Ghost ship.
I’m usually pretty decisive.
Scratch that. I’m usually VERY decisive.
Hell. People come to me to help them make decisions. Somebody else might coach and ask lots of exploratory questions to help the seeker come to their own answer. Not me. I cut to the chase and lay out exactly what should be done. I’d like to think that I deliver my counsel with a sort of clear-sighted calm but others argue that it’s really just gracious bossiness. Either way, people keep coming back for more so my advice must be okay enough.
One might even argue that I’m good at making big life decisions. At least when it comes to others’ lives. But my own? That’s a whole ‘nother can of worms… I often find myself stuck because I’ve got one foot in one possibility and the other in another. If I had to diagnose myself, I’d say I suffer from a terminal case of FOMO. And the bigger the decision to be made, the worse it gets until I’m basically being sucked down into a peaty bog of indecisiveness.
Which is exactly how I felt about Nicolas before there was a Nicolas.
Not regretting it later is the reason I’ve done at least three-quarters of the best things in my life. — Dear Sugar #71
It wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby. It’s just that I wasn’t completely sure that I wanted one. Or, rather, I wasn’t sure that I was willing to wager that the life I’d get with a (possible) child would be even half as good as the life I had without one. But I also wasn’t sure that I’d be okay with getting to the end of my childbearing years and not at least trying…
It didn’t help that Joe was as much on the proverbial fence as I was. Looking back, I think there was a part of me that wanted him to have a stronger opinion so that I didn’t have to make a decision. But he didn’t feely strongly either way or at least not strongly enough to help influence my own decision. I was stuck, frustrated that I couldn’t just pawn off the monumental responsibility of deciding whether making a child was a thing we were going to do or not.
So I did what any reasonable woman of a certain age might do: I turned to an advice column.
I was reading Dear Sugar long before we knew that she was Cheryl Strayed. In fact, most of my best decisions in the last decade have come after reading a column that hit me right where it needed to. It didn’t really matter that Strayed had long retired her Dear Sugar pen by the time I was slipping into the baby-no-baby bog; she had already answered my question.
So, as any reasonable woman of a certain age might do after yet another circular conversation where the conception question had been discussed ad nauseam, I pulled out my copy of Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar and gave a tear-streaked dramatic reading of column #71.
Bless my husband for his patience. And bless Dear Sugar for the advice she had doled out to another would-be/wouldn’t-be parent.
After I had set down the book and wiped the snot from my nose, I decided (and Joe agreed) that not regretting not trying was worth the gamble of the potentially colossal upset to our status quo that a baby would bring.
I was pregnant six weeks later.
I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore. — Dear Sugar #71
The most surprising thing about motherhood is that almost as much as I love my son, I’ve been grieving the loss of the life that could have been.
Don’t get me wrong. There is nothing that will ever smell as good as his freshly bathed fuzzy head nuzzled up under my chin as I sing him a lullaby or two. Or feel as good as witnessing his first tentative and then a little fuller gummy smile. But there’s a part of me that wonders what my sister life would have been.
It’s hard not to be slightly jealous of the version of myself riding the ghost ship that didn’t carry me. She’s not being roused from sleep at two, four and again at six am by a 10- or maybe 11-pound-by-now overlord demanding to be fed. And she’s not the one who has frantically Googled at least every other day to figure out whether or not she’s doing right by the organic Rubik’s Cube in her arms. She hasn’t debated if the smell of slightly soured milk is coming from her shirt or her hair — the former being an easy fix and the later requiring the calculus of choosing between a shower and a nap.
It’s easy enough to imagine the beautiful and important and not mine life that I’m not living right now. To picture all the books to be read, things to be learned, art to be made and words to be written during this “great pause” we find ourselves in.
But maybe it’s the great pause itself shining a light on the feelings that I feel guilty for having. The loss of would-have-beens hangs thick in the air and I wonder if it’s easier for my own grief to become electrostatically charged. Does the communal sadness compound my own?
And how do you salute from the shore when you’re not yet sure how to fully unmoor the ship that didn’t carry you?
