there is a universe in which i am a mother

but is it this one?

Note: This post is me grappling with motherhood as an identity and a possibility. If you’re not in the mood to wade into this topic, maybe skip this one. Or just read the parts about space. xo

This is the year I become obsessed with motherhood. I have never been pregnant, have never known if it is something I desire. The not-knowing feels less like a question, more like a void – an endless space on which to project my hopes and deficiencies, my most creative worries. Amid that conjuring I’m visited by regret, by loneliness, by loss. By the lives I will not lead. In November I’ll be 35, my mother’s age when she had me. At 35, I’m only just becoming myself. I’m not ready to become someone new. 

This is the month I return to Hawai’i – for good this time, or so I think. Here I am gauzed by layers of memory, of familiarity. Here I am swaddled by the ordinary miracle of child-rearing. In New York I could not imagine the imposition of a child on my freedom. I could not imagine lugging a stroller onto a crowded train. And I could not imagine morphing into a shape that held Mother. But even in Honolulu – on beaches carpeted with infants, among friends’ swelling bellies, in between bouncy-castle birthday parties – that shape eludes me. I look at my body, with its straight lines and narrow hips. It does not feel like it could easily bear a child. 

I think of my mother and her mother and the mothers beyond that. About the memories we pass down, about the fears we inherit. I’m reminded of Anne Carson in Glass, Irony and God:  

“You remember too much,” my mother said to me recently. “Why hold onto all that?” 

And I said, “Where can I put it down?” 

I’m convinced, maybe naively, that I must offload this weight before becoming a parent. That I must be healed. “I don’t know if I want to be a mother,” my friend said the other day, “or if I want to be mothered.” There is still so much mothering I crave. 

💮

In the peak of this past summer, on one of its longest, gooiest days, I scrolled through facts about space. “Almost all sun-like stars are created with a counterpart,” I read, “including the one in this solar system. The sun’s theoretical sibling, known as Nemesis, most likely drifted away millions of years ago.” 

Nemesis. I had never thought about the word’s etymology, or why it describes an inescapable enemy. It derives from the Greek nemein: “to give what is due.” In myth, Nemesis is the goddess of retribution, doling out punishment for human hubris.

The star Nemesis was named by scientists in the 1980s. They proposed that our sun’s companion might drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth. But their theory was never proven, and to this day, the sun’s twin remains undetected. Even without evidence, the idea resonates – two cosmic bodies, forged from the same event, fatefully linked.

The concept of a second self both soothes and troubles me. It’s a gesture toward infinite possibility and the endless void. It also affirms the dull ache I’ve had since childhood – an ache for the other half of an unknown whole. My mind hovers over the word enough, convinced I am incomplete.

That feeling was most potent a decade ago, when I read The Bell Jar and underlined too many of its passages.¹ Like the narrator, I stood frozen before a fig tree burdened with ripe fruit, unable to choose. At 25, I already felt too young and too old, my life too limited. I desired too many disparate things. Since then, I’ve made decisions that once daunted me. I’ve crawled toward what I believe is my real self, real desires, real home. But the question of motherhood pulls me back before the fig tree, unable to choose.

I try to find solace in words, but the books about motherhood are all philosophical argument and academic rigor, meditations on where the self ends and another begins. I’m not pulled by logic and theory. I want to think of motherhood as a kind of fate. I know that belief may be overly simplistic, perhaps even harmful – yet I’m reassured by the idea that something so large, so timeline-shifting, is out of my hands. 

I long for someone to tell me which timeline to choose, which threshold to cross.

I know there is a universe in which I am a mother. But is it this one?

If there are two selves out there, which one am I?

˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗ˏˋ ★ ˎˊ˗

1

yes, The Bell Jar again, I know! sue me 🤠