The Big Lie by Tanya Selvaratnam

Author:Tanya Selvaratnam
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781616148461
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Published: 2013-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

I started this book with the idea that every woman has a story to tell about miscarriage or infertility, her own or her friend’s. Every woman also has a story to tell about motherhood—about whether she has kids or whether she doesn’t, and whether having kids was by choice or out of her hands. My friends and women I meet seem to fit into categories: mothers, want-to-be-mothers, never-want-to-be-mothers, will-be-mothers, never-will-be-mothers, almost-were-mothers, and more.

Once I was at a party where there were a couple of women I had known for more than twenty-five years. One had given up her career as a lawyer to raise two kids. Another also had two kids but continued to work as a lawyer at one of the top firms in the United States. The one who had stopped working talked about how she enjoyed being able to focus on tasks like overseeing the renovations of her house. The other woman said that her husband’s flexible hours as a professor made it possible for her to focus more on her job because her husband was such an active parent. But she said that she often felt the tug-of-war between career and motherhood, and that sometimes she felt like she failed at both. As I listened to their revelations, I confess I had to check my inner judgment of the woman who wasn’t working. Why couldn’t she work and be a mom, too? How does she hold her own against her husband if she’s dependent on him to pay the bills? I had to remind myself that happiness is important and that, as another friend put it, “one-size-fits-all” does not apply to women’s choices about these matters.

Another night, I was having dinner at Hecho en Dumbo, a Mexican restaurant on the Bowery in Manhattan, with two of my closest friends. They’re a few years older than me, both in their forties, and both have toddlers a few months apart. Within a few minutes, one of them started talking about something cute her kid did recently, and the other joined in with something cute that her kid did recently, and soon they were talking only to each other about their kids, and I was tuning out. I had nothing to contribute to the conversation, and, to be honest, I wasn’t interested in it. Whenever I’m alone with one of them, it doesn’t feel so bad because then we are sharing directly with each other, but the dynamic is different when there are three of us and I am the only one not having the same life experiences.

A few days after that dinner, I saw Maureen Angelos, a cofounder of the Five Lesbian Brothers theater company. Maureen, or “Moe,” as her friends call her, is in her fifties, doesn’t have kids, and earns a living as a scenic painter in addition to her work in theater. I asked her how she felt around groups of women when they talk only about their kids. Moe said, “Many of the women I work with are straight and married and have kids and they do talk about them a lot.

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