Childless by choice...kind of...I suppose...technically...I guess...

This other place.

It's Mother's Day today, there's a gratitude that exists in my body that sits right up against an ache sandwiched between a resistance, a longing and resoluteness all at once.

This day has meant so many things over the years:

A celebration for my own brilliant mum. A woman I love so searingly, a woman who modelled devotion in motherhood so wholeheartedly.

A moment to admire the mothers in my life who I'm dazzled by. The mother's rearranging intergenerational trauma to heal long lineage of hurt. I look at my Millennial mum mates raising brilliant babes who stand so totally in their own power in ways we were never allowed to and I am moved by the mountains they are moving on a daily basis.

An honouring of the single mothers in my sphere who show up with love in action at every turn for their babes in such deep and brilliant, yet uncelebrated, ways every single day.

It’s a day that ushers in a deep ache for the children who miss their mums.

A day that punches with a grief laden gut twist for the mother's in the midst of infertility who yearn for their babes.

And then there's today...today I'm thinking of the childless-kinda-by-choice folks who we don't really seem to talk about because it's messy, and contextual and vulnerable.

Today I ponder the notion of writing from your scars not from your wounds, and I believe wholeheartedly in that, but also I wonder if some experiences are bruises that never scar, and will always be tender to the touch.

Today is tender to touch.

And it should be written about.

With an embodied nudge to write, and a dash of courage, here we are…I feel like part of what I'm meant to do on the planet is experience the grit, witness the grit, ponder the grit, and somehow produce a pearl about it. So, here's a tender pearl about motherhood just for today…because who knows how I'll feel tomorrow.

I have run the gauntlet of infertility. I know the deep held yearning of a dashed dream. Of living life in fortnightly intervals in a perpetual cycle of waiting…waiting…waiting disappointment…disappointment…disappointment. I've been poked and prodded and had internal ultra sounds and inconclusive results.

I've felt pregnancy symptoms and been so sick and so optimistic only to have my hopes dashed in the work bathroom five minutes before I had to go and teach a room full of actors how to act. I've pushed down the horror and taught a class without those actors knowing it was me giving the performance of a life time, that they have no idea they were witnessing.

I've felt disappointment so deep in my guts it collapsed my knees.

I've felt the unbelievable rage of infertility, a deep, white hot fury that plants seeds of judgement so deep in your body, that feel equally irrational and rational all at once. I sat at a cafe once and watched as two parents in the throes of addiction, the woman heavily pregnant, have a loud argument, as their shoeless toddler ran onto a busy road. I felt the width and breadth of the words ‘unfair’ and ‘judgement’ that day and in the moments just like it. You feel rearranged and out of sorts and justified all at once. It's wild making.

I've had it alter my capacity for joy and celebration of the people I love. There was a resistance built so intensely by my grief and my longing that meant I couldn't be around my friends babies for years. It was too painful. I still feel the impact of that resistance and those self serving choices now.

I've bore a baby in my body. Seen them in the black and grey scale image I longed for for so many years. I've birthed that tiny, tiny babe on all fours in the shower with a low, gutteral groan. I've held them in my hands, the same hands that then buried them in soil without community or grand ceremony because of their tiny, tiny size. I've felt the cramp of birth on my body and my heart. A loss that I had to decide to experience, or allow to happen naturally. In a ‘pain now or pain later’ model that felt so righteously unfair. I chose, because I believe in agency and choice, the pain now option. Some agency and control for once in something where there had been so little.

I've been rearranged by all of it.

I know I would've been a brilliant parent. I know that deep in my bones.

I feel deep grief for the things I will likely not experience in this lifetime. I feel deep grief on behalf of my parents, for not providing them grandbabes to love, because I would've like to have experienced them experiencing that with me.

I've heard two people speak with open vulnerability about this place I find myself in now, this childless by choice kind of, I suppose, technically place, and it was a wild balm to something so deeply isolating so much of the time. That's why despite the wild voice that screams of privacy and shamelessness that I ignore.

If we keep experiencing in isolation how will we learn we're not alone. Nothing is ever felt in isolation.

"You'll know when it feels right," is a true sentiment. I am for wholehearted fuck yes intuitive yes's. I believe in honouring and acting on your intuition. I know for some people they experience the call to be a parent on either side of a yes or no binary. Yes I want to or, No I do not. I know people who have changed their mind and swapped sides. I was team yes for so long until I was team yes-no-yes-no-yes-i don't know-no-yes-no.

What I want to hear more about is this grey area place I currently live in. Through circumstance, through age, through the way my life has panned out, the decisions I've made (and do not regret), my understanding of what I wanted shifted. And so I waited for the clarity of knowing to come again. And it would come. Wholehearted yes's would come. But, then wholehearted no's would follow. Then, I don't knows. And what I realised is that some decisions there's isn't a right or wrong choice, there's just a choice. There isn't a right path or a wrong path, there are just two paths, and you have to pick one and walk on it. Knowing that potentially both paths would hold regret AND longing, and that's okay.

If I had a baby I'm sure I would long for the freedom and possibility of a life without said baby.

Not having a baby means I regret and long for the version of my life where I am a mother.

Both are true and real and valid.

We don't talk about that.

I've learnt enough, in the last eighteen months especially, to know that I have no idea what will unravel in the future. I don't know what choices I will make, or who I will become. I may still bear a babe in my womb. But, the older I get, and the more sure I am that I am in perimenopause, that my body is actively running of possibilities every month to bear babes, the more likely it is that my experience of Earth school this time around will be a childless one, mostly by choice, I guess...now.

Childless by choice...kind of...sort of...technically...I guess.

On days like today that reality is loaded. It's sad, it's empowered, it's grief laden, it's joyous, it's confusing, its hard and easy all at once.

Multiple truths all at once.

The relieving thing today is that I am okay with the co-existence of all of these feelings inside me. It isn't a problem to solve. It doesn't pummel my heart to breaking point anymore. It's a bruise. It's tender. It's present. It's felt.

But, isn't that what a life is for, my darling? To be felt.

I think it is. So, I shall feel it all, and share when I like.

So much love.

Claire.

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If you wanna support me and my writing come hang out in The Grit Guild where I’m writing monthly chapters (sometimes more) of a smutty story about a woman names Lulu Dare learning to be more daring. We’ve just met her future love interest Owen and they are a dream boat. Readers in The Grit Guild are answering questions and in a choose-your-own-adventure fashion are leading me and Lulu in new and delicious directions. Basically The Grit Guild are horny, bold babes who want total pleasure and deep satisfaction with a dose of drama and I am here for it.

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Pearler is written and created on the unceded lands of the Yuggera and Turrbal people here in Meanjin and I pay my deep respect to First Nation Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.

I don’t believe I can wholeheartedly support sovereignty of this land I live, love and work on without acknowledging the liberation of Palestine and honoring the impacts of colonisation of Indigenous people everywhere else.