Why We Can't Sleep by Ada Calhoun

Author:Ada Calhoun [Calhoun, Ada]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780802147868
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Published: 2019-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

Single, Childless

“God isn’t going to tell you a partner and baby are never going to show up.”

“I thought I’d be married and have kids by now,” said my friend Sarah Hepola, the author of Blackout, as we ate breakfast together at a diner in Dallas.

Sarah and I worked together in our twenties at the Austin Chronicle.1 We went to see a lot of bands play, drank as if drinking was our job, and saw each other living not exactly our best lives. But we had fun. One time, inspired by the roller-skating cult-movie-musical Xanadu, we went skating and considered ourselves prodigies even though we fell down a thousand times.

She told me, “I see my [married] friends around me and they’re struggling, but I can’t help thinking that I would prefer their struggles to my struggles. They say, ‘I just want to go out and have sex with some random guy,’ and I think, ‘Why? I want to go home and watch a movie with my husband. I want kids to wake me up at four a.m.’”

What she’s describing sounds like the makings of the perfect Gen X movie: a Freaky Friday remake in which a married woman with children swaps lives with a single woman who has a hot dating life and a cool job.

“Because there is this increasing number of women living alone,” says Sarah, “I think there is a push to tell narratives that are about their triumph. But I don’t feel triumphant. Nor do I want to be some sort of reactionary, cautionary tale. That is not the truth of it either.”

For a long time, her desire for children was abstract: “The decision about whether or not to have a baby has been kind of vague, free-floating.” Then, at forty: “My desire to have a baby blossomed really powerfully. At forty-one, I started dating this guy in another state. There were a lot of red flags along the way that this was not going to be the relationship that I wanted it to be, but I ignored them. I needed to make it work because I felt like this was my last chance. By the time that relationship ended, I was forty-two. Then earlier this year, I was diagnosed with fibroids and I’m looking at a possible hysterectomy.” She hasn’t given up on finding a partner with whom she might adopt children, though she’s haunted by the question: Where is he?

One therapist I met gave me an especially poignant term for the feeling Sarah describes: “ambiguous loss.”

“When you think about women in their forties,” says Kelly Maxwell Haer, executive director of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University in California, “it’s a very rare person who pictured herself single. The ambiguous loss of singleness is the type where the desired partner is psychologically present in a person’s mind but physically absent.”

Generation X women are told incessantly that they should do—or should have done—things differently in order to get what they want. Still, however many times

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