From when I was a teenager and to this day, people ask; "why don't you want to be a mother?"
and the inevitable follow-up: "how can you be so sure?"
and I give, and have given, all manners of answers;
Most tragically: that I've no idea if my health would allow me to conceive safely, and even were it to, that it surely would not allow me to parent well.
Most confidingly: that my mental fortitude is a careful equilibrium, the likes of which I've spent a decade honing, and don't fancy that a child-shaped spanner in the works would improve upon.
Most contestedly: that I do not possess the maternal instinct - I can enjoy my time entertaining children, listen so keenly, yet find again and again that motherhood is just not a song which sings to me.
Most selfishly: that I want to travel, to be the protagonist of my own destiny. That I have bore the weight of chains long enough that, though this would be a blessing to many, I fear the chafing on my wrists would turn any gift too heavy prison-shaped.
And though all of these are fundamentally true... perhaps most truthfully I would answer... that I was born a mother. That amongst my earliest memories, between learning about the colour of the sky and the reason the rain falls, are those in which I am holding my mother's long curly mane back whilst she heaves just shy of the bathroom; are those in which, with hands impossible small and curved and soft, I use my entire weight to turn her on her side so she doesn't drunkenly asphyxiate in her sequin dress in the night; are those in which she cries and cries, mascara running down her cheeks, begging me to tell her she is not a "shit mother", and in which I intuitively learn two things at once; least of which is the fundamentals of what the word 'shit' means, and most crucial of which is that she needs to hear the answer 'no, no you are not'
She will cry another night yet, and afraid and bleary-eyed I will assure, and reassure, and plead for her to be okay, and in her dead eyes I will see that nothing I say or do can ever be enough. I will tuck her under my tiny little coat to sleep, burn my fingers learning how to use a stovetop I am too young to operate because I've eaten 59p powdered dessert mix four days in a row, discover that the broom-handle, which lies dusty by my bedroom door, can be used to turn off a fire alarm too tall for my little body to reach. I will get older, I learn the hard way which bathroom chemicals you cannot mix, learn which bits of the truth you say silently so that everyone stays smiling. I will take up running at fifteen, and run and run just to feel what it is to burn, and quieten my brain for fifty god-forsaken minutes, and eventually, I will run to England, still too young but feeling eighty-two, and learn what it is to slow down and stand... still.
I was born a parent. Now, I fancy I deserve my own childhood.
