Chapter 15

I literally cannot remember a time growing up when Mother had not expressed how much she was looking forward to grandchildren.  As in, I remember being a neglected very young child, barely old enough to be in school, and hyper aware that Mother was already pining for future days when I would have borne a child that she could dote on when convenient for her, and give back when she was done.

Let us break that down.

I was always aware that Mother did not actually want to do the hard work associated with raising a child (let alone three).  Very early on, I was made aware that one of my greatest values to her was as a future broodmare who would provide her with the fun of children, without the work.  Now, I am aware that Mother would argue that is neither what she meant, nor how she felt.  Even if I believed that was true, though, her intentions are of little consequence.  What does matter is how words like those are internalized by a child, especially when they are repeated constantly.  I was not the important one.  Those hypothetical future children were the important ones.  My value was in creating those hypothetical beings, not in existing for my own sake.

To make it worse, I do not ever remember her saying this to my brothers.  I do not remember Father ever mentioning anything about them carrying on the family name.  No, the burden of the expectation of children was only for me, the daughter.  If she did say it to my brothers, it was so infrequent that my child brain did not note it at all.  So, the boy children were important for their own sakes, but the girl child was most important for the children she would in turn someday bear.  That was the logical and emotional impact of her words, stated repeatedly from as far back as I can remember, until I was about 15 and finally said something that made it stop for a while.

Sadly, it was not the fact that her words were hurtful to me that made it stop.  No.  What made it stop was far, far worse.

I never argued with Mother about the fact she constantly told me of her dream grandbabies.  I never pointed it out to her when she said it.  I did not want to believe that she meant any harm.  I did not want to know if she genuinely intended what her words meant to me.  I did not want to challenge her and find out for certain that she truly did value a hypothetical grandchild more than me.  I made the excuses for her, in my own mind, so I did not have to ask.  I trusted her at her word completely, so the natural conclusion was grandbabies being more important than me, and having that fact explicitly stated would hurt all the more.  If I never questioned, never challenged, I could do the mental gymnastics required to ignore the logical ramifications.

But I did get sick of it.  I did start cringing when I hit puberty and developed a feminine body, and she would talk about hypothetical grandbabies with greater and greater frequency.  At the same time, a new sentence got tacked onto the end.

“But not yet!”

That last bit was always delivered in a manner that was highly enthusiastic, and yet at the same time felt like an insincere obligatory afterthought.

I can only speculate on this point, but it seemed she had the self-awareness to realize that she was pressuring me into having children for her sake, while simultaneously realizing that it would probably ruin my life if I succumbed to the pressure and had a baby as a teen.  Looking back, I think there was probably also a selfish element in the additional caveat, because if I had a child as a child, she would have been stuck with a baby, including the non-fun bits.  If it happened later, it would all be on me, and she could have the dream fun baby she always wanted, on demand when she wanted it.

What stopped the repetition of Mother’s declaration of desire was my coming out moment.  I was never in the closet per say, because I was never afraid of other people knowing that I did not qualify as heterosexual.  I also never denied to myself that I found femme presentation just as, if not more attractive than masculine presentation.  I knew I was very different from most other children in a lot of ways.  This was just one more way, so it did not cause me concern.  Still, I had never explicitly declared my sexuality, and heterosexuality was the assumed default, so Mother was unaware of my status as a queer person, and I knew it.

It happened when she and I had driven up to Idaho to visit with her sister.  We were helping my aunt settle into a new apartment while she was separated from her husband and contemplating divorce.  For the most part the trip was full of good memories, and it was wonderful to get to spend some time with my aunt.  However, one day when Mother and I were alone, I think in my aunt’s apartment, Mother expounded at greater length than normal about how much she was looking forward to those hypothetical grandchildren.  I could not take it anymore, and in that moment I realized exactly what would stop it, so I said it.

“I’m not straight.  I don’t know if I’m going to end up with a man or a woman.”

Full. Stop.

I could see the gears turning in her head, reasoning out the consequences of that statement.  With her very strong white baby boomer middle-American foundation of subconscious bigotry, the conclusion was natural and predictable.  A homosexual relationship is not going to produce children the traditional way, so therefor, if her daughter found a female partner, her daughter would most likely never provide the desired grandchildren.  Simultaneously, Mother’s strong desire to not be seen as a bigot meant she was not going to tell me to suppress my sexuality and only date men. 

I do not know if she thought about the fact that queer couples can and do have children all the time through deliberate planning, but even if she did, I think her reaction would have been the same.  She had all her children because she and Father used the rhythm method of birth control, and the only reason they stopped at three children is because Father got a vasectomy when she had a false pregnancy that promised a fourth.  They never planned any children, and could not afford the ones they had, let alone a fourth.  I am pretty sure she saw children as an inevitable result of heterosexual relations, whereas in homosexual relationships children could easily be put off forever.

Her dreams were dashed, and it was written all over her face.  She would probably never mention it again.

I immediately felt both triumphant and sick.  I was triumphant because it would finally stop.  I was sick because she confirmed that her desire to have a grandbaby for her personal enjoyment was critically important to her, more so than my own happiness and fulfilment.

At the time I did plan to someday have a baby.  I figured that the age of 30 or 32 would be ideal, because I thought that would give me time to get settled in a career and find a partner before saddling myself with the responsibility of caring for another life.  Even at the time, I recognized that my parents had children too young, too unprepared, and were unable to give us the time and attention that children need to be completely happy and cared for.  I knew my childhood was unhappy, and those were the primary factors that I blamed, so I was not going to repeat those mistakes.  If I ever had a child, I knew that child would become the center of my life, and that everything I did, every decision I made, would need to put that child first, genuinely.  I wanted to have time to make myself the priority before giving my existence over for another person.  I also wanted to have time to find a partner I could count on for the rest of my life before taking on that responsibility.  I did not want to do it alone.

I can give my parents a lot of credit for instilling the idea that children should always be a parent’s priority.  Even if they did not practice that philosophy the overwhelming majority of the time, they were very consistent about saying that children should always come first, and they were quick to dismiss any concerns of neglect by pointing out minimal actions as though they were extraordinary (the existence of food in the kitchen, for example).  It was one of a great many things they got right philosophically, but wrong practically.  Since I took them at their word and it was compatible with my own developing worldview, I fully absorbed that philosophy.

By the time Mother gleefully returned to stating her desire for grandbabies, I was grown, had already briefly stopped talking to my parents once, and I was trying very hard to not make excuses for them or re-engage in their toxic patterns of behavior.  It was around the time of Younger Brother’s wedding, so I suspect her glee at the likelihood of his wife producing a grandbaby had re-ignited her enthusiasm.  Plus, I had only dated men, despite my coming out to her as a bisexual.  I was talking to Mother and Father in their living room before heading home after a visit, and Mother came around to grandbabies.  She could not resist, and happily declared to me how much she was still looking forward to babysitting when I finally had children.

I remember looking around their living room, at the superficial cleaning they had done relatively recently.  There was less clutter than I would have expected, and no garbage drifting on the floor, but they had not touched the deep layers of ground in filth that had accumulated over the course of years.  The way they had approached cleaning the livingroom felt like an echo of how they approached life – superficial pretense of concern while completely neglecting the deeper things.  I think I probably looked at them with an equivalent amount of scorn, and anger that Mother would impose upon me for her own pleasure, yet again.

“IF I ever have a baby, there is NO WAY I would leave it here with you.  There is no way I would set it down on your filthy floor, or let it touch anything in your filthy house.”

You would have thought I had attacked them.  I vaguely remember Mother’s eyes welling with tears from hurt and horror.  I think Father was righteously angry with me for hurting Mother’s feelings like that.  I honestly do not remember with any detail what they said or did following my heartfelt declaration, because their reactions were predictable and not important to me.  I had said my peace, well aware they would find it unacceptable.  I had set down the hard boundary.

After reaching adulthood and consciously working to process and understand my accumulated experiences with them, I felt conviction that my parents were not fit to babysit, even if their place had been reasonably clean.  No amount of blustering from them was going to change that fact.  I did not want them to have any opportunity to emotionally manipulate or abuse my hypothetical child.  My only failure on that day was in solely emphasizing the filth in their home, but I was still a great many years from being capable of directly confronting them about their abusive behaviors.  I had not fully processed enough of my life and interactions with them.  I did not have a good enough conscious grasp of exactly what they had done and why to be able to stand against the inevitable onslaught of gaslighting and outright denial of any and all wrongdoing.

That genuinely was the last time Mother mentioned grandchildren to me.

Since life has a tendency to throw curve balls, my life worked out absolutely nothing like my teen self envisioned.  By the time I was 30 I may have found my partner, but I was still struggling to support myself and was well into the decline of chronic illness.  I could barely take care of myself, let alone another human being, so having a child was out of the question.  In the few years that followed I reached a point where I could not even take care of myself, and for a time my partner had to take on the role of caregiver.

Thankfully, Diana was fairly certain she did not want children anyway, and I came to terms with the fact that I had only planned on children because it helped me cope with the overbearing expectation that I would someday have them.  When I was a teen, making those plans gave me a sense of control over my own future in the face of familial expectations.  At a time when what my parents thought of me mattered to me, it gave me the comfort of a boundary that promised meeting their expectations without losing myself in the process.

Back when we were just friends and my partner was still married, she went to a family barbeque with many members of her father’s large extended family in attendance.  Despite being in the middle of her marriage and unable to see how toxic it was, she was very firmly of the opinion that she was not going to have any children with her husband.  Many of her cousins and their wives were flush with children, and one of them was even running a daycare center at the time.  As is normal in American families, they expected that now that she was married, she would of course start having children as well.

At one point during the barbeque the cousin who ran the daycare center asked her, “When are you going to have a baby?”  She explained that she and her husband were too young and unestablished and could not afford children.  The response was a rather glib, “Well, you never can afford them, so you may as well just have them!”

Diana walked away, and over to a cousin who self-identifies as a bull dyke lesbian.  As loudly as she could, the cousin parroted at Diana, “When are you going to have a baby?!?”

Diana replied just as loudly, “When Hell freezes over!”