by Miki Howald
I
What is it like to be a woman who knows she doesn’t want children? It means to have everyone doubt you, and to doubt your ability to know your own desires. It means to always be second-guessed by family, friends, lovers, doctors—to be told how it is, what you don’t know. It means to disappoint your loved ones: You’ll never understand how I feel, how much I love you, my mother says, unless you have children of your own.
I work in family support services, and all day we promote children as the future, families as the foundation of society. All day I hear women say: I’m a mother first. I don’t even know what that means. Is she a person second? A woman third? Where does she consider writer or friend or lover? I always think to myself, but I am me first. Do I just lack the motherhood desire? Is that so unnatural, so unheard of?
II
Sex and babies occupy completely separate spheres in my head, and I hate to be reminded that sex—that wonderful, exhausting, addictive thing I love—can produce children. Recently a friend posted pictures of her newborn on Facebook with the status line update: We made this from scratch! and with that one line my favorite activity was tainted, turned into something I’d rather avoid. I reminded myself to call the doctor the next day and make an appointment to discuss an IUD.
I’d like to ask the doctor about tying my tubes, but I’m afraid of hearing the paternalistic advice that I might change my mind later. You’re still young, you might meet a nice man and fall in love. I wonder if doctors ever warn women who are eager to have kids: you might meet a real asshole who hits you and uses your children against you. I hope they do.
III
If I met a nice man now—while I’m still young—I wonder if he would stay in the end. As much they may protest, I’ve never met a man who didn’t eventually want to spread his seed, father a child and make up for his own lost childhood. The only man who didn’t was afraid of passing on his hereditary disease, but even he dreamed of adopting or step-fathering hordes. My last lover asked why I never pictured him with children. He was pushing 40, an alcoholic and a recluse, and I thought I was the only person who could stand to be around him. His question hurt more than he knew; I never saw kids in his future because I wanted to see myself there.
There are things I want but I’m afraid will find a way to leave me behind in the end. As much as I bemoan all the family & friends & lovers who try to second-guess me, who don’t trust me, I’m the one who lacks faith: not in my decision but in my fear of its consequences. I have yet to believe the person who tells me, simply: “I will not leave.”
IV
I don’t want to know how my mother felt. From what I remember of childhood and from what she has told me since, it’s a wonder she never threw herself into the sea. My mother was the little mermaid, forever stuck on the wrong side of the world, unable to get back to where she belonged. Her marriage was the deal that bound her here, and my brother and I were the daggers in her feet when she walked.
She once asked, aren’t you afraid of getting old and having no one to care for you? She didn’t want me to come to the end of my life with nothing to show for it and no one to miss me when I was gone. She said: Aren’t you afraid of being alone?
I am, and I’m not.
And would children even assuage that fear? When I moved to Alaska my mother—who left Japan in the 70s, and in twenty years only made it back there twice before her mother died—broke down in tears at the airport. Now I know how she felt when I left, she said of her own mother. So I can’t ask you to stay.
I think we are all afraid of being alone, of being the last one standing, left behind by family, by friends, by lovers. It doesn’t matter if you marry or stay single or have children or cats: in the end, someone always has to leave first.
First, my mother left her homeland, and when her mother died she was left behind with nothing to return to. And when she couldn’t ask me to stay, I left her behind as well.
V
Writing this piece seemed like a good idea at first—an essay about women who know they don’t want children. There’s probably a whole sub-genre of memoir dedicated to motherhood, so this was the missing voice, the untold story! What a way to point out gender inequalities still! After all, haven’t I been harassed by family and loved ones? Haven’t I wanted to prove something about myself, that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with me, that I’m not malfunctioning?
But I don’t want to write this essay anymore. This is not a topic; it’s me.
I’m tired of using myself and the ones I love as literary devices, as characters in a never-ending narrative, continuously being shaped & crafted for better effect. I’m not a lens through which to focus an idea. I don’t want to keep cracking open the hard outer shell—in a crafted, artful manner, of course—to reveal the coiled insides still beating: all of those fears and desires I can’t control.
I’ve been told by others that I have a book inside me, as though all I needed to do was fertilize it and birth it through hard labor. Write about your body, your mother, your self-inflicted alienation, they say.
What would that book even be but stories of my loved ones and the things I’m afraid to say out loud? A clever sentence here or there. Exaggeration and interpretation in metered prose.
Nothing but words to which I don’t want to give life.
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