Motherhood: The Road Not Taken

This time of year assumptions abound.

"Any plans for Mother's Day?" the supermarket cashier asks cheerily.

My reflexive answer is well-practiced: "Well, who knows?" I reply, smiling mysteriously. "I'm going to lie low and just see what happens."

She smiles. "Me, too," she says. "Though I'm hoping for a surprise from my kids."

"I hope you get a good one!" I say, turning to leave.

I know surprises are quite unlikely for me this Mother's Day or any other.  I am a childless 67-year-old woman and my own mother has been dead for more than three decades.

Childless.

It was a radical thought back in the Fifties when just about everyone was married with children -- with a few notable exceptions -- including my beloved Aunt Molly. But I always considered her our third and best parent. And, for many years, especially after our parents died, Mike, Tai and I honored Aunt Molly with a special outpouring of love, affection and an excellent brunch at her favorite restaurant on Mother's Day.

There was one childless couple living in our neighborhood as I was growing up. Shel and Sybil Frye, a middle-aged, long-married couple lived two doors down from us. Their baby was a wonderful Golden Retriever named Honey.

Some people whispered that, as childless folk, they must be very selfish or else, perhaps, there was something terribly physically wrong with them.

But they seemed normal to me. Shel had a great sense of humor and loved to go fishing with my father. Sybil was always very sweet to neighborhood kids. She was quick with cookies, agreeable to my brother running away from home and hiding in her hedge all day as long as he was home by sundown. And Honey was a neighborhood favorite. I invited her to my birthday parties and she was the most popular guest there.

Still, I pitied them at times. Their life was so quiet, their house so orderly, their life together so...predictable.  I never aspired to be them.

All these years later, Bob and I are them -- but with cats instead of a big golden dog.

How did this happen? 

I never smugly chose to be "child-free." Instead, it seemed somehow predestined -- much to my distress growing up.

 I remember seeing "Three Coins in the Fountain" as a child and being greatly affected by a scene where one of the female characters weeps because she'll never have a child. I cried myself to sleep that night -- knowing somehow without knowing that this would be my own fate.

In college, as my suitemates dreamed out loud about husbands and children, I sat by feeling, once again, that what they dreamed so easily would not happen quite that way for me. I heard myself saying something snotty and bitter to soothe my overwhelming sense of anticipatory loss.  Lorraine sat beside me and put her arms around me. "You're scared that it won't happen for you, aren't you?" she asked, so wise for her years. "Don't worry. I just know somehow your life is going to be wonderful, that things will work out just right for you."

What was just right? I had decided that I didn't want to have children unless I could find a man who wanted truly wanted children. I didn't want to relive the eternal tension between my parents -- my mother who had longed for children, my father who largely loathed parenthood.

But things just didn't seem to work out with parenthood.

Michael Lynn, my first post-college boyfriend longed for marriage and children but I wasn't ready to settle down in my early twenties -- and he went on to be a loving stepfather to the children of the woman he eventually married and the absolutely devoted grandfather to their children.

I had an unplanned pregnancy with Dr. Chuck ---- thanks to a malfunctioning IUD. Though it was unplanned, it was far from unwelcome. Chuck, a pediatrician and adolescent medicine specialist, loved and wanted children. But the pregnancy ended in a miscarriage shortly before our relationship began a seismic shift. At age 30, Chuck came to terms with the fact that he was gay and we veered away from romance, marriage and children and continued on as friends and professional partners instead, producing several classic books instead of babies.

I was in my thirties when I met Bob, who was divorced and who had had a vasectomy during his first marriage. He had helped his first wife to raise a daughter by her previous marriage and he had no desire to repeat the experience.  Nevertheless, our relationship was so loving, so nurturing, so much what I had always wanted. I chose to spend my life with Bob. And this choice meant I would be childless.

But being childless hasn't meant that our lives are closed off to children.

As the years went by, Bob became a dedicated Big Brother to three generations of Little Brothers during his 22 years in the program. His three Little Brothers -- Paco, David and Ryan -- all became a part of our life together.

 In particular, we both love Ryan immensely and forever. He became Bob's third and last Little Brother as a small child more than 20 years ago and is the closest we'll ever have to a son. He calls us on Mother's Day, Father's Day, and many other times during the year to say "I love you!" and to share the adventures of his young adult life. And we'll be headed back to Los Angeles soon to share his joy as he receives his Master's degree in social work -- a major step toward his goal of becoming a psychotherapist. 

In some ways, my life, too, has been devoted to young people. For many years, I wrote almost exclusively for or about teenagers. For 20 years, I was a part-time admissions officer representing Northwestern University in California, Arizona and Nevada, interviewing several generations of promising young students. Some of these young people, whether or not they eventually attended Northwestern, became part of my life. 

But there were times, particularly after my parents died, when I felt existentially alone and wished that my lifestyle could be more traditional. There were times when I yearned for that closest of connections, for that love both fierce and all-encompassing.

Then I would host a parent fleeing from the stress of adolescent parenting for a week, or watch a toddler meltdown in public and think that being childless had its advantages.

But still, I've never identified with the militant "child-free" folk.

When I read books about being the wonders of child-free living, I always came away feeling unsatisfied and ashamed. The mind-set invariably seems to be that there was something the matter with children: they are savages, cost too much money to raise, and, in more promising times, interfered with a jet-setting yuppie lifestyle. These all seemed to be such superficial reasons to bypass a major aspect of adult life. And these weren't the reasons I was not a parent.

When I thought about why I had made the choices I made, it came down to me. Perhaps it was the memory of my father's bitter words "Marriage with children is the complete life catastrophe!" or my mother's wistful sighing about the career she had loved and left behind for motherhood. Deep down, perhaps, I didn't feel I had the courage and willingness to make the sacrifices necessary to be a mother. In my darkest moments, I've feared that something of my father might lurk malevolently in my emotional DNA.

But perhaps it was simply my destiny to fall in love with Ryan and with my nieces and nephew-to-be, to give warm support and guidance to children and teens with my books, and with my college admissions work instead of being a hands-on parent.

There are times of wistfulness, of wondering about what that road not taken might have been like, as well as times of feeling comfortable with my choice.

I see how children of friends have become wonderful adults, a source of joy and comfort to their parents, my peers. I see my friends and neighbors enjoying their grandchildren. I see multi-generational families and smile --and sometimes feel wistful. 

I've rejoiced as my siblings both became late-in-life parents. Tai gave birth to Nick when she was 35 and Mike was 60 when he and Amp had Maggie. He will be pushing 63 when their son Henry arrives this summer.

Despite her traumatic childhood, Tai is a loving, supportive mother to Nick, delighting in her strengths, talents and eccentricities alike.

And I marvel at Mike's -- and Amp's -- patience with their little Maggie. She's two-and-a-half, a bright and beautiful child and I look forward to seeing and knowing the growing person she will be. But I struggle to imagine how one copes with the demands, with the energy it takes, to be a 24/7 parent of a toddler -- especially in one's sixties. My brother, who had a much more difficult childhood than I, handles these demands beautifully. The love he and Amp have for Maggie is an all-encompassing love I will never know.

And yet I rejoice in being an aunt, a mentor, a writer young people can trust.

I love reading stories to Maggie and encouraging her to talk. I love sharing the insights and adventures of young adults I first met in the college admissions process as they venture out into the post-college world. I love hearing from long ago readers. I still sometimes get emails of thanks via my website from middle-aged adults who recall my 'TEEN articles or growing up with one of the seven editions of "The Teenage Body Book." It warms my heart to know that what I've written over the past 44 years has been helpful.

Sometimes warm feedback can take me by surprise.

I got an email on my birthday a few weeks ago from a high school friend Suse Harper-Yates, whom I haven't seen in nearly 50 years. She reminded me that we had played mother and daughter in a school production of "I Remember Mama" late in our senior year.

Her email read, in part: "For 'I Remember Mama' on her birthday! Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with another person, having to neither weigh thoughts nor measure words...I love you! Suse."

What a gift Suse's words were to me: both bringing back wonderful memories and letting me know as yet another Mother's Day approaches, that I had been a temporary mother, a source of comfort to her, all those years ago.

The memories flooded back. I had played Mama and Suzy had played Christine, the middle daughter. I remembered being delighted by the warm chemistry I had with her: it felt natural onstage to snuggle with her, to admonish her firmly but with affection, to meet her smile with my own.

I had no way of knowing then the secrets she was holding: the painful truth of her life at home. I had no way of knowing then -- nor did she -- the challenges she was to face in the years to follow. But for that very brief time, in a very different place in both our lives, I had been a good mother to her. I had helped her to feel warm and loved and safe.

What a blessing this was to hear and to know that these feelings had stayed with her all through the years.

Maybe my dear, long-deceased college friend Lorraine was right all those years ago: my life  has been wonderful, indeed, turning out the way it was always meant to be....just right.