Gut,Throat,Head

By Molly Pickup

Apple is your first word. It feels like a good one to start with. Alphabetically. A word that sets the rest of them off. You’ll have words for the rest of your life, and this feels like the way to begin. Start as you mean to go on.

You are sixteen, and the words you will choose when you breakup with your first boyfriend are, “I don’t know, maybe I’m a lesbian, I could be, I don’t know.” You’re definitely not straight. Your attraction to women has never been the problem. You just know that you enjoy spending time with him, but after your first date, you sat on the corner of your bed and cried into your knees at the overpowering feeling in your gut. In retrospect, it’s the one you get when you lie. You’re sitting on a bench in a park near his house. He buys you ice cream after the breakup and it’s awkward, because it sounded like a flimsy excuse to your own ears. God knows how it sounded to him. Six years later, when you come out publicly, he will like the Instagram post.

You are seventeen and find work on the clothing department of a supermarket that will remain unnamed. You mostly work on your own, and it’s the pandemic, so the greatest portion of your time is spent wandering empty aisles and putting clothes back on hangers. You don’t have a specific department. Marg has girls and Julie has boys and Sue has accessories. You are a floater type of hire and so you make an art of being out of the way of any customers. They’ll ask you where things are, and you don’t know, so you’ll hide in the warehouse, or the closed fitting rooms, or the toilets that are a good six-minute walk away from the shop floor. You play an egg farming game on your phone for half of every shift, or you wander around the other non-clothing aisles, looking for anything to do that isn’t your job. You find a place to sit between the puffer jacket rail in the back, and you keep a scanner in hand so you can hop up and pretend to be working if anyone comes in.  

You are seventeen, and very bad at your job. Deliberately so. And you will hold onto this idea of yourself for far longer than it will be true. The next job you have, you will work hard, and be kind to all customers, and know the layout of the shop so well by heart that you could walk it eyes closed. You will do tasks on instinct. They’ll give you a bottle of champagne at Christmas. It’ll take you two years of working there for you to have the moment of oh. I’m quite good at this. 

All this to say; you have a habit of holding onto ideas of yourself. A resistance to changing. You are so certain; certain about yourself in everything you do. In the first job, the one you’re not good at, you will have a conversation with a co-worker on the odd day you are actually doing work. You are on the topic of children. She is in her late thirties and has a child a little younger than you. 

You do not want kids. You have never wanted kids. You say as much. And though you like this co-worker – she is cool and interesting and tells you about movies she thinks you’ll like (she’ll be right about this – one of the films she mentions will remain your favourite for years) – she scoffs. Her own daughter is, rightly, the love of her life, and the warm pressure bubble feeling she radiates when she speaks of her is clear. She smiles at you, marking down the baby clothes, and tells you you’ll change your mind. It only makes you more staunch in your declaration. You won’t. You won’t. “Have a career,” she tells you, “You can have both. That’s allowed.” 

But you don’t want both. You think of children, of how small they are. You do like children. Your hand lingers on a tiny tee with a dinosaur embroidered on it. You’d like to buy baby clothes. That could be fun. But the thought develops, you sit with this baby on knee, the father gets home from his long day. His long day. And you are there to greet him – evidence of his work. A reward for it. And no matter how soft the fabric of the shirt is, you drop it from your fingers as if it burns you. Your throat scratches with the holding in of a yell. As if this shackle of a life is the worst thing you can possibly imagine, as if it scares you just at the thought. You maintain that you are attracted to men. The presence of the baby is where the fear comes from.  

You are too impulsive. Selfish. Self-centred. Pretentious, too, though that isn’t mutually exclusive from children. You could raise pretentious little toddlers in turtleneck navy jumpers. You could buy them gingham trousers and Mary-Janes for feet they can’t walk on. You could read them poetry and bop them on your hip. Make them French onion soup from scratch and teach them to like rose lattes. You’re not a very good dancer, but you can sing, and you could sing them Sondheim and Gilbert & Sullivan and Neil Diamond. You could dress them in your favourite colours – shades of green and blue and yellow – until they figure out their own. Maybe their favourites will become yours. Maybe they’ll grow up and show you singers you’ve never heard of. Or maybe they’ll dance. Maybe they’ll teach you as much as you could ever teach them. 

But you don’t want children. You never have. 

You are twenty and at a café with friends, and you are talking about having kids. It seems to come up a lot. Friends, schoolmates, whatever, are already having them, and it begs the question of whether you’re too young. The women you’re with talk about being a mother, about what they want from it, or how their minds have changed as they get older. You have always been the friend who doesn’t want children. You are secure in it. Confident – not loud – not hateful. But sure. As they talk, you stay quiet. You just don’t have much to add; it has nothing to do with the lump in your throat. They’ll be excellent mothers. Their partners will be brilliant fathers. They’ll be involved, loving. You did not grow up with a father. It was you and your Mum. You’ve always been fine without one. But you think, sometimes, in moments when you’re feeling unfair, that she regrets it sometimes. Her choice to raise a child without a partner. Especially now you’re an adult yourself. You don’t want to be lonely when you grow up.

(You are twenty-one, and on the Tube home from work. Your phone is on 5%, and so you can’t play solitaire. From Finsbury Park to Arnos Grove, you are forced to sit and think. You don’t know what it is, you’ll never remember what prompted it, but by the time you’re home, you’ve worked up the small bit of courage it takes to tell your flatmates, “I’m probably a lesbian, by the way. I’ve given in.” They know. They’ve known for years, but they’re happy you’re sure.) 

You are twenty-two and at a birthday party for a one-year-old. You sit on the sofa with a cup of tea, and chat with women and their boyfriends, fiancés, husbands. You watch them mother their children with one hand, the other holding paper plates of finger sandwiches and mini sausage rolls. The day flickers between sun and rain, and the mum of the one-year-old worries about it. Eventually, graciously, it settles on sun, and you find yourself sat in a deckchair holding someone else’s five-week-old. He has a tiny scrunched up face that makes him look like a boxer, wrinkles across his forehead and nose and cheeks. Strangers watch you, offer to take him off you, and you say, “Oh, I’m okay,” and eventually they joke to your Mum that she’ll be getting grandchildren soon. 

She smiles, catches your eye, and laughs that this will be the only time she sees you hold a baby. And this, in itself, is kind. It is an acceptance of no grandchildren. Of what you have been telling her for years. You’re her only child, and you are cutting off her line, and she smiles at you over her mug. She’s not even disappointed. There is a twisting in your gut. To nod, to agree with her, that you feel the same way you always have. 

This baby is not yours. In forty-five minutes, you will hand him back to his mother, who is only a year older than you. Her fiancé has their three-year-old in his arms, and really, really they seem like a lovely couple. Still, you look at them. You don’t want this, do you? Not in this way. It’s the first time you’ll allow yourself that caveat. In this way. You stand, watching as all the parents leave one by one. You’ve been playing toy cars with one of the cousins, and any time you go out to the garden, he drags you back in with a sticky hand. He fights with his sister about the order of the cars, and you find a compromise and they both smile at you. And it feels lovely. The whole day. 

In the car, on the way home, you sit with the window rolled down. For a long time, you hadn’t realised you got motion sick. You got headaches and nauseous in the backs of cars, but you weren’t in them often enough to see it as the pattern it was. One day, revelation, car sickness! A simple answer to a gut, throat, head feeling. Now, you can prepare for it. You’ll sit in the front when possible. You’ll crack open a window. On long journeys, you’ll take travel sickness meds. Simple, easy solutions. Like most of your revelations, nothing prompted it. One day, your mind ticked over to the answer. You just gave in to the feeling. 

But how do you change your mind about something as big as children? As tiny as children? As fragile, as malleable? Is that allowed? 

You do not want to be a mother with a father. This you’re sure of. You don’t want to be a mother on your own. You think you might quite like being a mother with a wife.

Children do not mean man. Children does not mean husband. Children simply means children. Children means I, mother. I, mum. Children means raising and choosing and holding and teaching to choose and teaching how to hold. And quite particularly children, for now, are not imminent. Part of the beauty of lesbian relationships is that it’s often difficult for accidental pregnancy. Part of the beauty of now, is that accidental pregnancy doesn’t have to mean children. Children means choice. Children means growing older first, so you have more to teach them. 

You are not the self you were at sixteen and unsure. Seventeen and hiding. Twenty and silent. Twenty-one and bored and smiling and full of realisation. You pick up a tiny lesbian flag for your room. You stick it in a plant you’ve had for years. You are someone who is allowed to change their mind. You have your gut, throat, head to listen to. Children are potential, and you are definite.