Notes to Self

by Emilie Pine

It took me two years to build up enough courage to show those notes to anyone else. In October 2016 I sent them to Tramp Press, a two-woman independent feminist press in Ireland.

When people thank me for this collection, telling me that it breaks the silence around infertility and alcoholism, women’s bodies and family conflict, I wonder how it is that these silences still exist.

Like all children of heavy drinkers, we developed a particular kind of watchfulness. We learned, through experience, not to trust. We learned to cope with crisis.

It is hard to love an addict. Not only practically difficult, in the picking up after them and the handling of those aspects of life they’re not able for themselves, but metaphysically hard. It feels like bashing yourself against a wall, not just your head, but your whole self. It makes your heart hard. Caught between endless ultimatums (stop drinking) and radical acceptance (I love you no matter what) the person who loves the addict exhausts and renews their love on a daily basis.

For a man with so much time and space for self-reflection, there’s pitifully little actually done.

As I try not only to read him, as I have always done, but now also to write him, I see beyond my judgment of his alcoholism.

If drink was a means for Dad to numb the pressures that can make life feel monstrous, then it was also numbing the qualities that make life joyful.

The love undoes me and all my protests about peace and quiet and calm. I want this love.

I quickly come to realize that infertility is a particular kind of loneliness.

She suggests that I try to stop thinking about it, because obviously thinking about it is what’s causing sperm and eggs to disobey the biological imperative. As advice, this seems perilously close to asserting that women’s minds are dangerous to their bodies.

I tick the box for “advanced maternal age” (aka “geriatric,” the official medical term for new mothers over thirty-five).

In Ireland, the equal status of the fetus and the mother in the constitution represents more than simply a ban on abortion. It means that in the case of any ambiguity, the life of the fetus is prioritized; and in our situation it means that it is illegal for the midwives to pronounce the pregnancy over. Ambiguity does not mean that there will be a baby. Instead, it means the total disempowerment of us as “parents” of this ambiguous pregnancy.

Having done it my way for so long, now we’re trying it his, and I see him taking responsibility for my happiness.

One evening I go out with a friend and, after too many glasses of wine, she earnestly informs me that it is my fault I’m childless, that I shouldn’t have left it so late. The remark cuts through me and I have no response except to get my coat and go home.

And I’m not really the accepting type (in fact, most of the time, I don’t even like people who are).

But the truth, what I have accepted, is this: I can try to have a baby and I can fail every month and be unhappy. Or I can not-try to have a baby and not-fail every month. The total number of children I have had remains the same either way, a big fat zero. But the outcome is totally different. I choose to be happy.

And there it is. The love.

ONE DAY LAST YEAR I came home from work to find R raking leaves in the garden. He smiled and I noticed in the bright autumn light the new strands of silver at his temples. And it hit me. We are growing old together. This is what it will be like as we watch each other age, as our partnership ages. And this unexpected moment made me happier than I could have imagined. I see a life ahead for us, a shared life. A great life.

It does not matter that I think hair removal is a sadistic, time-consuming and expensive tax on women. It only matters that not fully paying this tax makes me weird. And so I scour magazines and social media in a quest to feel normal.

I had a hangover that registered only a few levels above death.

I spent time with men who would tell me how great my (undernourished) body was but who never offered to buy me dinner.

But at this stage I knew that loneliness was not the worst thing.

At the time, I rationalized both of these assaults not as rapes, but as the inevitable outcomes of my actions and my lifestyle.

That range of feeling was worth claiming, worth talking about. But I didn’t claim it, and I didn’t talk about it, for one reason. Because to say I felt sad would have been dangerously feminine.

The ways things are now, though, everyone needs to be likable, because these days the career ladder—for men as well as women—is indistinguishable from the esteem ladder, the how-much-your-employer-likes-you ladder. This ladder is hard to climb because the likability goalposts keep moving.

I stopped being just sad, and I started being depressed. I did not read depression as a danger signal, I did not step off the treadmill, and I did not get help.

When a colleague told me that she began her research work at 9 P.M., after the kids were in bed, I didn’t feel pity for her—I was jealous of her discipline.

But my mental health, it turns out, is my responsibility. I probably didn’t need to tell you that, but I did need to tell myself. And once I realized that, I wondered why I would ever leave it in the hands of strangers to decide my value.

And I will ask my students what they would do, if they were not afraid. And I will listen to what they say. And I will remind them, with compassion, that the real failure is to not try.