apply for promotion), I realise that the year after my miscarriage, I published nothing. I worked really hard, I set up a research network and spoke at conferences, and taught students and marked endless exams. But I didn’t write. In fact, I abandoned the draft of a book I’d been working on, a draft I still haven’t gone back to. That gap in my life, the wasted baby years on my CV, goes unexplained. How do I ever reflect, on paper, the grief that stopped me in my tracks?
It’s hard when people ask me, as they regularly do, if I have children. They mean well, though it’s a terrible question to ask a woman in her late thirties. Because there’s really no easy answer. Occasionally I’m tempted to look around and say, ‘Oh yeah, I knew I forgot to do something.’ But I can’t bring myself to make such a false joke. One evening I go out with a friend and, after too many glasses of wine, she earnestly informs me that it is my fault I’m childless, that I shouldn’t have left it so late. The remark cuts through me and I have no response except to get my coat and go home.
AT THIRTY-SEVEN WEEKS, my sister goes into labour. I visit the hospital to keep her company with doughnuts and funny stories. There is a heart trace monitor for the baby, and we eye it warily, but it is so different this time. Still, she and her partner are jittery, and V is particularly stressed when her labour stretches on for two days. Finally, late on the second night, my nephew is born. I am at home, waiting up, annoyed that I can’t be with her for this birth, when my phone beeps with a message from her partner. It is a photo of the baby, his wrinkly face and bunched up hands so different from, and so much like, his sister’s.
At the registration desk the next morning they try to tell me that visiting hours have not yet begun. I dodge past them, because the rules don’t apply in this moment, and nothing is keeping me from my sister and my nephew. They are in the last room on the corridor, and pushing open the door, I see that she is fine, and smiling, and holding her son. She passes him to me, a wriggly little warm bundle. Welcome to the world, little one.
I AM NEVER GOING TO HAVE A BABY. I am anxious about this fact. And I am grieving. And I am happy.
One persistent anxiety is that I never understood why it wouldn’t happen for us. For all the research and testing – mine and the medical profession’s – I still don’t know what went ‘wrong’ with my body. Why is that? As I consider this question and I look back on those months and years and our trying and our failing and our appointments and our second appointments and on and on, a pattern emerges. A pattern in which I am not taken seriously, or we are not taken seriously. Or not seriously enough.
I feel short-changed. Not just because I couldn’t have a baby, though that looms large. But because of those weeks when we were denied the right to information on our foetus. And because, after the miscarriage, time and again, I met the attitude that as a woman I’m only the one who feels, not the one who thinks, not the one who should have access to information, not the one who should be empowered to control her own body.
There are days I think I could have – should have – tried harder to exert that control myself. I should have followed a gluten-and dairy-free diet, given acupuncture more time, gone to more than one fertility clinic. Although I know, deep down, that I gave it everything, I still find ways to beat myself up. What I never thought I’d say, because I thought it was clichéd bullshit, is that I have accepted my physical inability to have children. And I’m not really the accepting type (in fact, most of the time, I don’t even like people who are). Perhaps full acceptance is still a few steps down the road, because when I see my partner holding someone else’s child, or, actually, when I see any man carrying any baby, I am hit with the realisation that I still grieve for my life as a mother. But the truth, what I have accepted, is this: I can try to have a baby and I can fail every month and be unhappy. Or I can not-try to have a baby and not-fail every month. The total number of children I have had remains the same either way, a big fat zero. But the outcome is totally different. I choose to be happy. This happiness is not perfect, or pain-free. It carries grief within it. It is all the stronger for that.
And, hurrah, at last, for forty. It was always my cut-off age. If I don’t have kids by forty, I’d say to myself, I’ll stop trying. Of course, I’d said that back in the heady days of thirty-five, when forty seemed far away and I’d imagined not just one but two kids filling those years. And I know that there are mums who are only just starting at forty and I wish them luck, joy and a baby that sleeps. But I’m done, and I’m more than a little relieved about it. Because now that I’m here, and I’ve been up and down the rollercoaster, being forty feels like a positive boundary. I can give myself permission to be someone else, someone other than a mother. Someone other than the woman manically checking her cervical mucus.
Nowadays one of the highlights of my week is Thursday afternoon, when I pick my nephew up from crèche. He laughs and plays and shouts and pushes away his bottle but eats his fruit purée. He loves books (chewing them mostly), and all shiny things, and he hates wearing socks. He has just learned to wave. The first time he waved back to me, I nearly exploded with sudden joy. I am, you see, very warm and cuddly, despite what you may have heard. I smile and wave and he smiles and waves. And there it is. The love.
ONE DAY LAST YEAR I came home from work to find R raking leaves in the garden. He smiled and I noticed in the bright autumn light the new strands of silver at his temples. And it hit me. We are growing old together. This is what it will be like as we watch each other age, as our partnership ages. And this unexpected moment made me happier than I could have imagined. I see a life ahead for us, a shared life. A great life.
It is difficult to translate a great love, a great life, into words on a page. It sounds so prosaic – raking leaves, smiling at each other in understanding – but it is in the everyday moments that the tenacity of love, and its depth, are often revealed. Though we do not have the joy of biological children, there are many ways to have a childful life. And, it turns out, there are many ways to enjoy a child-free life, a recent, and important, shift of emphasis for me. I am done marking myself through absence. I am done using the word ‘failure’ about my body. I am done living and writing that story.
This is the moment that we get to look around, find our own balance, and enjoy the view from where we are.
SPEAKING / NOT SPEAKING
MY PARENTS SEPARATED when I was five and my sister was a baby.
I remember them before the split. I remember them as a happy couple. I remember family birthdays, laughing and blowing out the candles. Them hugging. Hide-and-seek in the overgrown garden. I remember climbing up the scaffolding at the back of the house and getting stuck, and calling for help, and them both being there, guiding me down. I remember rain falling through the roof and thinking it was an adventure to find buckets to catch
the water. I remember my sister being born. Toys arriving at the house for her and not for me. I remember my mum breaking her wrist when she slipped on ice. My dad sleeping in the other room. It was winter and he made me a hot water bottle and when I said I didn’t want it, he threw it at me and it burst as it hit the wall. I remember them telling me they were splitting up. I cheered and said ‘no more fighting.’
I remember moving house. My mum unpacked our things in an upstairs bedroom, because that was the only room with a proper floor. I remember it raining outside and us all in bed together for warmth. I remember my sister’s cough, which lasted for months, and the walls always being damp. I remember the nice man in the local shop who let us have bread and milk on credit till payday. I remember sunny afternoons and having painting parties and the day when my mum put up a swing in the garden. I remember going to see my dad on weekend afternoons. He made us toasted sandwiches in a machine that only worked if you stood on it and you knew it was ready when your foot got too hot. I remember when his house was taken because he couldn’t pay the bills and then he had no house. I remember going with my mum to visit her friends, who were also his friends, and seeing my dad’s furniture there. I remember pointing and saying, ‘That’s our table.’ I remember asking Mum why Dad’s stuff was in their house and she was angry and she couldn’t speak and she drove us home.
My mum drove us everywhere. She drove us to school. To the supermarket. To the park. She drove us to see Dad on weekends. She drove us to see him the time when he was in the hospital. The hospital was far out of the city centre and while she drove we sang along to our favourite mix tape. As we got out of the car, Mum warned us that Dad might not be in a very good mood. I did not understand when she said he was ‘drying out’. I gave Dad a poster from my bedroom that said ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’. In the years after their separation, being happy did not seem something that either of my parents were very good at.
And what do they remember? Out of all the experiences, what have they held onto? How did my mum face raising two small children in a house with no heating and damp walls and not enough money? How did my dad inhabit the space left by his family? How was it to have a husband, a wife, a marriage and then not? How was it to lie next to someone and then not? How was it to be two and then not? To be not even one, but a half of a broken two?
MOST OTHER FAMILIES did not look like ours. It was a time when people stayed together for the sake of the children, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the institution of marriage. When my parents, in typically bizarre fashion, threw a ‘splitting up’ party to announce the end of their relationship, one of their friends kneeled down on the hall floor and begged them to stay together. And even if a couple did separate, they were still connected, still tied, still married. There was no other choice. Because Ireland had a constitutional ban on divorce.
A year or so after my parents’ split, when my teacher handed out our school reports at the end of the school term – a brown envelope for each pupil – there was none for me. She asked me to stay behind. When the other children had cleared out in a noisy rush, I approached her desk, frightened at the idea that I had done something wrong. She handed me two brown envelopes, one for each parent. Perhaps she had thought it would shame me to receive them in front of my classmates. They were all standing outside the door, though. ‘Why’d she keep you behind?’ they wanted to know.
I tried to make up for being the odd one out by telling stories. I did not realise that stories had to be true; I thought they only had to be interesting. I told stories to the kids in my class. I told them that I could breathe, like a mermaid, underwater. I told them that one weekend I had had a kidney transplant. I told them that the snails on the schoolyard wall were poisonous and planted there by spies who wanted to kill children. My audience listened and then they laughed and then they called me a liar. After that, I became suspect. One Saturday afternoon I was in the kitchen at home when the phone rang. When I answered, all I heard was giggling. It was the girls in my class who had called to tell me they were having a party and that I was not invited.
Following their separation, my parents initially saw each other regularly, and had a relatively civil relationship. But at some point at the end of their first year apart, they stopped speaking. Actually, my dad stopped speaking to my mum. And so Mum, faced with little choice, stopped speaking to him too.
What is it like when your parents don’t speak? I don’t mean when they’re just in a bad mood and not speaking to each other temporarily. I mean when they never exchange a word with the other. What is that like?
When your parents don’t speak, you become their go-between. When you want to see your dad, you have to arrange dates and places and times to visit him. When your dad gives you a letter for ‘that bitch’, you have to give it to your mum. When your mum takes the letter and cries, you blame yourself. When you do something wrong and your mum tells you in her meanest voice that you’re just like your dad, you blame yourself again. When your dad gets a girlfriend and cancels seeing you, you’re confused. When your dad says that he’s bored by children and you can go to hell, you’re even more confused. When sometimes it’s not your dad, but your mum who is drunk and can’t drive you home or give you dinner or put you to bed, your world starts to fall apart because she’s the only thing holding it together. That’s what it’s like.
And this is also what it’s like: you’re ten and your mum is out at a party and the phone rings and it’s your dad, and he says that he is going to kill himself that night, and you say, ‘But I love you Dad’ and he says he knows, that you’re the only person who does, and then he hangs up. And you sit holding the phone because you don’t know if he means it, and you don’t know what he’s asking of you, but you do know that something is being asked, and you are afraid that if you don’t find the answer you will never see your dad again. And then you hang the phone up because you don’t know where he lives and you don’t know his phone number there, and you’re only ten, so you go back to bed and you cry yourself to sleep. And the next day you find his work phone number and you dial it and he answers and he is alive but now he is shouting at you for disturbing him. So you don’t say anything about the night before and you don’t tell your mum and you never tell anyone, because there is no way of telling this story that can make it okay.
Recently, in a box of old photos, I found a postcard from me to my mum. It is written in my large, careful, childish handwriting, though the address is in my father’s hasty scrawl. The postcard reads: ‘Dear Mummy, the weather is quite good. How are you. I hope you are well. did you know I was coming home on Monday 5th August I write just to make sure you do Love Emily’. The postcard is a lasting reminder that we were children in the days before mobile phones, before every house even had a landline phone. Still, it seems strange to me now, that my dad asked his daughter to write a postcard to confirm the date when he could give us back. And then, of course, there are all the things the postcard does not say. Above her address, my dad has written only my mum’s initial and her surname, as if he could not bring himself to write her full name. In my note, I don’t comment on the postcard’s image – a picture of a sailboat lost in mist – though it seems to speak pathetic volumes. And I have not written ‘wish you were here’. But looking at the card now, I can see that that’s what it really says.
WHEN I WAS EIGHTEEN, and in my first term at university, there was a referendum on divorce. One of the college debating societies put forward the motion: ‘This House Would Grant the Right to Divorce in Ireland.’ I went along, thinking I might learn something.
The debate played out as a kind of brightly lit theatre, the back and forth as predictable as if it were actually scripted. The arguments were well-made, well-rehearsed, but I’d heard it all before and none of it felt true to me. And when I looked at the full line-up of speakers, I realised why. Not one of the debaters represented my experience, not one of them said, ‘I’ve been through this. Let me tell you.’ It was all
just hypothetical. And so they did not know what I knew. Or they knew, but did not think it worth saying. Because in all the blather about sacred vows no one was naming the real danger: the limbo of non-existence.
Apart from a separation agreement, in which my dad was meant to share joint custody, the end of my parents’ marriage was completely unlegislated. Our family did not exist. And because we did not exist, we could not be protected. In real terms, this meant that my father could not be forced to pay regular child maintenance. Oh, there was the occasional cheque, but week by week, our household got by exclusively on what Mum earned. What my mother spent on raising two children, my father spent on drinking.
As a child, I had told story after story about my parents, intoning them to myself and anyone who would listen, as a way of staving off the threat of non-existence. I had told these stories loudly and insistently because I sensed, even at five years old, that the world would rather I remained quiet, that our family was not appropriate subject matter. But even as I told them, I knew that stories could never be enough. Because stories can’t make your parents talk to each other. And stories can’t stop the bullies. And stories can’t transform the damp, or the cold, or the lack of food in the fridge.