Dear soft heart,
For the past several months, since the end of the summer 2023, I have been in a void. I am in between a life I knew very well, and a new one that is not quite clear to me - it’s an uncomfortable time, when we go through these things, these life transitions and changes, these interruptions, emptiness and confusion permeates where there was once fullness and certainty.
The last time I went through a void experience is when I came out in late 2018. I was so lost when I went from being in a relationship with a cis man on the track to marriage and kids by 27 (the perfect age for your first kid in the culture I grew up in), to coming out as queer and realizing I had never actually consciously signed up for this marathon I was running - the husband and kids one. I didn’t know anyone else at that point who had not been signed up, or running it. We never asked each other questions about it in my circle, it was just what we did. What was I supposed to be aiming for in life personally if it wasn’t a husband and kids? What other measures of success were there for a woman in her personal life, if she wasn’t fulfilling this one? My identity as a woman was so tied into eventual motherhood and heteronormative standards from such a young age, I had not known any different and thus I lived in a void when that was no longer my life, or what I was moving toward. And I wrote about that experience in the chapter, The Marathon We Run, that I want to share with you today as part of sharing some snippets of my memoir Can You Turn The Lights Off? on this newsletter in the upcoming weeks. Also, please don’t judge me for putting a Lady Gaga quote in my college dorm room. Xoxo
If you resonate or like this writing, heart this piece, or if you’ve also been in a void between two different lives, between someone you used to be, and someone you are becoming, feel free to drop a line of solidarity below.
And you’re in a void right now, might I suggest locating a bath tub and staying in it for a while? Illustrations below by Lisa Seilkopf for chapter 27 - the marathon we run
Twenty-seven.
THE MARATHON WE RUN
I like many other little girls who displayed stereotypically feminine interests or traits, grew up thinking there was one specific marathon to run. This marathon was the husband and kids marathon.
I was recruited into training for this marathon to conquer it and arrive at the finish line by age 25 at the very latest, so I’d have time to get married and have my first kid by age 27. All of my girlfriends would always say, “Oh, I want my first kid by the age of 27 at the very latest.” This meant they had time to go to college and start a career, only to abandon it completely for their husbands and kids and catch up with it later on when the kids were in school.
My friends would often joke that I would be the last to get married. They poked at this playfully, but it also had an extremely serious air to it. I didn’t seem to prioritize love the same way they did. I prioritized my career. I wanted to be a well-known writer. I wanted my writing to be so good that people thought about it when they were bored in the grocery store check-out aisles, or a thought I wrote floated in their heads before they drifted off to sleep. I wanted to live in a loft in a big city and have a dog. My list of desires truly never included a bullet point for a husband.
I remember doing my homework one fall afternoon in the courtyard of the library at university when Paxton said, “You’ll be the last to be married. You’ll be like a spinster with your dogs and your career that won’t ever leave you.” This comment came after I told her I was pretty meh about my current boyfriend.
“That’s right.” That sounded way better than the husband and kid scenario.
Honestly, I sounded like a forevermore closeted lesbian. My favorite quote, and yes, I had it hung up in my dorm room, was a Lady Gaga one that said something like, “You know what’s never going to wake up in the morning and decide it doesn’t love you anymore? Your career.”
I didn’t want to risk the potential consequences of love. I honestly thought I would maybe never get married or have a long-term relationship. I didn’t want to experience the pain I saw my parents have in their divorce, and I sure as Hell didn’t want to put my own kids through that either. I was content to make art my life’s partner. Parts of me are still content doing that. I didn’t yet know that it wasn’t love that created consequences. It was people who weren’t well who did.
So, when I met Dennis, it surprised me the most. Even though I was always trained to run this marathon, I never thought I’d actually finish it in time.
Dennis and I talked about our futures a lot. We talked about how we wanted kids. I wanted two, and he wanted three or four. I said I would decide if I would shoot those extra kids out if we could manage two first. We anticipated how I was most likely going to be a nightmare that he’d love right through my pregnancies.
We talked about adopting a dog we would call Penelope when we would move into a home with a yard because it would be hilarious when the kids tried to say her name. We would imagine they would say, “Nelepee” or “Pene.” We created sketches of it as though we were on Saturday Night Live late at night. We talked about gathering and saving our money to buy property in the Midwest to have residual income. We talked about how we would parent. We both agreed on gentle parenting approaches that would largely be home school or Montessori-based. We talked about the dream a lot. The white picket fence and the husband in a suit and the dinner ready by 6 pm made by the doting wife in a beautiful dress. We had the timelines roughly planned out, and we were going to do this damn thing—we’d legally bind ourselves to one another, and I’d get on his health insurance at work.
What I never realized as we planned out our lives is that we talked about the things we would do together, but we never talked about ourselves as a couple. How we would keep the spark alive. How we would treat each other. What was important to us as a unit or important to us as individuals. I loved this dream we would dream together. It was the promise of everything I had lost. Or the guarantee that I’d get to have something I never had. It was everything my mother lost or couldn’t quite reach in the marriage she had with my father. The marathon she had perfectly run only to see her medal ripped from her.
My mom had met my dad just in time to finish the race—she was 24, they got married when she was 26, and by the time she was 27, she had me. She had aced the marathon—arriving in perfect timing. So, when she was 40, and the entire thing blew up, it felt like she had failed at life. As a feminine woman, I think many of us think something is wrong with us if, at any time after the age of 25, we aren’t on the way or arrived at the husband and kids. It’s as though it’s implicitly the thing everyone assumes we live for, so it’s weird if something falls through and the plan doesn’t go accordingly—by our own choice or in the form of things we cannot control.