From my sofa I have a great view out of the living room window on to the street where I live. It’s a high street in a small village and I live opposite one of the local hubs – the village hall. I often glance up from ‘working’ (browsing the internet) to people watch and see locals passing by, some going to yoga, art classes, or village meetings. I admit that sometimes jealousy does pass through me, not in a stalker mentally unstable way but in a wondering why I don’t have the seemingly normal life that others appear to i.e. married with kids. It’s a sort of, ‘oh’ moment, like when you went back to school after the holidays with a new six compartment folding pencilcase only to discover the most popular girl has the new farah fawcett hair flick. You look down at your pencilcase and hide it away at the back of your desk; that night go home and tell your parents you need them to take you to the hairdresser and soon. But they reply that won’t be happening for another three months because the trim your mum did at the kitchen table looks perfectly fine and they’ve just forked out for a jolly expensive, and in their eyes, totally unnecessary pencil case.
As an adult I covet my single life but it’s sometimes hard to talk about the latest workshop or museum I went to, with someone with farah fawcett hair. Because they then wistfully reply they wish they had more time, money and / or energy to go to museums as their beautiful enviable hairstyle come in the form of offspring.
As I look out of my window, I sometimes wonder what it’s like to live in their world and find it odd that after thirty years thinking that next year I would meet someone and be part of that world, reality sets in. The last few years I’ve searched my soul and my options to becoming a parent and decided on adoption. This is not done without regret or grief; most of us spend our childhoods assuming we will meet our prince, live in a castle and be blessed with children. As an adult I wish fairytales had not been so Disneyfied and still served as stories with morals to make children think and learn from human mistakes. ‘Don’t trust strangers who happen to look like wolves’ or ‘just because you treat others as you would hope to be treated, does not automatically reward you with a Prince and a castle’. This Christmas I went to see a theatre production of The Little Mermaid, which luckily hadn’t had the Hollywood treatment. Halfway through the show, some characters came in to the audience and asked the children if they wanted to come to the ball and meet a prince. Several children enthusaistically accepted the invitation, until one little girl replied, ‘no thankyou, I don’t like Princes’. I would like to meet that girl’s parents and congratulate them.
At 41, I am at one with reality and do not expect a millionaire to knock on my door and propose. But I do still have hopes that one day I might meet my life partner, with his own sets of flaws and share our lives together. This hope that most of us have is out of kilter with my life timing and is going to have to wait until I become a parent. I met someone a few months ago as I’d barely started the adoption process and it looks likely to be around a year until I get through it and am hopefully a parent. I foolishly thought I could start down both paths and see where they took me but the pressure of both played off on eachother and the brief relationship faltered. Having spent so long looking in to all viable options to become a mum and at last reach my decision, I felt like the rug was pulled out from under me to be thinking about becoming parents with someone else and to have all options suddenly back on the table. This all played in to my emotional wellbeing and made me more insecure about this new relationship and his character flaws. When it finished, it was sad but I also felt relief that I was back on the path I had long considered but it brings back the mild grief of not having my own DNA continued.
On my sofa, to the right of my view of the world is a table with family photos on. My mum as a toddler with the family dog, my mum older with her mum and step dad, and two photos of my great great granny, Kit. I look at these photos and wonder what these previous generations would have thought of my decision to adopt. As a teen, my parents divorced (after years of thick atmospheres this was a relief) and I decided not to make the same mistakes, in that black and white way that children see the world, it was as simple as making my mind up.
My mum had met my dad when she wasn’t very confident and quite young in some ways, as they grew older together her confidence grew and she became the woman she is now. Taking their love out of the equation and my dad being older than her, he could grow no more and adaptability was not an option for him. As a teen, I decided to not marry anyone until I was completely grown up and confident in myself and knew myself inside and out. As I got older and relationships failed because I subconsciously chose men like my father, who did not know themselves inside out. Now, having grown up and realised we are probably less confident as adults than as kids and having seen so many therapists to sort out my subconscious, I’m as good as I get … for now, and I have flaws that I’m continually working on come as part of my package.
Looking at these photos as my maternal family history, my parent’s marriage may have lasted for 18 years but the man she refers to as the ‘love of her life’ is my stepdad, they probably were better suited but only had 8 years together before he got cancer and died. My mum was a child the result of a wartime affair, she only met her real dad twice as a teen and grew up with a step dad whom she was never hugely close to. I once asked my granny if this man I called Gaga and loved as my grandpa, was the love of her life, ‘no’ she’d replied. I always found it sad that she’d not had an easy childhood, had fallen pregnant with her first boyfriend so her mum insisted they get married. After a swift wedding, my gran lost the baby and realised she never loved her husband. He went off to fight the second world war and as more and more friends and family were killed, she said there was a sense that this country would not survive and so people grasped each day they had. At 20 years old, with her husband away, she went to a New Year’s dance and was wooed by my biological grandpa, Brian. Granny quickly became pregnant with my mum so her mother insisted she divorce her hubby and marry Brian instead. Luckily she soon realised Brian and she were not compatible and refused to marry him so she was chucked out of her parents’ home and sent to live with my great aunt. She went on to marry my Gaga when my mum was eight but he was not the easiest of men nor the love of her life.
Going back a generation and to where I have no photos on display is my great gran. The photos remain in albums and much as I loved her as a child, particularly as I was always given smarties or ice cream by her, she died when I was 8; she was an incredibly difficult woman for everyone else. Her husband, my granny’s father, was a lovely man but sadly an alcoholic who died when the children were young. My granny and her brother mourned their father but their mother became more hard hearted and didn’t spend much time as a widow before marrying her second husband who was simply a ‘yes-man’ and pretty hands off with the children.
Lastly on my sofa table is my great great grandmother, Kit, in two photos, one as a child and one as a widow (are you sensing a theme here…?). Kit fell in love and happily married her husband but he was sent away to fight the Boer war. Two weeks after the war ended, he came home and died of yellow fever; leaving her with 6 children and no widow’s pension so the eldest of the children and Kit had to go out to work.
And there the story ends, no one knows much of what went on with the family pre 20th century and knowing that four generations of your family could not achieve a happy and long lasting marriage is somewhat offputting. My generation are so lucky to have such a plethora of options, we don’t have to marry the first man we fall for, nor do we have to get pregnant by him, or stay in an unhappy relationship. If my maternal predecessors were here now I wonder what they’d say, what advice they’d give. Some married because they fell pregnant, some may have married because they wanted to get pregnant, and all my life I wanted to break the mould and have a long and happy marriage. Really, I’m the lucky one to have such choice, despite no partner by my side, I chose not to settle for the first man who came along, nor the wrong men who have come along since. I could have chosen to reproduce my genes using IVF or surrogacy but those weren’t the right paths for me. Even though I’m sad I won’t bend down and kiss my child and see my own small hands replicated or my mum’s paternal nose, or my granny’s cracking pair of legs. Nor will I see my inherited bingo wings nor worry they’d get our genetic diseases.
And with a new start and a new set of genes becoming my family, I know that if there are any annoying character flaws that come out of my children, I won’t secretly blame my partner and think it’s come from his side of the family as some of my friends do.. Nor will I blame myself or my obviously brilliant parenting, I will happily blame their unknown genetics, continue to believe I am a perfect person with very minor flaws and live in my version of reality.
Mid Life Life 