NYMPHE: Childless, Childfree, Parent, Stepmom.

MOVING BEYOND GRIEF: Advice from Sugar

My blog nattering may be helpful now and again, but I'm no Sugar on The Rumpus. Freaking great, amazing stuff. This Sugar post discusses grief, miscarriage, depression, and abused teens---yet it is compassionate, practical, and realistic. It's not depressing at all.

Grieving? In the stuck place? Click that link and go read. Now. And here is a quote:

"You will never stop loving your daughter. You will never forget her. You will always know her name. But she will always be dead. Nobody can intervene and make that right and nobody will. Nobody can take it back with silence or push it away with words. Nobody will protect you from your suffering. You can’t cry it away or eat it away or starve it away or walk it away or punch it away or even therapy it away. It’s just there, and you have to survive it. You have to endure it. You have to live though it and love it and move on and be better for it and run as far as you can in the direction of your best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by your own desire to heal. Therapists and friends and other people who live on Planet My Baby Died can help you along the way, but the healing—the genuine healing, the actual real deal down-on-your-knees-in-the-mud change—is entirely and absolutely up to you."

My Fault, I'm Female...

MFIF—My Fault, I'm Female—is collecting everyday stories about how we are mistreated and belittled for being girls and women. Shouldn't be any big news to anyone who's been a chick for very long, but it makes for a strangely addictive read.

This post talks about being flipped out on by a very-breeding guy because the writer is female and CFBC (childfree by choice). 

(Photo is of me and Carrie in a high school play approximately 4.5 billion light-years ago...)

MEANING & BIGTIME SATISFACTION VS. MOMENT-TO-MOMENT "HAPPINESS"

Does Parenting Suck?

Does parenting suck? Surveys and scientific data have sure supported that notion, indicating especially that for Americans, parenting is making people more and more "unhappy" over the years—especially people with money. Now some data show that parenting is rewarding on the long-  haul and in a different way than momentary pleasure.

_{- - -Note to childless/childfree readers: you might want to avoid the last section, about my own experiences step-parenting and approaching biological parenting. The whole piece does discuss parenting/childing issues in general and ain't necessarily safe for those wrestling with the grief of childlessness.} - - -

Can we get a big "duh" on that? Do you feel "happy" and "unstressed" and like life is a big bowl of cotton candy when you're climbing Mount Everest, frozen and oxygen-starved and convinced you're losing your mind and about to die? Probably not. Does that trip up Everest become a major, beautiful, amazing defining moment of your life? I should freakin' hope so!

Are Tough Challenges Rewarding in a Special Way?
Same with other gripping, deep, frustrating, yet rewarding aspects of life. For each hour of bliss, "fun," or "happiness" I experience writing, making art, and trying to facilitate ways for other people to do or distribute their writing or art (ya know, community events, putting out a magazine without getting paid, etc etc)—I probably spend two hours in drudgery mode, thirty minutes in grumpy mode, and fifteen minutes in hell. Some people say they can't staaaand writing, it drives them crazy, they're such a martyr, but they HAVE to do it. I've always thought that was silly, but if I break down my own time, I gotta admit it's not like I'm swimming in creative ecstasy all the time. 

It might be that difficult activities generate a sense of meaning, importance, and some ineffable feeling a bit more transcendent than moment-to-moment "happiness," not despite their difficult-ness, but because of it. I hate to admit this (because my parents were always on about it when I was a kid and I thought it was soooo dumb), but earning something, going through a challenge, brings a sense of reward, contentment, pride, and amazement that I don't usually find in something that just plops itself neatly into my lap.

Does Writing Suck?
A recent example from my professional life: winning a grant vs. getting a sweet writing gig. Most writers I know, especially younger/newer ones, would dance a zillion jigs to get a nice, regular, well-paying gig like my new one for the Science Fiction channel. The drudgery and undeniably dull bureaucratic hassle of a grant proposal would pale in comparison; having it be successful would be fairly unglamorous, too. I experienced the reverse. I'm very pleased to write the SyFy.com "Eureka Idea Lab" blog, but I've got lots of experience writing similar things. Landing a gig like that feels great in the moment-to-moment; the hard, impossible work of becoming a professional writer is mostly far behind me. Landing a gig is a familiar and pleasant sensation. Trying to get the gig didn't suck my soul dry and make me throw my calculator across the room in a fit of frustration—unlike attempting to write the grant.

I've been trying to sort out the whole grant-getting game for years now. It's aggravating and difficult in most moment-to-moment work. I feel like a loser and a failure, in addition to being an idiot for not giving up this wretched game. But my cool blog writing gig doesn't make me feel like I scaled Mount Everest. Winning a $12,000 RACC grant I wrote for Plazm magazine? That felt like reaching the peak! Writing the grant sucked big donkey balls. Having written the grant, especially as it succeeded, feels fantabulous. It's not just about the money, it's about knowing I worked my ass off to learn something that, for whatever reasons, was really hard for me to figure out.

Everyone's lives are full of such examples, from the small ("Ha! I fixed that broken alarm clock all by myself!") to the huge ("I got through twelve years of Alzheimer's disease as my mother's caretaker, and I'm a better person for it"). Moment-to-moment irritation and drudgery may not produce instantaneous "happiness," but they can culminate in major life satisfaction and deepen our sense of wonder, humility, and amazement in the face of human strife, the vastness of the universe, little things like that. To me, it's no surprise that parenting operates the same way, but perhaps on a longer scale. Instead of gaining satisfaction after working at something challenging for a short time, like getting a difficult Masters degree in two years, you're putting in decades of challenging drudgery peppered with moments of intense satisfaction and awe. 

Joy, Fun, Hate, Parenting, and Scientists
"All Joy and No Fun: Why parents hate parenting" by Jennifer Senior in New York magazine (thanks, Jane, for sending it my way) covers some of these studies in parenting satisfaction. I highly recommend the article. It looks a bit at how much parenting has changed in American culture, and how that affects our ability to enjoy it on a moment-by-moment basis. Comparisons are made to French and Danish parents, whose daily life happiness is higher than Americans', possibly because there is more direct social support for childrearing in those countries. However, Senior doesn't tackle the challenge of what parents here can do now to make the day-to-day more tolerable. Given that no one's going to give us a paid year's parental leave or free childcare, how can we truly enjoy the  individual moments with our kids? A little Buddhist mindtraining, perhaps?

(The article also kicked off a fine froth of online commenting about childless and childfree living versus parenting, the usual venomous and/or self-righteous arguments, with a particularly New York flavor. Dotted among The Usual Huffiness you'll find evidence that people are actually thinking about the conversation, reading the article carefully, and being open-minded.)

Step-parenting, Bio-parenting: What'm I Getting Into?

Coming to biological parenthood for the first time, under two months 'til I deliver if all goes well, I understand that I'm getting into something challenging that will dull my wits and rattle my core. I know that having a baby will threaten my marriage and wreak havoc on my other relationships. I worry about my mental and physical health. There will be little time for the things that I have considered "fun" during most of my life: sitting alone, writing, going to Burning Man, eating a decadent meal out on the town, going on artist's residencies, and the like. I fully expect to become a zombie mom who can barely utter three words that aren't about baby's bowel movements, sleep, or nursing.

And the rewards? I'll just have to see what they feel like. Being a stepparent has been extraordinary, and heavily influenced how I approached the biological clock when it hit. Aspects of my childfree life that seemed perfect in the past paled in comparison to the moments of joy, and the larger sensation of exhilaration, that I felt as a stepmom. It rarely felt like I was "giving up" frequent late nights out on the town in order to romp in the park with A., have family dinner right at 6 pm, go to a 9 a.m. soccer game (me??? at a kid's soccer game?? wtf?) or even to stay up through harrowing nights of temper tantrums or illness.

The question of whether it was "worth it" wasn't even a question for me. It wasn't just "worth" the frequent hecticness, semi-frequent pain, and occasional tedium; step-parenting and my relationship with A. made my life just plain better. Richer. Weirder. Funner. Unpredictable in new ways. Chock full of love and intensity. Guess it must've happened at the right time in my life, with the right cast of characters, including a frickin' fantastic guy and his unbelievably cool, wild daughter.

It's this experience that I look at when I read the New York magazine article or consider how having a baby may affect my life. Every kid is different. Every birth is different. I have no way of knowing what's coming up.

Being a stepmother has its advantages; not only did I skip the whole diaper-poopy-screaming-toddler phase, because I met A. when she was 4 and 1/2, but other parents were around to do much of the heavy lifting. Now I'll be the poopy-screaming-diaper-toddler-exhausted-freaking-out mom, and I won't be able to call this kid's "real mom" for the occasional tête-à-tête about discipline, school, or what the child should be allowed to post on Facebook. *I* will be the "real," biological mom. Eek.

But if raising a biochild brings even half the love, satisfaction, beauty, and astonishment I've experienced co-parenting A., I will have to consider the experiment a huge success... even if I don't feel "happy" and "light" and "fun" every day, moment by poopy-diapered moment.

Images from "Please Rescue Me," a performance I did at the Haybarn Theatre, Goddard College, Plainfield, Vermont, in 2006. I think Em Delaney shot the pics.

THIS BLOG STAYS. I CHANGE.

[THIS POST IS NNSFCL: NOT NECESSARILY SAFE FOR THE CHILDLESS]

a note from the followup to my post that wondered, "What should happen to this blog now that I am not going to be biologically childless?" in short, i'm going to keep this blog alive for now; label posts with warnings if i think they might be upsetting to those childless people who are triggered by certain topics; and just see what happens.

becoming pregnant doesn't mean you stop caring about what happens with childfree/childless issues, and the people suffering because of them.

VOTE: what should happen to this blog now that things have changed?

"I think you’re great.  Don’t stop blogging.  Please."

A reader named Renée just sent me that, and dang, was it nice to read. "In my search to find some sort of familiar voice online… I found nothing close," she said. And some other readers said similar: that I'd hit a weird niche that they couldn't find elsewhere, online or off.

I feel gratified that my torturous, whiny grieving-and-deciding process was useful to anybody. Really freakin' gratified. Now I just wonder what to do next. So you tell me: A, B, or C?

A) TOMBSTONE SITE
Should I stop posting to Nymphe and leave it here as a "tombstone" website? The point of that: some of these posts are linked from a lot of places, and people seeking information and balm for their wounds, they find 'em, they email me, they comment. So if the site stayed up, those posts would still be visible. And if that particular grieving person nosed around on the site, they would not be confronted by a bunch of new posts featuring Me the Pregnant Lady or Me the One with a Kid... which could be traumatic.

B) I-CHANGED-MY-MIND SITE
Leave Nymphe here. Leave the old posts. Leave the resources. But just keep telling my story as it unfolds. The new posts might sometimes refer to the eternal battle between defensive moms, defensive childless, and defensive childfrees, but they might also be about how I make the transition from my "No I won't give in to the biological clock" stance to the "Oh please I give up, can I have a baby now?" part of my life.

C) NUKE!
End the site, close it down, move on with my life. Main advantage to this is that I pay for my hosting on this site.

Any suggestions? Comment here, comment on Facebook, or email me at magdalen23 at le Gmail.

Beyond Logic, Beyond Regret: Why I Finally Changed My Mind

The biological clock, a beautiful experience being a stepmom, and being with The Luv of My Life conspired to bring me four-plus years of self-torture self-discovery. Logically, it did not make sense to change my life plans, to complete the leap from childfree to undecided to childed. I've got significant health problems. I worry, like most thinking humans, about passing along medical and psychological characteristics from my birth family to any children.

Most importantly, my household family are happy the way they are—the biological dad with his biological daughter living with us half-time, a great biological mom living nearby, and a loving stepmom to boot. Ironically, it was their love that cracked my little walnut of a heart open... and inspired me to actually consider having a baby, not something I'd ever expected to see on my "Things To Do Before Death" list (yeah, I've got one of those).

The intensity of "maternal desire" or "the generative urge" took me off guard and blew apart everything I thought I knew. Whatever this Thing was, it was much bigger and much stronger than me. It was connected to history, ancestry, biology, nature, the great cycle of life, blah blah blah, stuff I had no control over. I did everything I could to stand up to its power, to remain a free woman, to wield my own damned willpower in the face of what felt like insurmountable pressure. I wanted to be a happy stepparent who wasn't contributing to the world's overpopulation problem. I wanted to be "free," and I grew up during the advent of second wave feminism, aware that I, unlike most of my forbears, could choose to have a career, focus on art and writing and music, follow my dreams of education and travel, without getting bogged down by that whole mothering thing. That's what I thought I wanted.

Whatever ran this universe—biology, DNA, evolution, Mother Nature, Father Nature, god, goddess, the Fates, the universe itself—really didn't give a shit what I thought I wanted. It had another plan for me, the same plan that finds 75-80% of humans reproducing, the same plan that keeps termites pumping out tens of thousands of eggs every day.

If you've read the Nymphe blog before, you know that I was not happy. I couldn't kick the grief that accompanied my decision to not-even-try becoming a birth- or adoptive-mother of a baby. I couldn't kick the sensation of regret: that I might regret this my entire life. The sensation of love: a giant wave of overwhelming, cheeseball LUUV that made me want to connect with the world, with history, with family, and with my husband in a very particular way. A procreative way.

And I couldn't kick the sensation that I was very, very tired. Standing in the universe's way, fists raised, refusing to surrender to this deep internal need, sucked a little more life out of me every day. It takes  a fuck of a lot of hubris to pull against everything that feels natural and inevitable, but, ya know, I'm no stranger to absurd bouts with pride. I'd tilted at plenty of windmills in my time. What was one more?

Maternal desire turned out to be the gigantic wind turbine that blew me off my warhorse. If I 'won' this battle, what was it, exactly, that I was winning? The bitter reward of knowing I could say 'Fuck You' to the universe, even if it meant stabbing myself in the heart? The classic female reward of pleasing the people I loved, so that they wouldn't have to bear the responsibility or inconvenience of a new child in their midst? The chickenshit reward of not having to radically change my life? The equally chickenshit reward of avoiding risks (any parenting or mentoring of a child is a risky proposition; throw in my panoply of mental and physical disabilities, and the risks grow)? The intangible spiritual fulfillment of getting through something unbearable? That which does not kill me makes me stronger? The intellectual reward of surpassing typical gender programming? Keeping the freedom to la-ti-ta, do whatever the hell I want with my days and months?

These rewards were not enough.

I recently came to terms with what I really want. What I would like and love is to have a baby. But what I really want is to let go of the rock and float downstream. What I really want is to earn a sliver of acceptance and relinquishment; to surrender to that which is bigger than me, more ancient, beyond comprehension, beyond the everyday American business of free will and self-meta-programming.

I didn't want maternal desire to be the bane of my existence anymore; I wanted to accept it. I finally had to say, OK, I don't really have that much control over the deepest parts of myself. I am not the ruler of my limbic system and the reptilian depths of my brain and nervous system. Dealing with the biological clock was like dealing with my bipolar diagnosis in my twenties: it took me years to accept that some things were bigger than me, that much of my body and mind were controlled by chemicals floating around within me.

It took many years, near-ruination of my life, and several suicide attempts to come to terms with bipolar disorder, to accept that Wonderful Me was not in charge of all this. Wonderful Me needed to step aside, try the medications, and learn that maybe being run by a bunch of hormones and neurotransmitters, though it sounded dehumanizing, really wasn't such a bad thing. I just had to get used to the idea.

Now I'm learning to accept that whether it's cultural, personal, or merely hormonal, maternal desire is real, and it's got me by the ovaries. I wanted to step out of the universe's way. If it wanted to grant me a child? That would be fabulous. If not? At least I would no longer be leading a fierce charge against the entirety of nature and the gorgeous, painful yearning within my own body, soul, and mind. My husband agreed. He, too, is a person full of love.

Researchers have noticed age-related distinctions in how and why we experience regret. The young are more likely to regret things they did rather than things they didn’t do. After all, at that stage in life there’s still time to see Australia, climb K2, or write a novel. But as we age, this tendency reverses, and it’s what you didn’t do that stings. When you look back and see all the mountains left unclimbed, the sense of loss can be devastating. (from AARP via The Situationist)

I may look back and regret my choices. I may regret that I didn't insist on having children when I was younger, more fertile, less likely to have miscarriages and birth defects. I may regret that I didn't stay childfree and keep battling, keep fighting, keep seeking comfort and peace on my own weird terms and against all odds. I may regret that I wasn't satisfied with stasis, the status quo, remaining the footloose, fancy-free, childfree Tiffany I had always known. I kind of doubt it. That Tiffany was struck down long ago. I guess this is what they call growing up. I've never been very good at it. I'm a little slow that way.

I don't think I'll regret this decision, however it turns out.

To my childless and childfree sisters, brothers, and others, I send out love and thanks and gratitude and love again. It sometimes feels like a loss or even a betrayal when one of our kind, in the 15-20% minority, crosses over to the dark side, joins the mommy club. "You'll change your mind," people told me a zillion times when I was young and vocal about being childfree. I really fuckin' hate that they were right... but they were. I changed my mind.

I'm pregnant. Pregnant and aware how fortunate I am to be pregnant, when thousands of people must struggle with infertility every day, must tilt at the gods' windmills for other reasons than mine. Pregnant and aware that this isn't the politically and environmentally correct thing to do (as an anti-breeder man recently reminded me a few months back, before casually dropping into the conversation that he had a grown son!). I'm pregnant and aware that the parenting, childed majority carry a great deal of entitlement and privilege in our society, along with the stress, responsibility, and dedication that accompany good parenting. I'm pregnant and thankful.

I'm floating downstream.

THE REFERENDUM

Which lifestyle to choose? Kids to have or not have? Marriage to pursue or singlehood to live? Why so much snark, jealousy, and bitterness between "the referendums" of people who've chosen their various paths—especially when they hit middle age?

Tim Kreider's excellent, poignant essay on the subject, and some surprisingly intelligent, cogent comments*, make for great reading on the NY Times website. 

*"Surprising" given some of the idiotic, bizarre, hateful, and vitriolic comments I've seen on that site. Maybe Kreider is given a break because he's male? Or maybe it was the word "infertility" that sent NY Times blog posters into a foaming-at-the-mouth, disgusting comment-frenzy last year...

WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY...

"Basically, nature wants you to have babies. Society wants you to pay to raise wage-earners, taxpayers, and cannon fodder for their wars. ...Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power that you would have invested in off-spring that can be directed elsewhere. So if you decide not to have kids, pick another twenty year project and get busy." --Franis Engel on pandalous.com, one of many thoughtful commenters discussing The Baby Question

My Spidey Sense is tingling! I read this today after posting yesterday's ramblings about, among other things, my ongoing fight with/against/? my body and nature. I offhandedly speculated that by having will, discipline, and determination win out over natural and biological urges, I and my kind might be acquiring some sort of spiritual warrior status. Nuns and monks and yogis can surpass their "natural" urges, so why not us?

But I thought Engel's sentence above very interesting. "Saying no to that dictate of nature bestows quite a bit of power..." When in the thick of The Baby Issue, I don't feel powerful. I feel like I'm in a deathmatch, wrestling with an angel or a demon, feeling the fragmentation of my mind/will and my body/biology. That deathmatch is eating up much of my time and energy. And yet here is the idea that it might bestow on me, on us, a special kind of power, personally and in the world.

As anyone who's ever gone through serious grief or serious struggle knows, these are sources of personal transformation, greater empathy with others going through their own struggles, greater determination, the realization that one can get through many tough times, and suchlike. Engel suggests that we not only earn these lessons and the "power" that comes with them, but a level of different power than parents can have, simply because we have chosen a different path and therefore have more energy to expend on something besides our children.

having grief in one area of life doesn't snuff out all fulfillment in other areas of life.

A childfree by choice woman named May just posted some cool comments and questions on an older post, and got me off & running again about the childless/childfree/motherhood/fulfillment tangle. Read her post and my absurdly lengthly replies right here on yr local Nymphe blog.

a few highlights: maybe we become some kind of yogi-type spiritual warriors by denying our bodily desires to such an extent, like monks. who knows.

i don't imagine this (level of daily grief) will be a permanent feeling.  (it's already been changing and getting better...)

in terms of grief, it's very different to other griefs i've experienced and/or watched others go through.

i do live a fulfilling life, always have. but i am not fulfilling what my body, my dna, and my hormones believe to be my Biological Destiny. that's a huge struggle.

it's like talking to someone who believes in angels or that God wants them to wear a veil all the time or that aliens are controlling them despite the tin-foil-lined hat they're wearing: fascinating but utterly, well, alien to me. UNTIL i experienced it.

i was probably worst off around age 37-38. if that hadn't improved somewhat, and if i hadn't found ways to manage the grief and connect with others going through similar grief, well, i'm not sure i'd be here today.

imagine you're on a chain, in a river, like the Greeks' Tantalus. you're starving and you're thirsty. somehow, your body keeps going despite the fact that you never get food or water. every time you bend to drink, the chain stops you. there's a fragrant orange tree right overhead. you can't reach the orange, however many times you try. maybe someone upriver is BBQing a steak. for infertile people, the chain may seem irrevocable. but many of us fall somewhere along a wide spectrum of childlessness/childfree life. we DECIDE not to drink the water or eat the orange, for the sake of the child, our marriages, our health, the planet, or other reasons. can you imagine that? standing in a river, your body insisting that you are dying of thirst, and not drinking? well, that's what this feels like.

part of why i want to tell my story is that i think younger women should be aware that however solid they are in their childfree decision, they may get their asses completely kicked by the bioclock later on. (yes, i'm willing to get dogpiled, as i have on other forums, for daring to say this.)

on childless women not being womanly: is Lauren Hutton unwomanly: Oprah? Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo? Ella Fitzgerald? Julia Child? yeah, didn't think so.

nature is another matter altogether. there are some animals and plants out there who replicate without breeding, but not generally a cuddly bunch. going through this, i suddenly felt alienated from nature itself.

to comment -= please read the original thread right here on yr local Nymphe blog and add your comment there.

Oregonian article on working with childlessness

 

hello nimfee readers --- over the weekend, the Sunday Oregonian ran an article about my writing and artwork inspired by childlessness. it's now online at oregonlive.com , complete with the usual array of ranting internet bullies who didn't appear to have actually read the article before they started dissing me, infertile women, etc etc. ah well. i think we all get a little ranty and whiny online sometimes, eh?

motoya nakamura took the photo i've reproduced here... this is a small sculpture that someone offered to the Easter Island Project as a "seed" during the Port Townsend "Seeding Easter Island" performance. i don't know who made it. (it's cool - the little acorn in the middle swings around - kinetic sculpture.)

people interested in participating in the project: please email me at easterislandproject (at) gmail.com for details, dates, etc. thanks!

also: that awesome green hooded shrug i'm wearing in the Oregonian photos was created for me by the awesome Portland designer Holly Stalder  using a silk and gold-thread scarf given to me at the wedding of my friends David and Rathna in Madras/Chennai, India.