HEALING

I don’t know if there’s a specific moment when you decide to never drink alcohol. Maybe it never occurs to you to drink, because both your father and his father are alcoholics and you’re not interested in continuing the family business. Maybe you decide while draining the contents of his Jägermeister bottle down the kitchen sink while your Mam’s ex-boyfriend threatens to set fire to her in the living room.

It’s the same for wanting children. There’s no defining moment when the knowing takes form within you, except for that time you’re walking your baby brother down the road and hope no one thinks he’s yours. How old were you then … maybe thirteen? But then there’s the famous story of when Mam gives you the BABY born doll she always wanted for herself and you abandon it after pushing it down the road in its pram once. You were younger than seven at the time, so you must have known that you felt ‘meh’ on the subject for a while. Even though your clarity is almost as old as you are, you spend most of your life wondering if there’s some trauma you haven’t quite healed that is twisting you up so badly that you’d be confused about what’s good for you.

Everyone says that the idea of motherhood will grow on you like a taste for creamed spinach (just writing this makes me dry heave) and colourful clothing. But I can say for certain that both of those things haven’t grown on me yet and the only place I hear the biological clock ticking is in the opinions of others. I told you that I spent some time in a cult but I haven’t told you why I stayed there for so long. The truth is, I wanted to face my greatest fear once and for all: to admit that I don’t want children to a group of biological essentialists who think I’m failing my purpose as a woman. I stayed so long because I was afraid that they could be right and that I’m just not healed enough to get it. When I finally confess, I know that the anger that pours out of me as I yell “YOU DON’T GET TO DECIDE WHAT’S RIGHT FOR ME!” is yours.

Turns out, your greatest fear isn’t that you don’t know if you want children or not, it’s that someone else gets to decide that for you. The group believes that trauma is clouding my natural desire and instinct as a woman to want children. The only reason it matters is because there’s a part of me that worries that they’re right. I tell a friend about this and that I’ve been secretly considering sterilisation. After some consideration they say that it sounds like a very healthy thing to do and that I get to be consensual with the universe. It’s the first time someone tells me that I get to have a say in all of this.

The thing is, maybe some of your decisions are the result of generations of traumatised mothers passing down their pain to you.

But what if their trauma isn’t whether they had children or not, but that they lacked the right to choose?

What if, by learning to trust and act out the clarity of your knowing, you’re actually healing for all of you?