I have continued to ponder the Definitely Unwanted Attention of recent months, and have developed a theory.
When I had a baby in my teens, the choice was well within the norm of my hometown, family, and age. In those days and that place, it was merely incidental to the rest of my life and not a hindrance to dating or whatever.
But rather than staying home, I marched off to college, where I was certainly the first in my class to procreate. During the entirety of my university career at a state university, I reckon there were perhaps a half dozen students who kept their babies while staying in school.
In fact, I can name them all and know where most ended up. Four thousand or so young people on a campus with a deserved reputation for rebellion, drug abuse, and promiscuity should surely have produced more infants. The fact they did not I attribute to the indisputable fact my classmates were almost entirely middle-class.
To the extent that working class locals like me were considered affirmative action admissions.
Who knows what the other young parents experienced – we never talked about it – but I found being a mother in that environment quite difficult. I’ve written enough about the academic side and I’m not going into that now. What I have been contemplating lately is the fact that even those people who obviously wanted to date me could not deal with the fact that I had a kid. Including the one I later married.
This is not interesting or even remarkable – the sort of youngster who chooses that college is not trawling around looking for responsibilities. Even the people with children struggled at times to reconcile the loss of freedom.
I have clear memories of certain people openly expressing their disgust or dismay. I know and could provide a tally of all the social events I was excluded from, all the opportunities that were missed, and all of the people who annoyed me in the process. Some are famous now, many are friends: but they were cruelly dismissive back then.
If I am being completely honest, I knew that mentioning my kid would shut down a flirtation, and I did so with glee. At the time, that made sense. I was too busy stomping around enforcing unpopular civil rights laws and taking care of my child. But gee, in retrospect: how sad.
During the years when people are theoretically figuring out all of the courtship stuff, I was not just oblivious but entirely cut off. Because of my background, my injuries, and my parenting status, I was a grown-up when my peers were all merely independent.
Byron admits that he lusted after me from our first meeting. But he resisted making a move because he did not think he was mature enough to date a mother. Since I have a clinical interest in such manners I asked him to describe me at age twenty. He replied You looked about twelve years old, you had the spectacles of a 1930’s intellectual, and you wore blazers. You were fierce and frightening!
Frightening, because I was so serious. Frightening, because my life in that raw incarnation was about blood and birth and death. Frightening, because I put my child and my career before all other relationships – and had already ditched one husband to support the claim.
None of this bothered me at the time; I was too busy to deal with the games preoccupying my peers. My tender sweet side was available only to my daughter: I was not interested in romance, I was playing patty-cake!
I was still a distraught, raggedy teenager when I realized I was pregnant, and from that day until I was thirty it was rare to find me without anywhere between two and two dozen children swarming around my person. I gravitated toward other marginalized parents, ran a parenting magazine, unschooled my kid, or sometimes begrudgingly helped run proper schools. My whole life revolved around raising children.
I didn’t want to know if anyone thought that was sexy, and I still don’t. Ditto the scars. I’ve only learned to accept compliments when they make sense, not when they are nauseating. Though I digress. I am mostly the same in appearance, attitude, and behavior. I am still wearing the spectacles and strangely formal yet perpetually wrong clothes, still pontificating with exasperated urgency about history, politics, and public policy, to the detrimental exclusion of idle chat.
Most everyone except babies, abused dogs, and bouncers find me frightening, at least upon first introduction. What is the big difference between then and now? Mainly, my age. My theory, to be simplistic, is that the people I knew before my thirties were afraid to approach partly because of the disease, partly because I was a parent, and in an overall sense because I was autonomous and self-sufficient. None of these are signature traits of youth.
Now that I am in a new age bracket, I am meeting people who may or may not have children of their own, but who know lots of people who have made that choice. They have had a chance to acquire diverse life experiences, including for most at least one serious injury or illness (even if it is just a bad back). They have lost friends and family, and know that they will lose more.
Nowadays when I mention the fact that I am a mother, or the cancer thing comes up, people just look interested instead of recoiling in shock. Is it possible, I wonder, that I have finally arrived in a period of my life where all the things that once made me peculiar are simply normal and appropriate?