by Pamela Jeanne
Life is a feeling experience.
That’s what my husband heard as a boy from his Uncle John. My better half gently repeats that statement to me when I am feeling life a little too much for my own tastes.
On those days when my heart isn’t working over time, my mind picks up the slack. I’m equally good living in my head — wondering, analyzing, questioning, imagining.
In the months and years following our fertility treatment losses, among the most regular series of questions that would occupy my gray matter were these: what would my life be like ten, twenty, thirty or more years from nowas a woman without children? How would I relate to other women, their children and grandchildren? Would I be well adjusted or still angry at the universe for having a barren body that couldn’t manage the conception and delivery of a child? Could I be fulfilled? At peace? Happy? And more importantly, how could I ensure a good outcome rather than the alternative?
I’m not the only one, it seems, who asks these questions. One of my fellow “baronesses” stated it more plainly in this post titled, “What the Hell Do I DoNow?”
My answer to those questions took shape on paper when I first started writing a few years ago as a way to make sense of our defiant and unexplained infertility. Eager to convey the weirdness of being barren in the modern age, I set out to write a novel. It involved two couples, Clare and Paul in Detroit, and Valerie and Greg in the Bay area. They were distantly related through a very fertile sister-in-law. In alternating chapters each couple battled differing biological reasons preventing conception. Distraughtand isolated in her experience Clare became acquainted with Audrey, an older childless woman. In time, they became confidants.
Clare learned that Audrey once suffered at the hands of friends and family who badgered her at every visit about when she would finally start a family. They bragged and complained about their children. They insulted her intelligence or questioned her childcare abilities when looking after a niece or nephew. They looked upon her barren state with a mixture of pity and disdain. Audrey, though, was stronger than her peers. Where they wilted under the weight of ordinary setbacks, Audrey easily managed through them. While her friends lost their identities and sense of purpose when their children moved out of the nest, Audrey was volunteering in the community and befriending and looking after young women like Clare. She was funny, insightful and young at heart.
I created the character initially because I wanted intensely to know if someone like Audrey existed. I craved a role model who could show me that my life wouldn’t be less than or empty without being a mother.
In time, I realized how difficult novel writing truly was. My plot, scene construction, dialogue, character development and sensory imagery felt flat.I was in way over my head. Instead I realized I’d have a more compelling story if I relied on what I knew best, my own life. And that’s how Silent Sorority was born.
But I never forgot Audrey.
Now five years after I started looking for her, a few years after seeing her take shape on the page, I’ve decided that perhaps I could keep her alive. Why not try to become like her.
She’s quite a bit more patient, zen-like and less judgmental than I am, so I know I have some work to do but it’s comforting, nonetheless, to have an archetype to model.
When no obvious role model exists, why not create one?