She I Dare Not Name: A spinster's meditations on life

by Donna Ward

I am beyond the balance of intimacy and solitude and deep, deep in the territory of she I dare not name. I am spinster. I stand in grief and loneliness, the fractured paragraphs of a discontinued narrative. Grief over what was and is now gone, over what I was convinced would come, for me.

Everything changes on the surface, but beneath remains constant.

every book ever published is a silent message someone doesn’t know they need.

This woman is not frightening. She is not cursed. She is not a temptress nor a lonely heart, a jam tart or a man-eater, she is not wizened on the stalk. You can speak with her. Even though she does not have children or a partner, she is able to converse about such things. But, be warned. Do not ask her why she is as she is. She will hiss at you then. Talk with her about the weather, sport, or try an exchange of ideas.

The word bachelor was never exiled, never lost its evocation of liberty, autonomy and opportunity, but that word, her word, fossilised out on the horizon beside the snake-haired goddess, and names such as feminazi, marriage-wrecker, and mad fucking witch attached themselves to women who remained uncoupled past a certain age—an increasingly indeterminate age, an age previously around twenty-eight, which, by the mid-1980s, was around forty, and these days is the time a woman’s biological clock tocks loudest, usually around thirty-three.

To be a reclaimed spinster is to revel in the glorious quietude envied by people in families.

Reclaiming spinsterhood disguises the dark side, distracts from the social alienation, the loneliness before solitude sets in, the process of grief and recovery from repeated relationship breakdowns—how that particular scarring seeps into every new beginning. It ignores the financial stringency, work expectations, and a stranger’s insistence the spinster justify what is assumed to be her life choice.

The grief and loneliness of divorce and widowhood are not comparable to the repeated rejection and disappointments inherent in the solitary life.

Singles doing it for themselves do it on one income in a dual-income economy.

mine was a songline of loss and longing.

Panic belongs to the panicked, she said. Dread to the horror-struck. Remain calm, she said. Above all, breathe. Breathing is all we have to do to stay alive.

Too intelligent to be a wife.

Howard, Abbott and Costello believed women were infantile chattels who should know their place as indentured child bearers, understand the household budget and make virtuous men of their husbands. Kālī Domestica. The rest? Damned whores who should get hitched, preferably when their bodies were fertile.

Women, childless or not, with or without a partner, are fair game as they lead our nation or walk home at night.

death has an essential rightness to it. No death is petty.

I travel at the end of love, to remind myself of the greater world, then I return to Brunswick Street and her refracting hum of trams.

Travel reminds me life defies the trajectory we create to protect against the void. Travel delivers me into the mystery of the wind that bends the trees, the clouds that ride the wind, the sky behind the wind, and the stars in cosmos behind the sky.

The order of the universe would be irrevocably disturbed if he sat me at a table on my own.

How do you live this life? And my answer was death. And death was my answer because, despite the options emanating from such a revolutionary age, the option I desired most was the very model of a modern marriage my friends and family lived right in front of me. And, since I had been unable to form such a union, it was easy to think there was something sinister about me.

the only answer I had for the life at hand was a blackness that looked for all the world like death.

The Silence was a spectre, a ghostly judgment for not attaining the life my friends found so easily, punishment for not being good enough for food comas and fights about walking the dog. In those days The Silence never stayed, and when it left I was oh so impressed with my capacity for solitude.

In-between is where The Silence resides, calm and windswept as a forest clearing, and as contained. And when it arrives it insists you will stay until whatever you are to do, or whatever you are to be, calls you into the next episode.

I’m talking about the silence that greets you when the sound of the key in the latch is the first sound the house has known since you left. I’m talking about when your face has been still for twenty-four or maybe forty-eight hours because no one has spoken to you, and you have barely spoken to yourself. I’m talking about how, after so much silence, the sound of your voice seems foreign, too boisterous for company.

Its cottonwool dullness was akin to death.

I tried to talk about it, but my friends reminded me of the loneliness in marriage. Told me I was lucky to have solitude, that we find ourselves in solitude, and when we find ourselves we are ready to be in a relationship, and a relationship will come when we are ready. My friends wished they’d had more solitude before hooking up.

If my friends sat in a beach house for a month, or a year or two, would they slip beyond ...

That each was fond of me there was no doubt. If they thought of me they would pick up the phone, invite me to join them, or plan to drop by later. But I was not in their thoughts. On that Sunday morning, the sun on the pillow beside me, I let that truth soak in and I fell through the net.

When I say, No! My shape is solitude, I see them feel the chill of silence and move away. Silence might be kin to solitude, but it is identical to death.

The only thing that saves me is my courage to live the life at hand. I choose not to escape The Silence because to do so is to rush from life.

don’t feel connected to anyone when I’m alone, I said.

This is how depression goes. It lays you gagged and bound in raw sensations, verbally etherised on the night.

In the middle of my life I stood in the dark wood, the black dog by my side.

I learnt the difference between the suicidal intrusions of the dark wood and those of menopause.

Tell your story of it. It will be the most exciting, creative time of your life.

It will be the time you will remember that death came, and still you found life.

The road through solitary is heroic, the most terrible of paths, an odyssey into the invisible, and circular. Solitary is stifling, seems impossible to leave. It shrieks with unforgiving gods and wild imaginings. The traveller trips into loneliness, wallows in lamentation, throbs with molecules of meaninglessness. Not everyone returns, and those who do come clad in a different disposition.

I trudged that desolate path, wandered disoriented and confused. I rotted with the shame of being unlovable, rusted in my envy of those who found love so easily. My body ached from disaffection. My face hurt from not speaking. And there was sleep, too much of it. And boredom. It pinned me, mesmerised, to the void.

spending days alone revealed his moods to be nothing more than the weather of his soul. He said that in solitude life becomes vibrant, aflame, everything tastes more of itself.

His solitude was chosen. Unfettered by grief and shame and envy.

My face falls into wordlessness. There are no words to think, no words to speak, no one with whom to speak them.

I see the world, and the world sees me in the same moment, and in all moments.

I never imagined that solitude is the ritual and the robe, the companion to the beast.

Desiccated and fragmented, I had to discover who I am when I am not close friend, lover, partner, mother, career woman.

But nothing came of a litany of somethings, and my heart turned thin. I swam in the waters off the coast, let them hold my grief.

living in a family of one dissolves the boundary between public and private life entirely. The person I am at home is the person I am in the street, in friendship, with relatives and in public. In this way, my private language is my public language.

An independent, responsible woman must be courageous,

And I know friendship’s conceit, how it looks as robust as family, a viable alternative, when all it is, is what it is. A touch that comes and goes, without obligation, often without farewell. Sometimes the touch is indomitable, other times light, sometimes both.

It seems a human right, as basic as the right to breathe, that everyone has at least one person dedicated to them, a person who would be so distracted by grief they might not survive their loved one’s passing, yet here I am, personless in this world.

can tell you that entering the territory of She I Dare Not Name was like being diagnosed with a degenerative disease for which there are no treatments, and which doctors scarcely believe exists. The onset was gradual, the symptoms deniable until the truth invaded. I spent more time recovering from break-ups than being in relationships.

Yet it is clear, from walking down the street, that with whom we partner and have children has little to do with the shape of our bodies, our age, class, sexuality, or the integrity of our mental health.