My Beautiful Aloneness
Making Space for the Single Woman Inside Me
Today I have lived in my own home by myself for one month.Today I received a letter from the bank that begins, “Your mortgage loan referenced above was recently paid in full.”
I own this house.
I live here.
I paid for it.
It’s mine. It’s mine alone.
I love this aloneness.
When Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One’s Own in 1929, it was radical to think and even more radical say that a woman, a woman writer, must have a space — literal and figurative — of her own in which to create and be herself. Now, almost a century later, at least for me, it seems just as radical to think and even more radical to say that I must have this space in which to create and be my own unmarried, single, and yet fully human, fully developed, woman self.
I’ll turn sixty in January.
The first third of my six decades, I lived under my father’s roof as the eighth of nine children, soaking up my mother’s aspirations and expectations. I learned to stand up for those less capable or just quieter than me — siblings, friends, team mates. I learned to mask the fears and sadnesses that every child has, feelings of inadequacy or uncertainty, in a veneer of bravado and stoic determination. In school, I learned that books and teachers and coaches might redeem me. Outside of school, I learned to ration my wild streak, to tell no one, and to go only so far toward that bright edge of sexuality and adventure.
I learned to carry my own weight. (I was small and strong and could literally pull myself up and over the bar better and faster than anyone else in my 7th grade gym class). I learned to carry others. And I told myself, this was the heart of my goodness.
Acing the test was easy. Winning in swim meets was easy. Doing my part of the cleaning and cooking and housework (tasks in our household being strictly sorted by gender), was easy. The hard thing, the thing that mattered, was stuffing my own secret longing for singularity and separate space down so that I could, instead, protect and speak up for my anxious little sister. So that I could, instead, defend and direct my older broken sister. So that I could, instead, admire and support and play the sidekick to my brothers. So that I could, instead, become a human doing like my super mom managing and organizing and leading and skillfully facilitating every group that coalesced around me — teams, clubs, classes, church groups, friends.
The second two thirds — thirty-nine years — I lived with my boyfriend who became my husband, playing the sidekick to support his aspirations and manifest the expectations I now had of myself: to be a good wife, to excel as a teacher, to mother my children fiercely, to build communities of colleagues and neighbors and students, to carry my own weight and not be a burden, to carry his weight, their weight, by managing and organizing and leading and skillfully facilitating every group that coalesced around me — family, colleagues, civic organizations, neighborhoods, students, friends, and still, also, despite a thousand miles of distance, some of my siblings.
My goal in all those years, I see now, was to stitch the privileges and blessings of the middle-class, white, American trappings I had been given into something worthy and shining and enduring. Carrying forth, bearing up under the weight of whatever comes, being “of use” like the steady and powerful water buffalo in Marge Piercy’s poem, a poem I carried around in my wallet for so many decades, was what mattered most.
“You’re either a giver or a taker,” my dad used to say. I chose to be a giver because that was the good path. I gave all I had. I gave my self.
Saying that, out loud, sitting here at my own kitchen table, an almost 60-year-old woman looking out at my own patch of land, taking in the golden morning light glittering like pieces of fiery glass through the leaves of an October Maple, I feel a fist in my belly. I gave me. I gave up on that strong, small girl who wanted to take on the world by herself. I locked the poet into a closet and turned away. I stopped listening to her odd a cappella and tuned my ears to the pop music of romance and marriage
The fist in my belly is also this. In giving my false self, I took them.
I took forty years of my husband’s life. I took his laughter, his music, his boyish exuberance and made an earnest, responsible man of him. I took his insecurities and replaced them with confidence in me. I took his need and nurtured it into an enduring dependence. I took his desire and pruned it daily, like a prize bonsai displayed for the world to see. I took him away from his parents, whom he adored and I despised. I tried to take him away from his work and colleagues, a separate sphere without room for me. I took away his chance at deep, soul-connected love. And finally, I took away his dream of growing old together.
I took it for forty years. It took me forty years to stop taking it. To stop taking him. To stop giving in to my own stupid script for The Married Woman. To stop giving up and giving out, and to stop taking him to the cleaners. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so very, very sorry for all that I’ve taken. Here in the purgatory between separation and divorce, I can’t take it back, and I can’t give him back himself.
All those years, I thought I was saving our marriage. And I thought that was what I wanted — the most important thing. But I see now that in holding on and holding out, shoring up and doubling down, all I did was kill time. And time is what he needed, what we both needed, to love ourselves first and then, in time, someone else.
When I told our daughter that I was moving out. When I tried to explain, in the fumbling babble that was all I had for my decision a year ago, she said to me, “I wish you had done it when I was a kid. At least then, one of us could have been happy.” I had been thinking, as so many women do, I stayed for my kids. I gave them a childhood with two parents. I gave them the solid foundation and resources of two incomes and an enviable “normal” family with summer vacations and parents who showed up at their games and college tuition. But I didn’t give them an example of what it looks like to be a happy, self-actualized adult. I showed them sacrifice and grief. I didn’t show them what it looks like to love another human body and soul. I didn’t show them what it looks like to love yourself enough to step out into the light of your own dreams. In the day-in-and-day-out space where those examples might have lived in our family, I gave them nothing. I left it blank, and they left their childhood with an emptiness I cannot fill.
Which is what I am finally doing here in a room of my own. Filling up the empty space in my own heart. Filling it up with color and light and plants and furnishings of my choosing — a scarlet sofa! Filling it with the glorious quiet of autumn mornings at my writing table. Filling it with the laughter of friends who come to drink whiskey and play cards on Wednesday evenings. Filling it with my poetry books, feathers, stones, clay fetishes — all these totems I’ve secreted away in drawers and massaged like worry beads over the decades. My own little house. My own little house. I repeat this phrase over and over like a mantra, like the comforting smile of an aunty handing me a cup of tea.
When I was still a married woman, I had a different mantra. I remember telling myself, insisting to myself, repeating to myself, “This is enough.” (And thinking, it’s so much more than most women have.) I was a child of the plains, a Minnesota daughter, hearty frontier stock. We took a demented pride in making do with just enough. So, I remember being stalwart and resourceful. I remember feeling proud of making do with a good enough marriage. And I remember challenging myself to make it good, to quilt the scraps of my life into something beautiful and warm and useful. But I don’t remember being happy.
I feel happy now. Reading the letter again, “your mortgage loan referenced above was recently paid in full.” I say out loud again, “My own little house.” My own little house. I own it. I live here. It’s mine. It’s mine alone. I love this beautiful aloneness.
