Wednesday
I’m upbeat today. It’s good to have a blog, to enjoy writing, to be able to be completely immersed in ones thoughts. It’s a luxury being unemployed currently affords me. It’s also given me time to think and examine what my options are now and to make a five year plan.
I have decided I’m never going to work for anybody again. I have an idea for not one but two businesses. My financial goals have always been modest. I’m not into showy displays of one’s means of support. I neither want nor do I need a lot of things. I have always lived quite modestly and that has always been my saving grace. It’s what gets me through the rough times, so neither of these ventures will catapult me into six figures. But I believe I will be able to support myself, indulge my favorite pastime (movie going), travel a bit and attain a goal I have fantasized about since I was ten years old. I want to get a dog.
I love English bulldogs! I love their droopy-eyed charm and their jowly jaws, their stout figures and their lap dog like temperament. I really want two. I already have their names picked out for them: Mulder and Scully. I imagine myself calling “Mulder! Mulder” the way Scully always did on The X-Files. Before it went bad, that show was so good.
The writing was excellent. I especially loved the attention to word choice and vocabulary, the banter between Mulder and Scully and the way their professional relationship developed. They just had a great working relationship. They trusted each other, relied on each other, respected each other, supported each other and tolerated each other’s shortcomings. They could disagree without ever being disagreeable. I enjoyed these two characters enormously. I wasn’t sad when the show went off the air, though. The last three years of the show, I think even Mulder and Scully would agree, were pretty not good.
When my son was six, he begged me for a bulldog. At the time we had two cats, I was into Weimaraners then, and it was also an obligation I was financially unable and unwilling to take on. My boy never got a dog. No bull.
These mental meanderings about boys and bulldogs makes me reflect on a certain April Baby who wrote about her worries and her fears and her trepidation anticipating the approach of her fortieth birthday. I wonder how much of this angst was prompted by the fact that she is unmarried and childless.
At my last assignment, a couple of the ladies there were what was once characterized as “spinster” women. In the South, they used to call them “Old Settler”* women– Women who had “no man, no milk, an’ no money, ” hence the expression “Dried up ole…”
Many women are childless by choice. Many are single by choice. Many women are single and childless by choice. Given the fact that choice is inherent in everything and there are exceptions to every rule, I am not talking about these women– the Exceptions. No, I’m talking about the rest of us. Not everything that happens in life is calculated or choice. It’s not my choice to be single now and it was not my choice then to become a single parent. But when life landed like an airplane on the runway of my life, I got in the pilot’s seat just like so many others like me. Sometimes you gotta walk and don’t look back. The Rule.
Rearing my son and keeping body and soul together completely preoccupied my life. I didn’t date. I didn’t put myself out there even to get considered. The “quest” in no way engrossed my thinking or absorbed my thoughts. I have no regrets. Not one. I loved being a mom.
I never felt bored, or deprived, or isolated, or unfulfilled. I never felt the job was anti-intellectual. I didn’t walk around looking overwhelmed and beleaguered like stay-at-home mom Janey Stedman in thirtysomething**. I didn’t experience “juggling” work and home as hard. Yes, certainly there were difficult times, but parenting my son was not the problem– Providing for him was. My son reflects fondly on his childhood in spite (or because of) our circumstances. For me, that’s a relief and a reward.
“If you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do well matters very much.” Jacqueline Kennedy | 1961
One of the single/childless, over 40, not-by-choice ladies I mentioned earlier said to me it’s better not to have children. The remark came without context and out of the blue. She’s also a self-described cat woman ( they are her “babies”), rattling about in her tiny studio, with no cable, no TV and no Internet. Just two cats.
Is it better to be childless than to be a parent? Does the apple taste sweeter than the orange? Is the orchid more beautiful than the rose? It’s good to be resigned I guess. But you know, there’s a reason these women are living the “not-by-choice” lives they live. They seem very intolerant and have a low threshold (or no threshold at all) for any disturbing “disruptions” like people talking. They frown and smolder and chafe and sulk around joy, spontaneity and the spirit of fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Different strokes… But these behaviors tend to repel people they most want to attract. And what a difficult environment for a child that would be. Sometimes things don’t happen for a reason.
So April Baby, if yer lissnin’, don’t become bitter, resigned, resentful and disagreeable. Life has landed like an airplane on the runway of your life like it’s been doing to countless others since time and memorium. Get in the pilot’s seat. Grab the controls. Walk. And don’t look back.
(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back Peter Tosh and Mick Jagger/1978
*Old Settler | 2001 | 
What Jackie Taught Us | Tina Santi Flaherty | 2005
