“But do you ever feel sad that you didn’t have them,” I probe.
“I think everyone has regrets,” she says. “There might be a point where I wondered, what would that theoretical kid have been like. But it doesn’t change what I want.”
The other, who is single and turning 50 this year, feels similarly. We’ll call her Mary. We spoke just before the holidays and she admitted this is the only time of year she feels grief about being childfree by choice. “I would love to have had a 20 year old kid coming home for Christmas,” she says. “I’m not surrounded by that and I feel like that’s sad. But I don’t regret it. It’s just like, ‘Oh, I didn’t get to experience that.’ I’ve given up on some love that I could have experienced.”
Perhaps my musings are bigger than parenthood, she wonders. More about choice, consequence, and time. We’re in our second act now, the back nine. Life isn’t written, but it sure as hell isn’t a blank page where every day felt like a choose-your-own-adventure novel and every decision, no matter how mundane, sparkled with life-changing possibility like you were in an episode of Girls. “When you get to my age, you start thinking, ‘that was my life. It’s not gonna be much different than this.’ And that’s hard,” says Mary.
I agree and disagree. I believe that you don’t have to be Madonna to be able to reinvent yourself whenever you want. But she’s right that the older we get, the more we reap the consequences of our earlier life decisions, some of which are deeply high stakes.
There’s a scene in La La Land where Emma Stone’s character Mia, now a successful movie star, runs into her ex Sebastian, played by Ryan Gosling, now a successful jazz pianist and club owner. As she watches him play, we see a montage of the life they would have had together. Both are beautiful and rich and full of ups and downs, but only one is hers, the one she chose — without him. Because real lives aren’t movies, we will never know what our other stories might look like, which is perhaps the biggest gut punch of all of this.
Writer Cheryl Strayed referred to this idea as a “ghost ship” in a 2011 Dear Sugar column. She was writing to a middle-aged man, who, along with his wife, wasn’t sure if they wanted children. She wrote: “I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.”