I picture you: an alien with my scowl on your face.
A foreign invader come to take my body, my life; I will not give it freely.
There were rumours of course; war and rumours of war, isn’t that what the Book says? No Horsemen but puppies, marriage, mortgage. “We did a thing!”
We saw you coming but you were still hazy and unformed. No threat to our slow mornings, our fast nights. Not yet.
When the war came, we broke ranks gradually. First the outliers: friends of friends, colleagues, cousins—far enough away to think the conflict wouldn’t reach us here. But then the tide turned, and the blood and the cries drew close, and women I knew—women I loved—were falling, putting armed careers down. Hands in the air.
Our sacred temple—host to pain and pleasure, virtue and sin—left for others to inhabit and perhaps to destroy. I will defend it until the last.
| Fruit cake to rise in price. The Nelson Mail.
My mother left high school when she was 15.
In early 1970s small-town New Zealand, the four paths available to a farmer’s daughter were secretary, teacher, nurse, or wife. None of these placed a premium on academic application—the moulding of fine young minds. Perhaps that was reserved for young men of means.
Mum describes her early academic exit as a result of being “too thick for school,” yet she is one of the most avid readers I have ever met. I wonder sometimes what literary career may have awaited her if she’d believed in herself more. If she had someone who believed in her.
But that’s not how the story goes. This is:
She enrols in nursing, then drops out to follow her boyfriend to Australia; there is no policing for the fifth of seven children.
They live in a house on stilts in Brisbane; brown snakes coil around the posts; her fair skin is baked golden brown by the sun.
They move again—this time to Auckland; friends encourage them to join their local Evangelical church.
It’s the cusp of a new decade; excess and abundance is everywhere; not cocaine, but divine purpose; it’s intoxicating.
They marry and the Lord blesses them with two children.
The shine of the church fades; the abundance that was promised does not appear.
They move again, and again; he taking whatever work he can find, she at home with the children; there are no gods here.
A surprise arrival.
For the first eight years of my life, motherhood was her only job. She has always maintained that she loved it and it’s the job she’s best at. And, while she’s dabbled in other careers since, it’s the one she returns to again and again. Nanny. Grandmother.
One of my earliest memories: sitting by the old Aga wood stove as she reads The Hobbit aloud. The morning fire casts a warm glow, like a dragon, like treasure.
Or this: she makes after-school pancakes topped with banana, syrup and cream. Not the lumpy, shaker bottle kind but from scratch, sifting the flour into the batter with careful precision.
Or this: we take a selfie together on graduation day. My trencher is crooked; I am the first in my family to wear one. We look happy.
| How to help your child navigate risks outdoors. The New Zealand Herald.
When I think of my mother, I think of her fear.
I am the youngest of three children: the baby. While for some, this role signals a carefree disposition—freedom won through sibling trial and error—for me it was the opposite. My walls felt closer and higher than those of my siblings.
It is there in every memory, even the happy ones. Be careful. Watch out.
It stretches out towards me beyond straight white teeth, always hungry.
Appetiser:
She is afraid I will fall. I do fall, radial bone poking up towards the sun.
Others wear their cast as a badge of honour. For me it’s a brand of shame: my small, weak body is as fragile as she expects.
Main:
I am invited to my first sleepover. Movies, popcorn, lip gloss. My parents refuse.
“We don’t know them,” Mum reminds me. “They could be axe murderers.” I am chastened in my father’s presence, but when he’s gone, when it’s just me and her, I unleash fury.
“You’re a bitch. I HATE you!”
For each of us, a bitter comfort: Her, the gates that keep danger out; me, the tantalising glimpses I see between the bars.
Dessert:
Teenage hormones have taken me over, and I am a broken hydrant spewing tears of rage and confusion and despair. I see her fear again.
I think about how we feel love versus how we show it, and how these can be different.
I think about how we show love versus how we show fear, and how these can be the same.
I think about how my mother wanted the world for me, even when she was afraid of what it might hold.
| Friday Five: Fun facts about the Bucket Fountain. Wellington City Council.
Its bloom was late but swift. Like a dormant volcano awakening, it swept through my limbs, my stomach a roiling epicentre of pain.
I had little warning of its eruptions. Its wrath could last for hours, days, and in my delirium I would bargain with whatever divine forces would listen: Take it away—I don’t want it.
I would vomit. I would pass out. I once did both in the middle of Cuba Street, a fallen angel slumped under the colourful pails of the Bucket Fountain. Elijah Wood once urinated in that fountain. I wonder whose was the worse transgression.
Aside from pointing out the Libra pads in our bathroom cupboard, my mother never spoke with me about what I was going through. Never used the word period if she could help it, like it was a bad word. A curse.
Still, she took me to the doctor when it was clear over-the-counter painkillers were doing little to help, the burns from the hot water bottle forming blisters over my stomach.
I remember the GP poking my abdomen.
“Not endo,” they said. “Try two ibuprofen every four hours.”
It never occurred to me or my mother to get a second opinion. We accepted as fact what that cursory prod conveyed.
3 Fun Facts About Female Pain:
I don’t know if those adolescent tempests impacted my childbearing ability. The arches of these halls are untested hosts. But I have wondered how this hostility might play out in pregnancy.
Whether it might once again awaken what lies sleeping, a lazy golden eye opening as the invisible thief steals in.
| Coronavirus: Strict new curbs on life in UK announced by PM. BBC News.
If I fall pregnant tomorrow, it will be classed as a geriatric pregnancy.
While my 34-and-a-half-year-old body still feels new to me—barring the frown lines on my forehead, earned from years of overthinking—my womb’s fertile days are numbered.
I figure I have five years in which I can bear offspring without adverse risk to their or my health. It’s a time period that once felt significant (five year olds; five year plans) and yet is now approaching the distance in time to the start of the pandemic.
Like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, I am still stuck there, trying to figure out the meaning of it.
March 2020:
My partner and I start having conversations about children when I turn 30 during the first UK lockdown. We’ve been living there for five months at this point; we are an Antipodean cliché.
I’d never thought seriously about it before, beyond the ‘one or two might be nice; you?’ screeners of early dating. Suddenly my childbearing window feels imminent.
Suddenly ‘one day’ feels like now.
Things I’ve said while experiencing pandemic-induced existential dread:
November 2022:
The hot rush of urgency cools following that initial panic but it is never far from my mind. It’s the reason my partner and I return to Melbourne—his home and my adopted one—despite having several more years on our UK visas.
“Might be nice to be closer to family if we want to ...” we reason.
September 2024:
We no longer speak in theoreticals but practicalities. He is the accountant, finding room in the budget. I am the project manager focused on timelines and delivery. In this, we are play-acting grownups.
A sample of our script:
The PROJECT MANAGER and the ACCOUNTANT are huddled around a laptop.
PROJECT MANAGER
(intently)
If we try to conceive around November then we’d have a child
by next September. But then before that we’d need a bigger house,
ideally one we own—
The accountant interjects with a breakdown of mortgages and borrowing power.
PROJECT MANAGER
(speaking more quickly)
Then if we decide to have a second child, I’d want to factor in a
minimum of one year between giving birth and trying again, so...
The project manager pauses, mind in a Gantt chart.
PROJECT MANAGER (CONT’D)
Working backwards from a maximum age of 40, I should get
pregnant by ... last year.
Both actors break the fourth wall and look knowingly at the camera. A canned
audience laughter track plays.
I am all too aware these roles represent a very real divide in our parenting responsibilities: he as breadwinner, me as carer. No matter what vows we make, it is not a burden we will share equally.
As the person in the relationship with a womb, it is my body that will be held hostage. My career and finances that are more likely to suffer. Statistically, it is me that will take on the greater mental load.
In my rush to catch the sand in my biological hourglass, I am not sure if I have truly weighed the benefits and the costs. I am not sure if it is possible to.
Mother. I will be viewed by society as a mother first and a person second. I will never shed the label. I can never quit the job.
I have no precedent for the situation I find myself in. I draw tables, seeking answers.
| Women in my family |
No. of children |
Age at first birth |
Age at final birth |
|
Grandmother |
7 |
22 |
33 |
|
Mother |
3 |
23 |
31 |
|
Sister |
2 |
24 |
27 |
|
Me |
|
|
|
I find none.
| Meet the queen of the ‘trad wives’ (and her eight children). The Times.
My grandmother was born in 1927. We are separated by 63 years and unfathomable divides.
Like my mother, she was a farmer’s daughter. They farmed sheep for meat and wool, cows for milk, and crops of whatever would grow in the small West Coast town of Maruia.
She left school young. This had origins in pragmatism rather than belief about a woman’s place: there were no high schools nearby. Boarding school was a luxury under the economic depression of World War II.
She met my grandfather when she was 14 and he was a strapping James Dean lookalike of 17 working for her father. When they married six years later, their life was characterised by labour. Hard, long hours on the farm. Seven children. No Uber Eats.
I wonder if she ever wanted more for herself or if dreaming, too, was a luxury.
When my grandmother was 34, John F. Kennedy was president, humanity was in a race to the moon, and the German Democratic Republic had just come up with a great idea for a wall. Here in Australia, colour TV was still over a decade away. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were not yet counted as Australians. Victoria’s Pentridge Prison was meting out death by the noose.
The world she lived in was fundamentally different.
And yet.
It’s last year. I meet a woman at a work event; small talk ensues. I tell her my partner and I have just got a puppy. I show her a photo.
"Ah," she smiles. "A starter baby! Congratulations."
As a woman, my measure of success—my default mode—is still frozen somewhere in the mid-20th century. Tied irrevocably to the domestic. Not to the labour I give my career—which I have birthed and reared with care—but to labour of a different kind.
I am a millennial raised under the dying sun of capitalism. I’ve been taught from a young age that under its warmth I can be anything. My life has been carved on the bland white walls of corporate hallways, the beer-sticky carpets of foreign cities. It is imperfect, but it is mine.
And yet.
Puppies. Marriage. Mortgage. Mother.
I hear my critics now, for their voice and my mother’s are one and the same.
The job I’m best at.
I think of other jobs I could be best at.
I think if I had been born a boy, those voices might sound different.
I think if I have a daughter, I will want the world for her—but more than that, I want a world in which she can want more for herself.
I think if I have a son, I will not have to want that for him.
| Should I Be a Mom, or Should I Stay a ‘Brat’? The Cut.
Here’s how another story goes:
She has the career she’s wanted since she was six years old: like a dragon, like treasure.
This is a family: Her and him.
This is too: New friends, old friends, nephews, nieces.
This is her world: Write, travel, eat, sleep, read, garden, wine, fashion, have-you-seen-the-latest, I-got-a-last-minute, oh-thanks-it’s-new, I-had-this-crazy-idea.
This is the world: On fire.
You will be smart. There’s no getting around it—your parents are nerds.
You’ll be funny, too, and kind, though it is your thinking face I will love the most.
I will hoist you up on my shoulders long after you are too heavy to hold, both because I need you close and because I want you to see the world from up there.
My fears for you will be different than those of my mother.
I will overcorrect with my openness, and you will call me an oversharer for it, call me ‘cringe, fr’ or whatever the kids in your generation are calling it. Probably some other stupid acronym that you don’t capitalise, because unlike me, you never took grammar classes. For real.
I will have other fears. Fears that make me want to wrap you in cotton wool long after you are your own person.
I will do my best. And one day you may forgive me for it.
What will be the terms of my surrender?
Will it be the siege of time that forces my walls down?
Will I keep fighting, journey to uncharted lands and see what awaits childless women?
Or will it be a scowl in a face like mine that stays my hand?
Will I lay down my sword for you?