When you’re a single or simply childless woman, something starts to happen in your late 30s and early 40s that is uniquely painful and absurd at the same time: people act as if you forgot to have children. A puzzled look comes over their faces when they ask whether you’re married and increasingly, what with their open-minded acceptance that women can choose to have babies without partners, they skip that part of the question and get right to the point.
“You don’t have any children?”
“No, I don’t,” I’d say back then. I’m now 52, but I still remember how I would open my eyes just a little bit wider, head tilted to the right with a slight smile to make them feel better and encourage the next question about something else, all the while thinking about how I really wanted to respond.
“No, I don’t … you know, somehow I forgot to have kids. Last month I was late paying rent, and just last night after my second martini, I forgot my favorite beaded handbag in a taxi. Silly me, I forget things ALL of the time!”
But I didn’t forget to have children. The truth is that it breaks my heart a little bit every day that I didn’t have children and that I will never know that kind of love, a love I’ve always recognized as something powerful and pure, even if so, so complicated.
Sometimes when I’m alone in my kitchen, I still think about making oatmeal with blueberries for the little girl named Henry Cameron Gormley who never even came close to existing. I’d dreamt of naming a little girl after Grandpa Cameron since college. I wanted a girl named “Henry” and a boy named “Brooks” after Grandma Cameron’s father, Brooks Moore. After I met my best friend Brooks in college, we often joked about who would get to proactively “claim” that name as young women often do, choosing baby names well before choosing the realities of motherhood.
Throughout my 20s, I thought about those names and assumed I would have children the same way my mother did: I’d meet the right guy and get married and have babies, because nothing mattered more than family. I knew this — and I felt it — and on some level, all of the work, and the jobs, and the ladder-climbing were supposed to lead me to the place where children, and a family of my own, came into the picture.
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But that never happened.
What happened to me is what happens to so many women: I woke up and realized the window for me to have children was closing, which I eventually realized actually meant the window for the way I imagined having children was closing. When I was 37, I met with my doctor and talked about IVF, about going it alone and getting a sperm donor. I fast forwarded to an image of this person I would create, who would at least be half of me, and therefore one-quarter Cameron and one-quarter Gormley, and I convinced myself that I might like that I wouldn’t have to share any part of her beautiful name with a partner or husband.
Henry Cameron Gormley. I could see her blue eyes and imagined her tiny fingers wrapped around mine. I imagined our fights when she was a teenager, how she might hate me because she didn’t know her father, how we would have to work through those realities together. She wouldn’t be the only one with a single mom if we stayed in NYC, and then, and when we visited the family farm and she met Mom and Dad, and my siblings Jane and Joe, and all of the Cameron cousins it would all begin to make sense to her. My little girl would know she was loved and how much she belonged in our family.
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I was thoughtful when considering whether I could make single motherhood work. I knew I could make enough money to support both of us and pay the nannies and the school and make the calls home from the work trips overseas and push down the single-mother guilt I anticipated with exercise, therapy and girls’ nights out. Objectively, I knew I could be a mom if my body and science cooperated. I’d already spent years imagining this approach in a hypothetical sense.
But after the appointment with my doctor when I learned it was physically possible, I wanted to slow down to focus on what was driving my desire to have a baby. I spent more than five more months — months that matter in the grueling IVF cycles — pushing myself to dig deep and understand why I really wanted to have a child on my own. I felt as if I had to be more certain about this decision than any other decision in my life. I had to be really clear about what was going on in my own life before I decided to create a new one.
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And what I realized after all of those months was that having a baby on my own was not what I really wanted. What I really wanted was to have a baby with somebody. And not just somebody … somebody I loved and somebody who loved me and wanted to create another human being with me.
The potential reality of him, this partner, this person I didn’t yet know, was so distant, so elusive that I knew what the right decision was for me at the time. I felt in my core that the question wasn’t whether I could have a baby on my own, and it wasn’t even really whether I should. It was whether I wanted to — and why I didn’t want to — for me.
It turns out that I wanted to feel worthy of love more than I wanted a child.
My realization surprised me, disappointed me even. This clarity occurred on a Thursday night when I was sitting on my terrace in Chelsea, drinking a glass of Cabernet by myself and watching the sun set over the Hudson River.
I kept reciting a poem I’d memorized in my head:
White Towels – Richard Jones
I have been studying the difference
between solitude and loneliness,
telling the story of my life
to the clean white towels taken warm from the dryer.
I carry them through the house
as though they were my children asleep in my arms.
I thought about how sadly prescient I may have been. I cried about what wasn’t going to be and cried because I felt so alone. I’d been trying to outrun my loneliness with success and the endless pursuit of gold stars my entire adult life. I was convinced that my self-worth was something I had to earn by doing rather than being, and making this decision forced me to begin to face this truth. I made my difficult choice by taking a hard look at my life and being brutally honest without relying on any external validation.
So in that moment, even though I was sad, I also felt truly proud of myself for the first time in a long time. Because somewhere deep inside my emotional self — a place I was typically afraid to visit — I know that I was strong. And in that moment, I started to understand that I could untangle hard things. In no small way, the decision not to become a mother was the first step in eventually believing that I’m a person who is worthy of love, and that’s something I’m thankful for every day, even on Mother’s Day. Especially on Mother’s Day.
The Order of Things: A Memoir About Chasing Joy by Sarah Gormley is on sale now, wherever books are sold.
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