Fifty-eight is a timeline I never really contemplated, and being this age without children has me thinking about how nothing I love, know, feel or care about passionately will carry on when I am gone. I am not sitting here feeling sorry for myself, life dealt its cards, I played them out and I am satisfied with the way the cards fell. I do regret not having children. I doubt I would have been a good mother if I had children when I could have, I was not a very stable person during those years, but now that I am middle aged, I wish there were children filled with my stories and adventures as I am filled with the stories and adventures I hold from my parents.
I wonder what it would be like to be connected to a person from myself in a manner that I have never known. I have been a good stepmother but the connection is not there, it is just not the same. My stepdaughter has her life, her birth mother, her family, we visit but we are not connected. I admire the way she loves her children and the connection she has with them. The distance between myself and my stepdaughter is not a painful gap, it is a lonely gap. The place I filled in her life was a place of privilege to me. I felt like my job was to help her have the best relationship she could have with her mother.
Now though, late at night, I sit and wonder what it would be like to have had a child of my own. My favorite cousins had children, and they have gone through the joys and sorrows that children seem to bring to parents and I have not felt those things. My stepdaughter never hurt my feelings like I saw my cousin's children hurt her. She has a life filled with interaction with her children and her grandchildren, I do not. This interaction is what I crave.
So I wonder what others are feeling who are growing old without children and how they feel. I wonder if they have moments when they feel lonely because they will be the end of the memories shared for so many generations. I have so many memories that my Mom told me about our family and who we were and where we came from, without children this message will just fade away. Our family stories have no connection for my stepdaughter to own, I understand, but I am saddened when I realize the chain will break with me. Do others growing old without children ever feel this way?
Mountain Roses
