We need new language to describe our identity. OK, I need new language to describe my identity.
There is childless and there is childfree, opposite ends of a spectrum. Childless is a sad disappointment, wanting to but not being able to have. Childfree is a proud rejection, staunchly not wanting.
Yet a good number of us are neither/nor. We’re ambivalent. Sometimes we’re anguished. As the final years of our fertility slide by, we swing from a surge of baby-desire, to resolute acceptance that’s not our path, to utter joy at the life we’re living.
Just last November, freshly 48, I welcomed my lover into me, knowing it was That moon, That time of the month. But most of the time I am content with my choice.
For it was certainly a choice. Twice during the past dozen years I would become pregnant and decide against it… but those are stories for another day.
Obviously the language of childless vs childfree fails us in another critical way, in that it literally centers the child. (So, really, do “auntie” and “unmother,” which I’ve also heard.) And so I have thought long and hard about a term that acknowledges our place, our choice, our status. Our power.
I have landed on.. cipher. We are ciphers. We are impenetrable mystery and unfathomed potential.
Originally, cipher was the mathematical symbol for zero; it comes from the Arabic sifr.
We are ciphers. We hold the space, fullness and emptiness simultaneously. We are our grandmother’s wildest dreams and the patriarchy’s wildest nightmares. Like a zero, at first glance we’re considered lacking, lacking value, making no contribution… but try expressing the biggest numbers the mind can hold—a billion, a trillion—without zeroes to hold space for potential.
Far from being nothing, zero is infinity’s twin. Zero is where the Universe begins and ends. Zero belongs to nothing. Ciphers belong to no one.
Happy Ciphers Day.