Table for 1
Sitting between two life stages, and slowly making peace with the unglamorous reality of choosing a life your own.
It was a dinner with four of my closest friends. These were women I have known and loved for years, all of them stood beside me at my wedding. We were at a restaurant, the kind of happy hour / dinner situation where you settle in, order too much food, and stay longer than you planned. And at some point, maybe halfway through the meal, I became aware of something that left me feeling uncomfortable.
There were five of us total. Two on one side, two on another, and me sitting at what might be considered the head of the table.
What I mean by that is I am not choosing a child-free life because I believe motherhood is wrong, or because I have no capacity for that kind of love, or because children don't belong in my vision of a meaningful life. I'm choosing it because of the specific conditions under which motherhood currently exists. The standards are impossible, there is a structural absence of support, and the whole thing is set up to slowly hollow you out while calling it d
And there I was. Sitting at the head of the table. Between two groups and two life stages, while belonging fully to neither.
I found myself feeling like I didn't fit into either group.
I'm no longer single, because circumstantially I found my person, and because I chose to get married. I was less than a year into my marriage and was genuinely excited about the path ahead of me as a wife. So, I didn't fit on the right side of the table, even if part of me appreciated and thought fondly of that lightness.
But I also didn't fit on the left side of the table. That was a group of women who had chosen motherhood and were living it. And that was a path I was actively considering not going down.
What I later came to realize is that what was causing me so much emotional distress during that dinner is that life is framed around progression. You go from being single to finding your person. You go from finding your person to getting married. You go from getting married to having children. There is a direction society assumes and expects you are moving in, and it only goes one way. So, I was sitting at this juncture where the logic of that progression said I shouldn't choose to go "backward", and truthfully, I didn’t want to. The right side of the table was behind me. But the left side of the table was the next step, but I was choosing not to move in the assumed direction. Which meant I wasn't going backward, but I was also not moving forward. And in a world that only knows how to read forward motion, stopping can look a lot like failure. So yes, I was at dinner with 4 of my closest friends feeling like a failure.
I came home from this dinner and cried in my husband's arms because I felt so alone. It was like the seating chart during that dinner felt like a visual demonstration of so much of what I had been dealing with and experiencing at the time. Specifically, feeling alone in my journey by not having other close women in my life who were also actively choosing a child-free life.
And truthfully, I do know a few other women in my life who are child-free, but there's something unique about this group of women, and just feeling like I was losing connection with them. I know intellectually that friendships survive different paths. I know this isn't the end of anything, but it is a kind of quiet loss and unglamorous reality of choosing this that doesn't always get talked about.
The table had two sides, and I didn't belong to either one. What I'm still learning is how to stop trying to belong on either side of the table, and start getting comfortable being on my side of table. Doing this would mean owning the clarity and the grief, the relief and the loneliness, the conviction and the days when that conviction wavers. It can be hard to accept that the life I'm choosing may sometimes mean I am the only person sitting on my side of the table, no longer walking an identical path with my friends, and learning to find comfort in that reality.
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