Looking for Upsides

One of the things I’ve tried to do this year while I’ve been dealing with my kidless circumstances is look for upsides to the whole thing. Silver linings. Little good things that might help make the big bad thing feel a little less suffocating.

Right now, I’m on vacation in Orlando. I kind of hate the weather in Orlando, but I do love both food and Harry Potter, and so this week my mom and I are here for both the Harry Potter experience at Universal (I got to have some Toad in the Hole and butterbeer for lunch yesterday at the Leaky Cauldron, and yes, it was just as charming as it sounds) and for the Epcot Food & Wine Festival. Walking around the theme park yesterday, there was a distinct lack of people. No ride had a line longer than 20 minutes. We could just wander up to something and do it.

The reason? It’s the last week of September, and no schools anywhere are off for vacation. It’s the “low season” for tons of tourist attractions, so I can have my pick of cheap flights, good hotel rooms, and 2-for-1 packages. I’ve been enjoying the pick of vacation deals for years now! May is another great time to travel - kids are ramping up to final exams and the beaches are nearly empty. Want to have some fun in the sun for a steal? Try early February in Cancun! With no school calendars to deal with and only myself to pay for, travel is easy and flexible, and my waiting-in-line time is nearly nothing.

There’s a list that runs through my head of things that are easier without kids. On top of travel, It includes: taking the subway, eating at pricey restaurants, sleeping in, cleaning my apartment, cursing loudly when I stub my toe, making last-minute plans for a drink after work.

It also includes spending money on things when I shouldn’t. I have a fair bit of debt racked up from a combination of non-profit salary, student loans, and crappy spending habits. A few years ago, I made up a personal austerity plan to get out of credit card debt so that I would feel more secure having kids on my own - no new clothes for a while, no big vacations, no fancy dinners and expensive theater tickets. I needed that space on my credit card for donor banks and fertility clinics (both not covered by my insurance).

Now that I’ve made the decision not to get pregnant, my debt-reduction plan has gone mostly out the window. Who cares if I’m in debt, when the only person it’s hurting is me?

Jody Day, one of the ladies from my book recommendations post, talks about how she nearly decided to accept a very dangerous job in Afghanistan. She wasn’t worried about the danger to herself because she was a kidless single woman. If she died, she thought, what would it matter? That might sound insane, but I will tell you that I’ve had the same thoughts. I’ve wondered if I should ditch my NYC life for a job with a lot more travel and a bit more danger. I don’t have kids to worry about, or a spouse. What if I just jumped into something crazy?

I honestly don’t know if that line of thought an upside or not. I don’t know if I want to do crazy things because I want to, or just because I can. I don’t know if I actually feel like my life would have more worth if I joined an NGO and moved to Cameroon, or if I’m just trying to do something, anything, that gives my kidless single life some deeper meaning.

The upsides to a kidless life are not hard to find. But the scale seems to be eternally tipped toward kids so that no matter how many upsides I pile on the other side, it never feels quite even. It always feels like the upsides are a consolation prize.

But don’t get me wrong - if I can’t have the kid, I’ll take the short lines.

Choice vs 'Choice'

I can’t stop thinking about this Guardian article my friend A share with me this week.  Entitled ‘There’s no stigma: why so many Danish women are opting to become single mothers’, the article is, on the surface, about how the liberal mindset of Denmark has led to a new class of family led by ‘solomars’ - single mothers by choice.

There’s a lot of talk of why women are having children alone, making it clear that most of these women were “waiting it out”, trying to find men who wanted to have children with them until they were (on average) thirty-six.

But in reality, it’s just an outline of what a whole host of women in many countries would love to have access to:

“Denmark is famously family-friendly, with 52 weeks’ paid parental leave for a new baby and a generous welfare state paying three-quarters of the costs of childcare, enabling 85% of mothers to return to work. “It’s easier to be a solomor in Denmark than elsewhere because society accepts and supports you – we’re pretty liberal about most things,” says Erb.”

And later:

Won’t women’s job prospects suffer if they’re grappling with small children while trying to finish degrees and get on the career ladder? “Not if men and women realise they have to play a part,” she says: “Denmark has the highest employment rate among mothers in the world – we have the day care, we have the welfare state – it shouldn’t harm women’s careers to have their children a little earlier.”

My tweet to A after reading the article was “Man, if I had free fertility care, a year of maternity leave and cheap child care after that, LIFE WOULD BE DIFFERENT. Sigh.”  A’s reply was “I just read it and cried.”

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Choices women make can only be compared when all the decks are stacked the same. 

I say I’ve made a “choice” to not have kids on my own. But in reality, U.S. society is not set up to make it possible for a single woman of my income (and my income is pretty high, statistically) to have a kid alone. Insemination is not covered by my insurance. Neither is sperm, if I wanted to go through a donor bank. My (very well-established) non-profit offers no maternity leave. (Women have to use up all of their sick and vacation time; after that, they are eligible for disability if they want more time at home with their babies.) There is no subsidized child care. Once I had a kid, my health insurance premiums would go way up. And don't even get me started on saving for college.

My grandfather was born and raised in Denmark. I wonder if it’s time to consider going back?  (JK, if I wanted to be a Danish citizen in my childbearing years, I should have moved there a decade ago.)

Fat is not a Four-Letter Word

There was a lot of talk in certain circles of the internet this week surrounding a (now deleted) youtube video by popular vlogger Nicole Arbour entitled “Dear Fat People”. In the video, Arbour spends long minutes telling fat people they are fat, and should be ashamed of being fat because it’s gross, and don’t we love ourselves enough to be thin? She’s calling it comedy, satire, a funny way to tackle what she thinks is a serious subject.

I call it bullying.

(This might not seem relevant to this blog about singledom, but bear with me.)

Look, I’m fat.

I have friends and family who cringe when I use that word, because they don’t think of me as “fat”. They don’t look at me and see a fat person. “You’re not fat, you’re adorable,” they’ll say, and I’ll reply “No, I am totally fat. I am a fat person.”

It’s jarring for them to hear, because fat is not a thing society wants a person to be.

A number of my friends and family end up falling in to two camps: the ones who argue that I cannot be fat, because that is an insult, and they love me too much to insult me like that, and the ones who concern troll me about my weight, because they love me so much and every fucking thing in society tells them that Fatty Fatsons like myself are doomed to die young from being fat. Either way, what comes across to me, as a fat person, is that being fat is not okay. That the person I see when I look in a mirror is upsetting to a lot of people. That I do not fit within the prescribed limits of what is okay for humans to be.

Arbour’s video is the pinnacle of this. It’s thoughtless, and it’s hurtful, and I am 100000% glad it’s gone from the internet (at least for now).

Look, if you have ever told a fat friend “you’re not fat, you’re lovely!”, please know that I know you are trying to be very nice to a person you like a lot, but it’s doing the opposite. Also, please think about what that means for you in the world. If you refuse to see your lovely, smart, talented, cute friend as fat, even when they are pretty obviously fat, think about what that means for how you see fat people you don’t know.

Here’s a quick exercise: think about the people in your life. I am going to bet that there is at least one (probably more than one) who is fat, and who you love. Think about if you didn’t know that person and saw them on the street. Think about what you would think when you looked at them. When you looked at their body. Think about if you would be judging them, about if you would point them out to your friends and whisper “oh, shit, some people should not wear leggings." What if you saw your fat friend in a restaurant enjoying some (probably well-earned and certainly delicious) french fries? If they were a stranger, would you frown at them, thinking “of course they’re fat, look at what they’re stuffing into their mouth!” What if your friend was a stranger in a bar, and bought you a drink? What would your gut reaction be?

This is why it hurts so much being told you’re not fat by people you care about.

You, as a fat person, now know that this person doesn’t want you to be fat because they know what fat people are, they know how lazy they are, how much they don’t care about themselves. They know that fat people are an eyesore. They know how gross fat bodies are, and that they’d never want to see one naked. And they don’t see those characteristics in you, but instead of re-evaluating how they think about fat people, they just re-categorize you as “not fat.”

And here we go: relevance!

I went to the beach this weekend with some wonderful friends. I spent hours laying in the sun and splashing in the waves and having heart-to-hearts and laughing a whole bunch. One of my friends had her new camera with her. “Let me take your picture,” she said, and I looked her with my floppy hat on, and I smiled. It was a good day.

She sent me the picture last night with the note “You’re so cute!” In the photo, I’m smiling in my sunglasses and my pink straw hat. You can see the dark spots of my moles. You can see my saggy double chin, and the roll of fat along my neck as I turned to smile at her camera. It’s a headshot - you can’t even see my body south of my sternum. But I looked at that photo and I thought, “Oh, fuck. Fuck. Is that what I looked like out there, on the beach all day?” I was nauseous.

I forgot I was fat yesterday. I didn’t think I looked like that on the beach because I felt whole and right and unashamed of my happiness, and fat people aren’t supposed to feel those things. But that photo is proof of my constant fatness, and my reaction to it is proof of my own unease with that, no matter how much I try to be body positive.

I call this blog “circumstantially single” because it is. It’s mostly circumstantial that I haven’t met the right person for me. I am an extrovert; I love parties and meeting new people and making them laugh. But if I didn’t admit that I’m worried (ashamed, terrified) that part of the reason I’m single is because I’m fat, I would be lying to you.

I’m not single just because I’m fat. I know that well enough because I have a lot of happy, fat friends who are not single! They have found people - fat people, thin people, all sorts of in-between people - who love them and desire them and make them feel special and beautiful. And who, I am assuming (hoping?), don’t spend a lot of time telling them they are not fat.

Because they are fat. And also smart and kind and generous and sexy and funny and all the other things that people can be.

But I am terrified (worried, ashamed) that for every person who knows me, who adores me and laughs at my jokes and compliments my outfits, and tells me I’m not fat - for every one of those people, there are a hundred to whom I am the stranger in a restaurant, with my plate of fries. That one of those people - hell, more than one! - could have been “the one” for me, if only I’d been less fat, and they’d seen me like my friends see me.

I am ashamed (terrified, worried) that I have thought that same thing about a person in a restaurant, or someone buying me a drink at a bar. Because fat people, well. We fat people judge fat people just as much as non-fat people do. And one of those fat people could have been “the one”, and I let them get away because ew, they’re fat.

That is gutting, to me. That is the worst thing I can imagine, and I imagine it often.

So, for me, being fat is somehow still mentally tied to be single. For me, fatness is still something that I struggle with. Finding myself sexy is easy when my only view of myself is my ample cleavage in a cute rockabilly dress covered in polkadots. But then I pass a window on my walk to work and catch my reflection - sideview, always the least flattering - and I am jolted by that same grim realization all over again. I may have great boobs, but I’m still fat.

And if I don’t think I’m sexy in this rockabilly dress, who the fuck else is going to?

Some takeaways, if you’ve made it this far:

If you don’t think any of your friends are fat, take another look, and then think about what that means for your ideas about fat people. (If you don’t think any of your friends are fat and none of them are fat, you’re possibly an asshole who judges people more by what they look like and less by the awesomeness of their insides.)

If you’re fat, you probably have the same ideas. I know I still do, even when I’m trying not to. Be aware of them, and how it affects how you see other people, and how it affects how you see yourself when you look in the mirror.

If you’re fat and people you love tell you you’re not, it’s okay to tell them they’re wrong. It’s okay to say “I am fat AND adorable, thank you very much!” It’s okay to jar them a little bit. It’s okay to be fat. The person you see in the mirror is okay. More than okay - your body is lovable and good and an acceptable way to be a human. (Read ‘Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere’ if you want to get a good head start on loving your big, fat self.)

Learning to love yourself is like a game of Shoots and Ladders. You move up and up and up and love yourself more and more and more, and suddenly one random toss of the dice sends you whooshing down some shoot, pushes you back to where you were ten turns ago. That kindly-sent photo from my friend was a crappy roll of the dice for me. Arbour’s “Dear Fat People” video might have been that crappy roll of the dice for a whole lot of people this week. But there’s no other way to win the game other than to keep on rolling the dice, and so I shall.

PS - I am not going to spend any time talking about why I’m fat, or how long I’ve been fat, or what I’ve done to become less fat. It doesn’t matter, is the thing. People who care enough to get to know me learn those things. People who don’t, well. That’s the problem, isn’t it.

Catastrophe and the Modern Woman

I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon this month marathoning the Amazon Prime series ‘Catastrophe’, and I can’t recommend it enough!  Written by the two leads (American actor/comic Rob Delaney and Irish actress/comic Sharon Horgan), it’s the story of a one-week stand between two 40-somethings that turns into a lifetime commitment when Horgan ends up accidentally pregnant. From there, the comedy turns into one of the most refreshingly honest and romantic (and hilarious) shows I’ve seen in ages.

I recommend it to anyone, but for women who have been told they should be able to “have it all” all by themselves, the show has a particular resonance. There’s one scene, mid-way through the 6-episode run, where Horgan is explaining to a friend and co-worker that she and Delaney have decided to get married. Her co-worker is shocked - it’s the 21st century! She doesn’t need to get married to raise a child! She can do it on her own! Horgan’s character laughs it off in the moment, but later in the episode she returns to her friend to say “No, you know what, I CAN’T do it on my own, and I don’t want to; he wants to help, and that’s wonderful.” And it doesn’t make her less-than, it doesn’t make her seem pathetic or sad or weak, it just makes her human.

There are a million other scenes in this show that made me laugh and cry and love it to bits, but that one made it golden.  Check it out:  

Starting the Conversation: Book Recommendations

My last post stated that baby-stealing was a great way to get a conversation started about the ways we think about women and children, and more specifically women without children. But baby-stealing is, rightly, illegal in this country.  So where else would a conversation start? Books! Books are a great way to start thinking about something, and talking about it!

There have been, in the past few years, a small number of voices speaking up about this non-conversation, about this well of loneliness at being single and childless and ‘of a certain age’. I’ve read all of these books this year, and while my experiences are different from these women in the practical, the feeling of sorrow at watching one’s life unfold in a way you didn’t expect seems to be universal. I remember reading Notkin’s book and underlining whole paragraphs, scrawling “YES!!!” in the margins. These aren’t books that have all the answers, but they showed me that I am not alone in asking the questions:

1) Otherhood, by Melanie Notkin

I found Notkin when I was frantically googling things like “childless women who are sad about it” and “women who want kids and don’t have kids”, crazy stuff that was running through my mind as I came to end of a long, emotional journey where I realized that I did not want to have a child on my own. I was not going to be a ‘Single Mother By Choice’; instead, I was going to be something else, something undefined. My searching brought me to Notkin’s Huffington Post article ‘I’m 45, Single, and Childless, and There’s Nothing ‘Wrong’ With Me’ which deserves a read as well.

I found out from there that Notkin had just (just! as in, that very week!) published a book called ‘Otherhood’ about her struggle as a single, childless woman in New York City. Was it perfect? No. In fact, large swaths of the middle of this book read like episodes of Sex & The City, complete with disastrous dates with high-powered attorneys and conversations about egg donation over cocktails. Her life is far more glamorous than mine, and her friends have far more money than I will ever see in a lifetime of non-profit work. But the chapters that start and end her book are smaller, introspective pieces of writing that strip away the trappings of five-star Upper East Side eateries and weekend visits to the Hamptons and show Notkin to be a woman who struggled for years to come to terms with her own truth - that she wanted a family more than a baby, and that she wasn’t okay with settling for mediocre when it came to finding a partner. And, at 45, she wasn’t going to have the family she’d always envisioned. It’s worth checking out, even if you skim the Sex & The City parts.

2) Rocking the Life Unexpected, by Jody Day

Day’s book comes out of the UK, and her experience is as a woman who ended up divorced in her mid-30s, single for the first time in ages just as her fertility was about to nosedive. Her battle through the grief and anger around her circumstances led to a book that is full of hope and encouragement. Day has spent the last few years in training to be become a counselor, and it shows in her writing. She doesn’t point fingers, but gives some practical exercises for women to work through as they are thinking about their worth as women in the world who are not mothers.

Day also founded Gateway Women, an online community for those who are struggling with their circumstances. Much of the focus of the site seems to be around women in the UK, but there are meet-up groups all over the globe. I haven’t fully explored the community online, mostly because it’s a closed community and joining seems daunting, and would solidify my membership in a club I’m not really thrilled to be a member of.

If you want to get a flavor of Day before you read the book, check out this great short talk she gave as her book was coming out.

3) The Mother Within, by Christine Erickson

In her non-writing life, Erickson is an “equus coach”, which (as far as I can tell from her website) is a kind of life coach who works to help people while they ride horses. This seems odd, but Erickson’s short polemic on childlessness is earthy, personal, and accepting. She wants to be okay, and she wants you to be okay too. It’s a lovely read!

(She has also tried to get some discussions moving around childlessness at her Mother Within website, but it doesn’t look like the conversation has started there either.)

Not all of these books are for everyone. And yes, there need to be more voices from poor women, from queer women, from women of color, all of whom face this same challenge. But what I got from these books was a sense of shared loss, a sense that I may still be at the bottom of a well of loneliness, but that there are other women down here too, grasping in the dark for someone’s hand to hold. These books were a helping hand for me. I hope that this blog can be a helping hand for some of you, who will then open your hands to even more women.

I really do think we have to overcome the shame of perceived failure at not having children before the conversation can really open up. No one wants to be the first to raise their hand and say “me! I didn’t end up with the life I wanted!!” Thank goodness these writers made their voices heard! 

Do you have other books, articles or blogs to recommend to those struggling without children? Let me know in comments!

I Want To Steal Your Baby

I spend half an hour holding a gorgeous baby on a sunny Saturday morning. He’s ten months old but small for his age, and he’s all smiles, laughing as we play peek-a-boo with a book his big sister left on the dining table. “He doesn’t usually like strangers,” his surprised grandmother says to me.

“I’m the baby whisperer,” I tell her. Then, as we’re leaving, the baby is still tugging on my hair as I tell the room, “I’m totally going to steal him.”

We all laugh.

But I really, really want to steal that baby.

*

I love living in New York, because it’s a city of people with Big Ideas who have made Choices and have Opinions, and not always the popular, middle-America ones.

Many of the women I know in New York are in their 30s and 40s and beyond and don’t have kids. The assumption I make about them is that they decided they weren’t going to have them. They woke up one day - at twelve or twenty or thirty-two - and said “nope, kids are for other people, but they aren’t for me,” and they happily moved forward with their lives.

It’s the easy thing to assume. It’s the happy thing to assume, and these women look happy.

When I look in the mirror, I look happy a lot of the time. I joke and laugh at work. I go out to plays and long dinners with friends. I travel, carefree and kid-free, able to do a weekend in Vegas or Boston or Chicago without much notice.

Is that what people assume, when they look at me? That kids would hold me back? That kids don’t fit into my lifestyle? That I made a choice? I didn’t make a choice about kids.

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I don’t have kids because.

I’ve been trying to finish that sentence for a while now:

because I never found the right partner;

because I can’t afford to do it on my own;

because I focused too much on my job, I didn’t give online dating a fair shake, I stupidly believed in ‘you’ll find The One’ and ‘things happen at the right time’;

because no one ever really explained how women’s bodies work, that I would hit 35 and start on a stark downward spiral of fertility, that at 40 my chance of getting pregnant even if I was trying really hard would be 20%, and at 45 it’ll be 5%.

It all boils down to “I wanted kids and I don’t have kids and I probably won’t be having kids.”

*

There’s a woman I’ve known for years at work. She’s tall and lovely, with a warm smile that makes her a favorite among our coworkers. “I notice you don’t have children,” I yearn to say to her. “Do you not want them? Has it always been that way? Or are you like me? Did you want kids but never found the right partner? Or maybe you tried and tried and tried, with a partner or without. Maybe your body isn’t built for having children. Maybe your heart isn’t built for doing it alone.”

I don’t ask these questions.

“Have you ever thought about just having a one-night stand from Craigslist, just to see if you could manage to get knocked up? You wouldn’t even need to know his last name,” I don’t say to the friend-of-a-friend who is over 40 and divorced, sitting at our favorite table in the back of our Thursday night bar.

“Have you ever wondered if having a baby alone would be easier if your mom moved in with you? Or is your mom a little crazy like my mom?” I never ask the brilliant woman with a PhD who is my monthly lunch date.

“How do you apologize to your dad for not making him a grandfather when you know he would love that more than anything?” I think to myself, sitting quietly with some of the other single ladies at a baby shower for my friend’s second kid. It’s going to be a cute kid.

They’re all cute kids.

Man, I really want to steal a baby.

*

I don’t ask these questions because no one asks these questions. In the women-can-have-it-all era of post-second-wave-feminism, it’s assumed that what a girl wants, she gets. We’re all active participants in our lives, after all. If we don’t have kids, we made the choices to get us there. The ‘childfree by choice’ movement has books and podcasts and blogs all telling women it’s okay to not want to be a mom. You won’t be less of a woman. The fabric of society won’t come tumbling down. And they’re right! If you don’t want kids, you shouldn’t have kids. That sounds like basic common sense. Go you, ladies who never liked babies, or who prefer being an aunt to being a mom! Do what you do!

But I’m not one of you.

And I bet there are people reading this who aren’t either.

But I can’t tell for sure, because no one ever talks about failing to become a mother. New Yorkers don’t fail at big life things like that. Women with great careers and advanced degrees are smart enough not to get to a point in their lives where they don’t have something they desperately want.

I know a bunch of you are rolling your eyes right now. “Why doesn’t she just have one on her own?” you’re asking and I wonder if you’ll lend me $18,000 a year to put my kid in a Manhattan day care. “You can adopt,” you say, and I barely refrain from sending you a dozen articles on how hard it is to adopt a baby as a single person. “What about fostering?” Well, that one I’m actually looking in to, but fostering a kid over the age of four (which most of them are) requires a free second bedroom in your apartment. Most single women in NYC would be dropping 60% or more of their paycheck on rent, if we all wanted to be foster moms.

A note to everyone, everywhere: all women who are in this boat have already asked ourselves these questions. We are still asking them, every day, just in case some miracle has occurred to give us an extra paycheck, or an extra set of hands to help with midnight feedings or a medical miracle that would save our failing bodies, would give us time to make plans or save more money.

Billy Joel is having a new baby this year. Billy Joel is 66. Fuck you, Billy Joel.

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Besides, all of those options would still make me a single parent. Choosing to be a single parent is amazing and heroic, and I salute those of you who make that choice. But I have weighed it, back and forth, for years now, and it’s not the right choice for me, financially but especially emotionally. I want a family, I want support, I want to share the joy of being a parent with another person.

I spend a lot of time berating myself these days, worried that this no-kid thing is not a failure of body, but a failure of my heart. It’s a failure to make the connection that everyone in every rom-com ever made has managed with a meet cute on a train platform, or by awkwardly tripping over a stranger in a coffee shop. It’s a failure to be pretty enough, or thin enough, or smart enough. Or maybe I’m too smart? Should I talk less? More? Should I go out with everyone who asks me out, just in case, even if I don’t like them? What if no one asks me out? Why didn’t I settle for good enough years ago??

This is not a productive line of thinking.

Right now, my Truth-with-a-capital-T is that I didn’t meet someone, and I’m not old (I’m not even middle-aged), but I’ve pretty much run the clock down on the ‘partner + babies = family’ lifestyle I envisioned for myself. It sucks. I’d like to talk to someone other than my therapist about it. But other women don’t ask me if I’d ever intended to have kids, or if I’m sad that I don’t have kids, or if this was a choice or just circumstance, just plain bad luck. And they don’t volunteer that information about themselves. Why would they - no one likes to broadcast a failure. The consequence is that I often feel utterly alone in my childlessness, like one layer of loneliness dumped on top of another.

Maybe we’d all start talking about it if we all started stealing those babies. A national baby-stealing epidemic would open up this conversation for sure.