For eighteen years, I’ve written a letter to myself on my birthday. The next year, I read the letter and write a new one to my future self. Having just finished writing my 19th letter, I’m writing a series of posts in which I revisit and reflect on each letter to date.
On March 9, 2007, I wrote a letter to my future self that I read now as mostly uninspired and, frankly, boring. Upon further reflection, I’ve come to realize that the boring bits—fretting over finding my research interests, maintaining a writing life alongside my academic career, and vague directives to follow my heart (all of which I’ve already written about in posts on the 2005 and 2006 letters)—provide cover for two lines that prickle with the static of a gut-wrenching dilemma.
“So, future me, what’s happened with the child or not to child ordeal? More about this year: questions about our relationship—children specifically.”
March 9, 2007
The problem contained in these two lines threatened to end our five-and-a-half-year marriage. It could easily have overtaken the entire letter. But rather than pour my pain and confusion onto the page, I chose to deflect.
At first, I thought I might have chosen this safer path because the problem hadn’t yet taken over our lives. Maybe it had only just emerged. Or maybe I didn’t yet understand how dire the situation would become.
Turning to my black, polka-dotted journal quickly proved me wrong. I’d been writing of “the child or not to child ordeal” for months. I could neither think nor write of anything else. So why then, on my birthday, did I write only those two relatively innocuous lines? Why did I leave them there, sticking out from their surroundings like the tip of an iceberg, without explanation of the toll the problem had taken on me, Matthew, and our relationship? This was, after all, a letter to myself that only I would ever see.
The answers, it turns out, lay in thinking about my life as a glacier.
Bergy Bits and Growlers
Boating around glaciers is notoriously dangerous. Calving creates icebergs, which float mostly underwater on their sides (check out this awesome simulator to see how this works). Icebergs themselves can cause problems because, you know, “the tip of the iceberg” and all, but as the iceberg melts, smaller pieces called bergy bits and growlers begin to break off. These offshoots are harder to spot and weigh less than full icebergs, which means they float more capriciously and are more prone to overturning at a moment’s notice. Rolling bergy bits can produce tsunami-like waves that can overturn small vessels, even if they’re far enough away to avoid collisions.
As I began to revisit the events leading up to the two sentences in my birthday letter, I found myself floating in a tumultuous sea amid bergy bits and growler moments—naming my child, never wanting kids, and then, suddenly, changing my mind.
The Name
In the Fall of 2000, six and a half years before I wrote my birthday letter, I decided I would name my child McKenna. I was on Semester at Sea, a program for college students to live and take classes on a ship that travels around the world.
By the start of the voyage, Matthew and I had been dating for just over two years. Despite having no concrete plans for the future, we both knew we were building a long-term life together. From this solid foundation, I’d applied to Semester at Sea, received a scholarship, and embarked on my first trip outside the United States.
When I saw the name in my roommate’s magazine, I hadn’t been thinking about children. But it shimmered a little—as creative niglets tend to do—and lodged itself into my brain as a good name for a daughter.
Rasons Not To
When I went on Semester at Sea, the ship had no internet access. Only a few people had (extremely expensive) international cell phones. Instead, we wrote letters. Real, handwritten notes folded into stamped envelopes and flown around the world. When we docked in a new port, bags upon bags of letters would arrive in the mailroom. After days without any communication, I awaited Matthew’s missives with breathless anticipation. I stalked my mailbox and sometimes volunteered to sort the mail so as to get my letter as soon as possible. Reading those letters put his familiar voice right into my head. They were as close to hugs as I could get.
Some of my peers’ relationships floundered in their physical separation from loved ones, but our relationship thrived. We filled the void of physical touch with silly, loving versions of ourselves that allowed for more sincere connection than we might have had at home. When I returned to the U.S. in December, 2000, we decided to get married. Ten months later, we did just that in front of family and friends at a mountain inn near Boulder, Colorado.
Despite having picked out a name for my child on the ship, the future Matthew and I envisioned never included children. We even turned our steadfast refusal to have kids into a game. Over dinner in a restaurant, we’d watch screaming toddlers and harried parents and then whisper, “Reason number 5,264.” The next day, we might find reason number 612 at a park and number 1,208 at the grocery store. The numeric order didn’t matter because we knew there was an infinite number of reasons not to have children.
It wasn’t that I wanted a child and he didn’t. Instead, the two things—the name and the childless future—simply existed side-by-side, a brain glitch akin to when I’ve scheduled two events for the same time on the same day only to realize the night before what I’ve done. I’ve forgotten neither. They just lived in my head together, an impossible combination coexisting until it couldn’t.
Opening to Possibilities
Five years after we married, my visions of future Christmases inadvertently began to include a child. Our child. A daughter.
At first, I dismissed these imagined futures as glitches. We didn’t want kids, so of course there’d be no child there. I was just reliving the happy holidays of my own childhood.
Soon enough, the iceberg of my realization began to splinter into small bits of curiosity. The tug of an emotion here, an unexpected imagining there. My thoughts began to transform from absolutely not to maybe. I still played the Reasons game because I hadn’t yet decided one way or another, but I felt myself opening to the possibility that, just as a glacier looks solid but continually flows into the sea, my adamant desire not to have kids might not be as firm as I’d thought.
The Pain of Uncertainty
In the weeks leading up to my birthday letter, I wrote prolifically in my journal. The realization that I might want a child wreaked havoc upon our relationship. Pain, frustration, confusion—I wrote of it all.
My anxious brain seized upon a constant feeling of impending doom and refused to let it go. I wanted to crawl in bed, curl up in a ball, and stay that way. How, I wondered, could we “have a relationship with this huge thing looming?”
Many of my journal entries had me trapped between two options: stay together without a child or split up. In a bout of magical thinking, I didn’t even want to write the latter possibility. To do so threatened to set in motion a terrifying conclusion for which I might never forgive myself. If we broke up, I’d know that “my best friend, my husband, that wonderful caring person was still in the world and for some stupid reason I’d broken it off. It would be me in the end. I’m the one who changed, not him.”
“There is no separate us,” I concluded. “We have to stay together.”
From this vantage point, I considered that maybe we could simply live out our shared vision of a childless future. I asked my journal, “Is it worth it, what we’re doing? Would be so much easier to just forget about it and go on like we were. Easier now, but not later.”
While I wanted the pain of uncertainty to stop, I knew that ignoring my intuition would cause a lifetime of suffering that would wreck me in the end.
Closer to my birthday, I allowed myself to imagine what it would be like to have a child. On paper, I captured the exciting, fun parts alongside the stressful, loss-of-life-as-we-know-it parts.
“Happiness. Frustration. It would all be there. We would be wonderful parents,” I wrote.
This was always the crux of it. I wanted a child not because I wanted a small being in my life but because I wanted us to be parents. Us. Together.
Splitting up could never solve this problem.
The Letter
Two weeks later, on March 9, 2007, I sat in a cafe in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco, California and stuffed the mess of the past few months into two wholly inadequate lines. One, a question deflecting any explanation of the issue onto my future self. The other, an evasive summary that transformed months’ worth of turmoil into “relationship questions,” a neat box that didn’t require rehashing it all again on the page.
And there, in a sea of reflections on writing and grad school life, I floated these bergy bits toward my future self. The capricious pieces of ice would eventually reveal themselves, but that day I left them alone because I could not bear to acknowledge what I already knew. The wave was coming. We’d have to choose. Until then, I needed to let them be, floating, turning, flipping if they must before figuring out how to successfully navigate the immense pain of our precarious situation.
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Wow! Even though I know the next part of the “story”, I can hardly wait to read it.
Glad you liked it! I’m sure there will be more in future letters. 🙂