“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Several years back, I stumbled across a Dear Sugar (later revealed to be Cheryl Strayed) advice column that resonated with me so deeply that I’ve continued to revisit it on a semi-regular basis ever since. While the person writing in to Sugar for advice was struggling with the decision of whether or not to become a parent, the advice in her response is applicable to all of the big (and sometimes small) life decisions we confront that inevitably redirect the course of our lives.
Sugar begins her response by referring to a poem by Tomas Tranströmer called “The Blue House.” About it she writes: “There is a transformative power in seeing the familiar from a new, more distant perspective. It’s in this stance that Tranströmer’s narrator is capable of seeing his life for what it is while also acknowledging the lives he might have had. ‘The sketches,’ Tranströmer writes, ‘all of them, want to become real.’ The poem strikes a chord in me because it’s so very sadly and joyfully and devastatingly true. Every life, Tranströmer writes, ‘has a sister ship,’ one that follows ‘quite another route’ than the one we ended up taking. We want it to be otherwise, but it cannot be: the people we might have been live a different, phantom life than the people we are.”
Sugar encourages the letter writer to let go of the idea of a perfect choice. “There will likely be no clarity,” she writes, “at least at the outset; there will only be the choice you make and the sure knowledge that either one will contain some loss.”
Re-reading this, I’m brought back to a session several years ago with my therapist, where I too was struggling with a big life decision, frozen with indecision and overwhelmed by the fear of making the wrong choice. After listening to me agonize over all the potential outcomes, she said: “I think you’re looking for an option that doesn’t contain any grief, but I don’t think that option exists. No matter what you choose, you’re giving something up, and closing the door on an alternative life path. But the fact that you’re struggling so much to choose means that both paths hold a lot of potential for joy as well. I’d encourage you to think of it less as a “right choice” and a “wrong choice” and instead acknowledge that whatever path you choose will have both joy and grief, things gained and things lost”.
She then asked me a more direct question: How would your perspective shift if you tried to make your biggest choices from a place of hope, not fear?
I hope it does not seem hyperbolic for me to say that this reframe changed my life. Not just the way I make choices, but the actual choices I make.
I’ve used this advice to make many decisions in the years since – including leaving my old job and going back to grad school in my 30s. More recently, I’ve been putting it to the test with one of the most irrevocable choices most of us will ever make in our lives: the decision of whether or not to become a parent.
I’ve always been deeply envious of people who “just know” their answer to this question. Those who know they want to be a parent more than anything, and those who hold the steady confidence of knowing that parenting is not their path. While I’ve leaned more in one direction or the other at various points in my adult life, I’ve never felt sure with any sort of unshakable certainty. The fear of making the “wrong” choice and thus regretting it has been the only steady constant.
For a long time, I could only wrap my head around imagined, hypothetical parenthood from an aggressively heteronormative perspective. “Total motherhood” terrified me (still does). The cultural messaging around parenthood and motherhood in particular assured me that any equality I thought I had in my relationship would go out the window, and I would quickly grow resentful. I would be permanently exhausted, stretched thin, and overwhelmed. I would become insular and disconnected from community. Childcare and parenting would be another burdensome chore on my to do list. Parenting would be a competitive sport, and I would be constantly inundated with feedback telling me I’m doing it wrong. I would give up all aspects of myself that make me “me”, and motherhood would become my all-consuming identity. From this perspective, being a father felt appealing, being a mother did not. On top of all that, as an already anxious-leaning person, the thought of deliberately creating a small, danger-seeking separate vessel that carries my sensitive little heart around while finding new and creative ways to put it at risk is deeply alarming and feels wildly illogical.
I couldn’t start to fully imagine myself as a parent until I could start to see queerer alternatives for family formation. Above all else, queerness reminds me that I’m not bound to a single paved path. Several years ago, I was introduced to the term “desire lines” (sometimes also called “desire paths”). This article on The Guardian uses Robert Macfarlane’s definition: “paths & tracks made over time by the wishes & feet of walkers, especially those paths that run contrary to design or planning”. These paths get etched into the earth, demonstrating our autonomy and agency and refusal to do what’s expected in small ways. They’re little visual reminders that we can take an alternate path, even if the way forward isn’t yet entirely clear. The Guardian article also includes a quote from Rebecca Solnit’s book Wanderlust: “Walking is a mode of making the world as well as being in it.” This is how I feel about queerness, too. A way of making the world as well as being in it. Imagining my life as a queer parent less bound to heteronormative scripts opens up space for me to explore the possibility of parenting from a place of hope, rather than fear. It allows me to imagine raising a child rooted in a larger community, unbound by the rules and strictures and expectations that govern straight life. It was this vantage point that allowed me to really see and imagine myself as a parent for the first time without immediately being overwhelmed by a sense of claustrophobia.
This is not to romanticize deviating from social norms. I’m not suggesting that charting your own course will be an easy path of joy and supportive community. To really belabour the desire lines analogy: someone might yell at you to keep off the grass. You could get ticketed, arrested, or worse for trespassing if you’ve wandered onto private property. And of course, the more structurally marginalized you are (for example: BIPOC, trans, working class, etc), the less the world will tolerate you veering off the prescribed path and the more violently they will attempt to punish you for trying.
I also know that despite all the planning in the world, reality will likely look different than all the hypothetical situations I can imagine. I will imagine a particular hypothetical child, but the real one likely won’t resemble this imagined picture in appearance, temperament, personality, or behaviour. I know that if I’m lucky enough to parent a child someday, I will likely look back at my naivete in this post with a pitying, almost derisive smirk.
The decision of whether or not to be a parent also seems to spark a domino effect of other big, impossible-feeling choices that don’t seem to have one right answer. Do I want to stay in academia or get a 9-5 policy or alt-ac job? Do I want to live in the city or the country? I had a rural childhood and have trouble imagining what an urban one would look like. Those gaps in my imagination make it hard to give city life a fair chance. At the same time, practical reality reminds me that there are drawbacks to rural communities, including a lack of diversity, less obvious queer community (which is not to say it doesn’t exist!) and fewer resources. This is where the realities of queer life collide with all the hope and joy it can bring with it. When these “what-ifs?” start circulating, it can be very easy to slip back into the fear. Despite all this though, I hang onto that queer hope. I find even the faintest of desire lines beginning to appear in the grass from the queer parents who have walked before me and I follow those footsteps, knowing that I’m choosing just one possible path of thousands.
Sugar closes out her advice by writing: “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.”
I have so many sister lives. The one where I’m a solo investigative journalist, travelling the world and telling stories. The one where I’ve built up a little permaculture homestead that looks suspiciously similar to my grandparents’ old farm with lots of kids running around. The one where I live in an anarchist commune in Europe somewhere. The one where I’ve gone back to my roots in Northern Ireland, married a local, and opened a cute little used bookstore. The one where I work for NASA or the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. All sister lives that are not mine. And then there’s the path I’m actually choosing: building a little family in the city 45 minutes from where I grew up, still a student as I creep closer to 40, and trying to hold space for the joy and the grief, the wins and the losses. This life is mine, there are still more surprises ahead, and all I can do is salute my sister lives from the shore.
Queer Domesticity 