Mommy Guilt and the Childless

The opening lines of a Mary Oliver poem are on my mind today, “Hello, sun on my face. Hello, you who make morning and spread it over the fields.” The chickadees are whistling their greeting this morning too, that two-note repetition from just outside my window. I never get tired of watching them flit across the bare branches of the lilac tree, their black and yellow and blue heads atop their cotton ball body, their kind eyes, their busy feet. It seems we are all ready to wake up to spring soon.

I have too much to do this week to be writing, final page proofs due back for A Curious Faith, school-work and studies, and some additional work for a not-ready-to-be-named project. I knew there would be a few weeks during this sabbatical where I would need to put back on my work hat and slay the beast, and this week is one of them. I’m grateful for the work, but I do wonder if a complete sabbath is ever possible in this hurried world in which we live.

I have been reading voraciously through this time, mostly books for school, but another stack of fiction and non-fiction and poetry as well. Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear, Elisabeth Tova Bailey’s Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, James Nestor’s Breath, Brian Zahnd’s When Everything’s on Fire, Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project, Daniel Bowman’s On the Spectrum, Katherine May’s The Electricity of Every Living Thing, Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, James K.A. Smith’s On the Road With Saint Augustine, Eula Bliss’s Having and Being Had, Ronald Rolheiser’s The Domestic Monastery, and that’s just the non-fiction. It has been so good to read guilt-free.

“Guilt-free? Whatever does she mean? Why would one feel guilty for reading?” Good question, dear reader. It seems I have been saddled with a sticky sort of companion the past five or six years: non-mommy guilt. You’ve heard of Mommy Guilt, I suppose, the feeling that accompanies the array of opinions on breastfeeding, attachment parenting, co-sleeping, homeschooling, vaccinating, masking, et cetera et cetera et cetera. It’s nearly impossible to avoid as long as anyone anywhere has an opinion about how to raise one’s child. I have friends who are nearly paralyzed by it. It turns out, though, that there is a non-mommy-guilt as well, and this is what I have been stricken with.

It is the sense that because we do not have children, our lives are being wasted or the times we get uninterrupted sleep is something for which we need to apologize or our quiet mornings cannot be talked of without mentioning in the same breath those who do not have the blessing of them. It is the sense that in the absence of children, we have to make up other excuses for why we’re tired or why our bodies hurt or why my pelvic floor has issues or why sex is hard or why it’s difficult to make friendships. The normal excuse for all those things is the children, the children, of course, but what if it’s not of course? Do bodies still age and break down and stretch and groan and wrestle with insomnia and anxiety even without the children? Are we allowed to talk about that as a real thing without someone rolling their eyes because how could we ever know how much harder it is with babies?

Yesterday Nate and I drove into the hills to wander a bookstore and clear our heads. On the drive we listened to a sermon in which one of the wisest preachers of our day said, “I’m convinced there is nothing in the world that can help us grow more selfless than being a parent.” Nate made a wise remark after we finished listening, something to the effect of, “I suppose that’s true for some people, that they need the impetus of children to reveal and root out their selfishness, but I have to believe that God is going to use whatever he wants to reveal and root out our selfishness.”

Just as I cannot know what it is like to be a parent, saddled with the responsibilities and bodies and schedules that parents have, I suspect the opposite is true for them. They cannot know what it is like to move through their 40s childless, to experience different responsibilities and bodies and schedules. But because their stories are the more commonly heard ones, sometimes I feel the need to stick my head up through all that mom-guilt and say, “Hey, you don’t get to keep all that hardship for yourself, I’ve got it bad here too.” So do some of my still unmarried friends whose bodies are also changing, whose sleep is also lacking, whose schedules are also fit to bursting. Different stories doesn’t mean lesser ones.

(I’m saying that more for myself than for you, reader.)

This time away from work has been me asking myself the question: what have I set aside because I felt it was only legitimate if I had kids to legitimize it? Some of the answers to that question are private and painful, not for public fodder. But some of the answers are that I would play with paper and scissors and glue more, that I would read more books that I just enjoy not because I feel the need to regurgitate their content for readers, that I would have more fun. I feel that I need to apologize for having fun whenever I mention it because fun for a childless person is imagined to be enviable and perfect, and fun for a parent is Christmas morning and Disney vacations and seeing their toddler take their first steps—all of which is tinged with a bit of bittersweetness. The thing is, our fun is too. It’s just a different kind of bittersweetness. But it still matters just as much to God.

I think being single for so long prepared me for childlessness in marriage. I learned to lean into the lack and see what God wanted to teach me in it. But I also learned how he wanted to love me in it, and not just a lackluster love, lavishing it on my married friends along with their super-sanctifying seasons of life, but a real full-bellied love, withholding no good thing and also no hard thing.

I’m trying to pay attention to that non-mommy-guilt wherever it creeps up. And then I’m just doing the thing. Touring virtual museums, cutting out paper and gluing it on pages, calling the doctor, inviting a friend into a private struggle, rereading that YA novel I love, and more. And slowly, slowly, I find the guilt dissipating.

Dallas Willard wrote, “We dishonor God as much by fearing and avoiding pleasure as we do by dependence upon it or living for it.” The old proverb says, “Moderation in all things.” I tend toward a poverty of all that’s good or pleasurable because I feel I have to justify its presence. But what if its presence, like love or grace or the mercy of God, is just there to show us a small glimpse of his full goodness to come? What if it is like the chickadees on the bare branches of my lilacs, singing their two-tone hymn, “Spring soon. Spring soon?” What if the answer to my guilt is not more shame heaped on me but, just as it is for those with children, a full-throated lament of what we do not have, a robust enjoyment of what we do have, and a willingness to become more like God in every way in the space between?