To be or not to be. The singleton’s conundrum.
I am not really a fan of thinking things all the way through. Thinking things through in a logical rational fashion is the death of hope and imagination. There are always more reasons not to do than do something. The enthusiasm of the passion might die a quick death, or survive with a ferocious tenacity unfathomable to most people. I remember my sister Jasmine sitting me down after I’d been trying to get into humanitarian work for over a year, doing course after course, networking my ass off.
“So what’s your plan B?” she asked.
“There is no plan B.”
And there wasn’t. Not for work, not for love, not for children. It never occurred to me that a dogged pursuit may not get me to my destination. If I worked hard or if it was fate I would get there in the end.
This is of course not a sensible way to live.
Yet if I have one regret, it’s that I didn’t do more stupid things, live more wildly, be less calculated in the risks taken.
In writing to Keanu Reeves, I had written most of the angst out of my system. It was an Atlantean decision. I needed to talk it all the way through, with a variety of sources, consider it from every angle. I needed to think not feel it all the way through. I had consulted my local religious vessels – Anglican, Catholic, Buddhist – and was still on the fence.
I knocked on Debbie’s door.
“I’m thinking of giving up. Not having a child.”
“Shit. Come in.”
Debbie had, in her twenties, visited an orphanage whilst on holiday in Asia. She came home with a baby girl; not quite a whim but not the predicted path for a young married couple. She had convinced me not to consider international adoption. I would be waiting for years and how old did I want to be as a first time mother? I’d been waiting on the foster-to-adoption list for two years, possibly as long as I’d have waited for an adoption.
Debbie shooed her five children out of the kitchen and poured hot water over freshly crushed coffee beans.
“Fostering, adopting, isn’t easy. You never know what child you’ll get. Not that you know with your bio kids either.”
She went into the kitchen and returned with Tim Tam chocolate biscuits.
“Comfort food.”
Debbie pressed the coffee plunger, the grounds somersaulting, and splashed in some milk. We gnawed the bottom off our rectangular chocolate biscuit then dunked it in the hot liquid, sucking up coffee and chocolate cream through the biscuit straw. The trick was to have the biscuit explode in your mouth before collapsing in the drink.
“And suddenly I’m back in high school.”
Debbie licked her chocolate-smudged fingers.
“Phoe, fostering, it’s like a Tim Tam explosion, trying to catch everything before it crumbles. With all the love in the world, you can’t erase that displacement from a world they may never have known. Raising good humans, it’s endless, exhausting, thankless.”
An argument broke out downstairs and Debbie stamped to the top of the stairs.
“What’s going on down there?”
In a layered chorus: “Nothing to see.”
She walked heavily back to me, then tiptoed back to the head of the stairs and listened to the silence. She tiptoed back over to me.
“Phoe, you too could have this in ten years time.”
“It’s already been ten years Debbie. Ten years of trying to have a child. That’s a third of my adult life. I’m just…tired.”
“If you’re tired now, just wait ‘til you get a foster child.”
“I just don’t think I can wait any more.”
Debbie put her hand on mine.
“I don’t know what I would do in your situation.”
That was the crux of it, the reason I wrote to Keanu Reeves, a man I didn’t know and would never meet. No-one I knew was in my situation. I had single friends who wanted children, but with the absence of a husband they hadn’t seen the need to pursue it further.
I loved men but I didn’t need them. They were handy for sperm. In my twenties, I was surrounded by friends who wanted to get married in the worst possible way. I mean really, in the worst possible way. I saw them as divorced with two kids as they walked down the aisle. I didn’t want that for myself. “The One” or nothing. Now, being divorced with two kids didn’t seem like a bad decision.
However a relationship – even with “The One” – was not the best conduit to having children. You could get sperm without a side serving of heartache.
I left Debbie without a resolution but with more prayers.
I sent out a text to my uni girlfriends:
“Need some advice. Thinking about not having children. Dinner?”
We sat at the starkly lit Vietnamese restaurant with the great food and great wine. There were seven of us from university, “the girls,” including Juzzy. I talked it all through. I had watched their children grow up, been part of their lives, been at christenings, sixteenths, twenty-firsts. They listened, nodded and when I was done, provided empathy but not answers. They were of a consensus. It was a huge decision and it was mine alone to make.
Juzzy, always forward with an opinion, was quiet. Juzzy had been with me when I gave birth to Phoenix, had wondered how she would tell my mother if I died in the volume of blood. It was Juzzy who videoed the nurse handing me my son, swaddled in the blanket she’d bought that day, a white blanket with blue teddy bears. It was Juzzy who painted his palms and feet blue and pressed them gently on white paper. It was Juzzy, of all people, who understood what it meant for me to say “I will not be a mother.”
Last stop was Ziggy, less by design than happenstance.
Ziggy was a psychotherapist and actress. All that analysing and considering one’s backstory was a recipe for neuroticism, yet she seemed level-headed. She reminded me of my sister in the way she looked, moved, spoke, but less put together. She was the person with whom I liked to see plays, who truly revelled in the theatre. There weren’t a lot of friends putting up their hands to be babysitters so we hadn’t seen each other for a year.
We met at a local Poké Bowl place; Hawaiian and trendy but still salad. If anyone could talk me out of having kids, it was her. She had four rambunctious boys and was accordingly harried and spent. We talked about acting and writing plays, all the things she hadn’t the time or emotional energy to do. She could be rational about this whole ill-considered kid nonsense.
“Ziggy, it’s not rational is it, having children? I don’t know why we feel the need to do it. It makes no sense.”
“Children are the ultimate act of narcissism. We want to see ourselves reproduced. Then we look into that mirror and see ourselves and it’s not pretty. Children are little fucking bundles of karma.”
“You reap the seeds you sow so to speak.”
“I made Josh get a vasectomy so there’s no more fucking seeds. Storm is a six-year old asshole. He does something and I shout at him. Then I remember I did exactly the same thing and I am now my mother. And I’ll be paying his therapy bills.”
We laughed, ate some raw fish, and looked out over the swarm of tourists walking past us on their way to Bondi markets.
“If you take away biology, then why to I feel this need, this compulsion to have a child? A foster child will have nothing of me in them; there’s no biological imperative, not some sort of primordial homing beacon. It is completely irrational.”
Ziggy had been in therapy for decades. All her thoughts had been examined, and relegated to their correct places. They could be pulled out, neatly folded, whenever needed.
“Phoe, we are all looking to connect, not just physically or emotionally. We want a stickiness in that connection, something binding; the more you pull away the stronger it pulls you together. Your heart is built for a function, to love without reason. And your heart is ripe.”
This was not the advice I thought I’d be getting. Perhaps I had sought her out to confirm what I wanted to want. I wanted to let go. I wanted it to be over.
Next: Part 8 To be or not to be: The singleton’s conundrum
Wishing you love and all good things x
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A 12 part series on a single woman’s journey through the foster system
1. Letter to the Minister 2. List every relationship you’ve ever had and why it ended 3. The Asian tick box 4. Where the wogs go 5. The Goldilocks principle 6. Letter to Keanu Reeves 7. An Anglican minister, a Catholic nun and a Buddhist philosopher walk into a cafe 8. To be or not to be: The singleton’s conundrum 9. Absolutely fine 10. Fate and other fuckery 11. Danger signs 12. An unusual situation
