We women can be alone and not having children

I am thirty-five years old and I have no children: I do not reject the idea of motherhood, nor have I made a decision not to have children, as other pregnant people do. Having children is something that just didn’t happen in my life.

Other things did happen: I have had and still have friendships that changed my life forever, friends who are like sisters, even at a distance; I found Yoga practice, that brings indescribable beauty to my life; I lived in different cities; and recently I emigrated from Argentina. Non-motherhood is simply a livable life, just as motherhood is a livable life.

When I think about these things it strikes me that it is very difficult to name them in the affirmative: not having children, is thought of as an impossibility, as the negative counterpart of a full life, in which there is a partner (heterosexual if possible) and children. Having a partner at any cost, since sustaining a bond does not necessarily imply that it is healthy and brings happiness.

During a break at work some time ago, I heard a woman say that she had hosted in her home for a while a friend who had a violent husband: the man locked her in the flat and wouldn’t let her out. She had managed to escape. And after a few weeks, the woman telling the story convinced the female victim of violence to reconcile with her ex-partner. “Think about your future. What are you going to be doing alone in a few years’ time? Go back to him”.

Our culture is afraid of loneliness (what will you do with so much time for yourself?). The seed of romantic love is deeply implanted in us. Solitude is synonymous with lack. There are a lot of things you can do. You can travel. You can develop the artistic discipline you like the most. You can read, watch films, visit friends, do sport. You can meditate, enjoy the quiet hours without needing them to be “productive” hours.

When I started planning my trip to Australia, where I live, and I wanted to talk about it in English with other people, I came across the expression “by myself”; which might seem very common but in Spanish, my mother tongue, has no literal translation. At that time I liked to think that I was travelling by myself and doing things for myself, much more than defining myself as “alone”. By myself: from me, to me, for me.

“Barren life is not a misfortune: it is a fabulous desert that is not shared, a place of violet sunsets and hot winds, solitary and free”, says Mariana Enríquez, Argentinean writer and journalist. Expectations only lead to frustration; freeing life from expectations about what should and should not be allows for more relaxation and less pressure. Taking the possibilities that the present offers rather than lamenting what is not. Deconstructing ideas around assigned and chosen gender (some cis people also choose our gender) helps to take more lightly the things that are taken for granted for us.