Coulda Been a Contender
A couple of nights ago, as Emily scrolled through her Hulu recommendations to find a lurid true crime show to soothe her to sleep, she came across the iconic art house film, Sliding Doors. For our more uncultured readers out there, this Gwyneth Paltrow rom com is all about the choices we make and the lives we never live. Emily didn’t end up watching it, even if Gwynnie’s languid movements and wilting bedroom eyes were just the soporific she might have needed.
It did get her thinking, though, about an article in last week’s New York Times, The Lies Mothers Tell Themselves and Their Children. In it, Elise Loehnen reflects on her mother, who was both loving and also performed motherhood as an obligation rather than a choice; she “was good at it, but it was just not who she wanted to be.” Loehnen spent her childhood trying to compensate for the sacrifices her mother had made in order to raise children, writing, “As Carl Jung famously said, nothing is more influential in a child’s life than the unlived life of the parent. My mother’s unlived life ricochets inside my life.”
Fortunately, neither of us spends much time wondering about what our lives would be like if we hadn’t had children. Deciding to have them was arguably the most obvious choice we have ever made. But we all have unlived lives. So the question is: what unlived life of yours might ricochet inside your children? In Emily’s case, there’s a supermodel-turned-glamorous-dignitary banging around inside each of her kids, because she’s pretty sure that’s where she was headed before kids. For Alexina, it’s a spot on the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team and subsequent lucrative book deals and motivational speaking gigs.
Which brings us to two takeaways: first, whatever your “unlived life” is, you probably weren’t going to be as amazing in it as you might imagine; and second, your unlived lives have less to do with what you might have achieved and more to do with what your end goal was. Alexina, for instance, always dreamed she’d have kids who loved soccer as much as she did. Instead, one of her three boys hates it (his word), one excels at flower picking and hugging while on the field and the other is working on learning to hold his head up. This has been disappointing for Alexina. But as we discussed our newsletter topic together this week, Alexina realized that her love of soccer was mostly rooted in escaping a rocky childhood. When she fell in love with soccer, what she was seeking was not the game itself but a sense of safety and stability. As a mother, this is exactly what she is giving her children. Her unlived life, it turns out, is not so unlived after all.