A Dream Unborn

On grieving an unrequited future

Making wishes on my walk this morning

The hardest grief I have ever known is for a life that was never lived.

I write this to you from menopause at age 35, my ovaries scorched from treatment, ground infertile for life.

While my circumstance may be unusual, the outcome is not. Millions of women live without biological children, some by choice, some because life simply happened differently than they imagined. I write this partly to find peace, but also because I suspect others are carrying this quietly, unsure where to place the grief.

Mine is a child-shaped hole, but moreover, a loss of frame. A reckoning when the thing you had been hoping for will never come to fruition. Despite all I’ve done, despite all I’ve lived, despite all I’ve loved, does any of it matter if I haven’t followed the logical progression?

I will never be a mother biologically. Perhaps there will be a scientific miracle, eggs grown from skin, the reversal of damage done, but I’ve come to acceptance. I wonder what I am meant to learn from this, my function defined not by a child, but by the absence of one.

I often think about Nietzsche’s amor fati, the love of your fate, the active embrace of one’s life exactly as it has been and will be. If a demon were to challenge you to live in “eternal recurrence”, repeating every moment, every joy, every horror of your life infinitely without subtraction, would you?

It’s easy to blame the medical system for my woes, but more painful, and perhaps more honest, to recognize that life is rarely shaped by one event, forming through hesitation and longing. Through all of the moments when we believe there will be more time.

Life is a series of infinite forking paths. There was the man I loved too much and the man who didn’t love me enough. I made and canceled countless egg freezing appointments, debilitated by the terror of messing with my hormones. I wasn’t born infertile. I had been pregnant before, at a time when I was unable to be a mother and gave it up early, a decision that breaks my heart to this day, but one that I do not regret making.

And there was that final opportunity before my radiation started, a surgery I likely would not have survived. It was an unfathomable choice to decide between my life and the potential for a life unborn, as the doctor ruled any fertility preservation options untenable.

Would I walk this same road again?

I mourn the paths not taken, but I exist only because of what was lost, each step shaping me further into an n of one.

I swim in a swarm of emotions, of gratitude that I am living, of sadness for the lives I’ll never have. As I’ve had more space to sit with it and systematically untangle myself, I tug at the complexity knot by knot.

I sat in denial with it for months, praying for my cycle to return as ardently as I had for my hemorrhaging to stop, blaming my temperature shifts on my apartment heat, my brain fog on chemotherapy. The scab heals only to be picked open again, by the hospital’s ordained pregnancy tests, by a thoughtless comment by a man at a party, by the stark realization that there is an experience in this life that I will never have.

I found myself drowning in secret guilt, in sadness that this was some form of divine punishment, a test of my faith. But slowly, as the storm of my treatment fades to gentle waves, a new grief begins to take shape.

What is my purpose in this world? What is my role as a woman if not to bear children? What is the purpose of a partnership if not to create a family? How do you date when you can no longer assume you will grow old?

I started to look into adopting a puppy and immediately found myself paralyzed by fear. To knowingly bring something new into my life in the shadow of my recurrence statistics felt reckless. How do I let someone love me when I cannot promise a future? How do I mother anything when I cannot promise I will be here? How do any of us ever feel safe enough to begin?

I read somewhere once about the distinction between motherhood and mothering, the institution versus the verb. Mothering is the act of creating, of nurturing, of letting something grow into what it’s meant to be. I am already a mother to the companies I’ve built, the essays I’ve written. I am a mother to my art. I am a mother to my wild parrots and plants. I am a mother to myself. I am a mother to this earth. Life has never been a guarantee.

But underneath it all, the absence remains.

Can you miss something you have never had? The joy of introducing a new soul into this world, of seeing your face reflected in his or hers, of subordinating yourself in the service of life, of living in a state where everything is new. I think about who will be there with me when I grow old (oh, how I pray I will grow old).

And yet, a reminder of how many of these things are still available to me. That I’ve lost only one version of form, not function. I accept my challenge to see myself in every face, to subordinate myself to the world, to wear my child’s eyes. To love all children as if they were mine. I am trying to trust that life is here to take care of me. That there are infinite ways to be a mother.

I learned a few days ago in a brilliant lecture by Bayo Akomolafe at the Long Now Foundation that Nigeria is the largest birthplace of twins, to the point that children have specific names based on their birth order. The second-born child is named the elder; the firstborn is the younger. The elder sends the younger out ahead to scout the world, and the younger emerges last.

We treat children as the future and our legacy, but other older traditions have understood them to be our elders, each a screaming lesson in humility, wonder, and joy. How much would change if we didn’t ask children to inherit our world, but to teach us how to see it?

What if the question is not which child I will raise, but what children will raise me? I say this not to diminish this heartbreak, but to find a new shape, to let my excess love spill out into the world. A few weeks ago, a beautiful raven-haired girl was born. She was named after me, or rather, I was named after her. I cannot describe what it meant to be told and share such an honor, a bond that transcends biology.

My grief assumes a particular geometry of time, a line drawn forward, my children ahead of me in an unreachable state. This isn’t the only way to view it. There is a version of the world where every present, past, and future exists at once, layered in a way that makes all unmanifested things visible. My children are as alive as the silence before a song is played.

And I am, in a way, pregnant. The cavity of my womb filled with grief, with joy, with unbearable pain, with the teachings of elders yet to come.

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