Mothers, Children, Childlessness and Legacies

Years ago, we had a dog, a bitch actually, named Nikki. "Nik the Dog." We let her have one litter of pups before we had her spayed…someone told us that was the thing to do. She got pregnant, got big as a house, and dutifully gave birth, depositing the first whelp in the middle of the basement floor. And then she looked at those strange, wriggly little creatures that had issued forth from her own body as if she had absolutely no idea what to do with them. She reminded me, for all the world, of my own mother.

Mom never talked much about her childhood. I don’t think it was a great time for her. Even though she was younger by almost a decade than her two brothers, the only daughter and the "baby" of the family, she was not petted, spoiled, or coddled. Or even particularly parented, except by those selfsame older brothers who were drafted to mind the inconvenient tag-a-long. Her dad was ill, and her mother hired out as a housekeeper to keep food on the table. Mom was a latch-key kid decades before there were latch-key kids. Which may explain why she never developed a knack for parenting. Any female animal can bear offspring, but nurturing those progeny—being a mother—is not necessarily instinctive. It’s a learned behavior. And when you spend most of your childhood raising yourself, whom do you use as a role model?

But, like my dog, Mom dutifully procreated. Not, I think, because it was what she had dreamed of doing all her life, but because it was what you did. She always said that she and Dad planned to have four children (which, being #5, always rankled me a little.) They were so pleased with my oldest sister, and they were such a cute little post-war family. Joyce was almost three years old when my next sister was born. Pretty good planning! But then, they just seemed to lose control. Twenty-six months later, came number three. Ooops…just sixteen months between number three and number four. And, speaking of "oops," two years later the "complete" family added a seventh member. I can’t get my arms around the idea that my parents enjoyed sex so much that, despite practicing that ever-so-reliable method of baby-boom birth control—the "rhythm method"—they just couldn’t contain themselves, and got caught coloring outside the lines that many times. We were a houseful, and way more, I think, than my mother ever realized she had signed up for. She probably could have stopped at two, or maybe even one, and been a much happier and more successful parent. Rather than the harried, bedraggled, overweight, overwhelmed housewife she became. When the last of the brood was packed safely off to school, Mom divorced the house and went to work. By the time I was nine, she was working full-time, and never looked back.

It’s no wonder, then, that I don’t have a maternal bone in my body. I am my mother’s child, even though there could not be two more opposite personalities on the face of the earth. Luckily for me, and for any children I might have produced under the duress of societal pressure, women of my generation could, and often did, choose to remain childless. Still, my childlessness is more an accident of nature than an act of will. I was married at twenty-one, and stopped taking my pills at twenty-five, ready to give myself over to whatever happened, but not terribly enthusiastic about it. Pregnancy did NOT happen, and, we soon found out, was not likely to happen without a lot of blood, sweat, tears, and money. It didn’t make much sense to brave that road, to get to a destination about which I was, at best, ambivalent. Nature wisely took the decision out of my hands.

Like any childless woman of my age, I sometimes look back and wonder if I made the right decision. But really, I wonder for all the wrong reasons. I don’t feel the ache of empty arms and womb. I selfishly ponder who will care for me when I am old…who will remember me when I die…who will get my "stuff," such as it is, when I no longer need it. At times, when I see women my age enjoying the fruits of their labors of love—watching with mixed emotions as their precious chicks try their wings and fly from the nest—I get the feeling that I missed out on a very important aspect of life. But then I realize that, in all probability, based on my own upbringing, I would have been a rotten parent. I can’t help but think that my, "If it happens, it happens," attitude would not have stood me in very good stead for bringing up children in these insane times. It was an experience best left untried…because you can’t give them back if you figure out halfway through that you really aren’t any good at it.

So I am challenged to create my legacy some other way, since the "normal" way was sensiblydenied me. I may write, weave, sculpt or build something that will outlive me by some decades. I may say or do something that lives on in the hearts and minds of somebody…anybody…for many years after I go. Or I may fade into oblivion, like a leaf drifting to the forest floor, crumbling to dust and becoming silent fodder for the next generation of living things. Better to have that to look forward to, than to have forged more links in a long chain of damaged, struggling human beings. At least I’ll feel I’ve left the world no worse than I found it.