The Chosen Loneliness
I have always liked being special. Growing up I only wanted to stand out. I was always good at school, always smart, always the teacher’s pet. I had weird medical issues growing up and as sick as it sounds—kind of enjoyed the attention I got. I literally had a collapsed lung the day that we had a pulmonary lab in physical therapy school, so all my classmates got to listen to my absent breath sounds with a stethoscope. And...I liked that. (I did not like the chest tube, surgeries, and hospital stay, however). (But even now as I’m telling you this story, there is still some weird satisfaction in telling it—"See, I’m special!”)
When it came to standing out with my unexplained infertility on a path to IVF, the sheen of that specialness faded quite quickly. When my son arrived in an emergency cesarean at 33 weeks, I did not want to stand out. When we found out at 4 months that he is blind—I was done being special.
And yet—I find myself using these stories to feel special too. Look what I’ve been through—try to top that! It feels gross. And sometimes, I find myself secluding myself within my story. There is a strange othering that I continue to choose, sometimes to commiserate with other Others, or to prove that I’m still special.
When I joined MotherCircle, it was an online circle with hundreds of women from across the globe. I began to take in all the other women’s introductions on a Facebook page. Most of them (in my selective memory, which I’m confident is flawed in this particular story) shared about magical home births, had multiple children with whom they easily got pregnant, and maybe even had an orgasmic birth. Those were the ones I remembered. A handful told of miscarriage, very few of infertility; none told of having a child with a disability.
I felt other.
I felt like I didn’t belong.
I entered the Circle with loneliness.
I can see now that I chose that loneliness.
I resisted being fully present in the Circle because it felt safer to be guarded in my specialness than to be vulnerable in my full presence.
And something I didn’t expect happened. Over the course of the eight weeks, as we sat together in breakout rooms of 2 or 3 or 4 people, I heard more stories. A mom of twins who felt like she didn’t belong. A woman who was not yet a mother but desperately wants to be, and just went through a breakup with her partner. Single mothers. Pandemic mothers. And they all felt lonely too.
When I actually got to know the other participants—not just what they said in their introductions—I realized that I did belong. That I was other—because we are all Other.
No one has my story. I have no one else’s story. And what we see on the surface is an iceberg—I knew nothing of these women’s journeys, nothing of their own heartache and loss and yearning and Hard.
This is the gift of a space like MotherCircle. A space where we are called to join together with other women in a container of love and visibility. Where we can see that your story and my story are really not so different. Really not so special. When we can see that we are all Other, we can gather together with one an-Other.
If you feel called to join our Circle but aren’t sure if you will fit in, send me a message. Let’s get on a call and explore your resistance, your fears, your Otherness. Because I’m confident you do fit in. And if it’s the right time and place for you, you will belong.