What to expect when you’re not expecting

What am I building toward? Or, somewhat less grandiosely, what… am I doing here? The childless get to ask these spectacular and terrifying questions in a wondrous existential freefall. 

I’ve been asking questions in existential freefall since I was 6 years old, because it’s in my nature. But, as many of my friends raise children or freeze their eggs or do both, the intensity of my questioning has deepened. 

We childless, in addition to intense, uninterrupted navel gazing, also get to design the impact we hope to have on the children and parents around us. We can do this with supersonic, piercing clarity. Without managing travel soccer carpool or wondering what the neighbors think about our screen time policy. 

Mothers of course can do this too, and do in overwhelming numbers, chart their own extraordinary path and impact far beyond their own children. But I believe that the intense, overpowering love of a child, or 4 children, depending on the specifics of the family, can create an all-consuming vortex of energy expenditure. I personally believe that for me, it would. Which is why from an early age I was wary of the thought of myself as a mother. What I feared most was a blinding, bias-inducing, crippling love and worry for the well-being of my child. This is a momentous and necessary thing, this kind of love, but I’m glad to be just outside it and able to access other vistas, not only with my time, but with the force of my love itself. It’s a gift that I’m only just now unwrapping. Auntie life is boundless. Dizzying, like a deprivation tank, or falling up into the stars.

When I reflect on my personal disinclination to take on motherhood, it is ultimately a desire to protect my resources, including my emotional reserves. I can’t wrap my mind around the terror of loving a dependent something so deeply. One day Luke and I will get a dog… and I’ll have to face some portion of this thought experiment. 

I have several memories of teachers and uncles, family friends, coming in to my life, saying or doing important things, and then exiting. It was their intermittent presence, their frequent exits, that deepened the impact of their message. 

When I was 24 years old on set directing a comedy video, in a moment of downtime while our DP repositioned the lights, I ended up in a conversation with a younger female peer who looked up to me. I don’t know how we got on the topic of motherhood, but I suspect that it was because I was in a leadership position. Directing a large family of young men and women to create a comedy video I had written and produced. Everyone worked for free and I believe the props and food cost $212, which we paid for from the ticket sales of our live weekly show. 

I told my friend on set that I didn’t plan to be a mom. She appeared affronted, which surprised me quite a bit and she said, “Well. You would be a fantastic mom.” She said it with a sharp tone, like she was personally burned by my decision. 

There’s nothing like the hush on set, when time and money is in perpetual motion, to make your life flash before your eyes. I should point out here that our hard-earned live show ticket sale profits were the entirety of our budget. Everything is desperately high stakes in your early-20s. I remember the decade as one spectacularly exciting, sensorily inundating, unrelenting panic attack. 

I see myself, now, growing in maternal capacities. But free of the tangles and logistics and sleeplessness of actual early motherhood. This excites and frightens me. The growth and the capacity to love is powerful, sometimes overwhelming, and the target of that love less clear than with a human child in my arms. 

I do not share the opinion of my friend and colleague that day that I’d be a fantastic mother. I think it was a failure of her imagination, which was a refraction of all she knew at the time. What I am is a fantastic protector, facilitator, mentor, creator. She saw my power that day to bring collaborative art to fruition and, out of habit, called it motherhood and then got salty that I would reject it. 

I was so busy in my 20s thinking that life ended at 30 and now 40 has a gravitational pull that speeds my days along. But something marvelous and welcome, a discovery, has come to save me as the seasons somersault and time accelerates: 40 to 80 can be its own entire other world. All these years might have been preparation. 

A shedding of expectations. Privileged from early on to see every option, I’ve winnowed them down.

Preparing for me means letting go. Dismissing what rings false to my spirit. 

Sometimes too I see myself as mother to myself. Because even though I have two mothers, no one can really parent you better than you can. Correcting behaviors and thought processes I do not like in myself. Sharpening younger-ish Emma to be better for her middle and old age. 

And then 80 to 120 will be another matter entirely. The subject of an essay that I’ll tackle when I’m on the cusp of 79. 

All of this feels revelatory. All of this seems obvious. I am starting.