Aged Out?

For a lifetime I carried an empty cradle inside me, and I swore it was meant to stay that way. I thought my life was a garden of other things; wild travels, great loves, sacred silences, pages filled with selfish lustful words instead of lullabies. Children belonged to other women in other stories. My body was vessel of my own becoming, not for anyone else’s arrival. A finite fuck you to the patriarchy that had held and shaped my outlook for so long.

I believed myself.

I believed it so fully that I built my whole house upon it. Laid other hearts to waste to protect it. And then one morning the floorboards gave way. A desire I had never known arrived like a storm in the night. Not gentle rain or curious what ifs, but lightning, searing, unstoppable, sudden. It was not a thought I could reason with. It was hunger, it was prayers. It was the unbearable recognition that somewhere inside me a room had always been waiting to be filled and I had only just now found the key.

It’s easy, I supposed; to grow up longing for children and carry that wish like a river through the years, your whole identity mapped around its shores. But what of the woman who never longed, who dismissed the idea as foreign only to awaken one day to find her soul suddenly empty, aching for what ifs.

That is not a river, that is an earthquake. The land shifts beneath you, the map you’ve drawn for yourself collapses, and you are left staring at the rubble of your own certainty. There is panic in this awakening. A stubbornness to not admit it out loud. To refuse to acknowledge every man that once sat in board rooms saying “you’ll change your mind one day”. It feels like chasing a train already pulling away, arms outstretched, breath caught in the throat. You’ve never felt left behind in life before, but now… everyone else already boarded long ago; friends now deep in bedtime rituals, first days of school, the mess and music of family life replacing the muddy paddocks of festivals and festivities. And here I am, ticket crumpled in my hand, whispering to the wind, Wait for me?

But time does not wait. The body does not wait. And so I stand trembling, both late and suddenly desperate, a pilgrim at the gates of a temple I never thought I would worship in.

The hardest part is not the longing itself, its the dismantling of who I thought I was. I wore my childlessness like armour, like identity, like prophecy. I was the free one, the untethered, white couches and clean hands. My choices, my lovers, my pursuits, all spun from a single thread.

The thread has snapped and I don't know what cloth I am weaving any more. To want something you once swore you never would feels like a betrayal. Not just of others, of the hearts you shattered saying no along the way but of yourself. The girl I was at twenty laughing at the thought of cribs and car seats, feels betrayed. The woman I was at thirty proudly declaring her independence feels erased.

Maybe its not meant to be stone, maybe its supposed to be water, always finding new shapes. Maybe the truest betrayal would be clinging to the shell of who I was, instead of honouring who I am becoming.

Still, the ache is relentless. And it terrifies me. To suddenly want with every cell of my being what I may never have. It feels like being split in two. Like carrying both in my chest at once. What does a woman do with this?

If I never hold a child of my own, does this longing dissolve back into the soil of me? Selfish and self assured, leaving only a scare where it bloomed for a season. The agony of a changed mind, the sudden rupture of certainty, the unbearable beauty of new desire. the terror of time slipping through my fingers like sand. It is standing at the edge of the vast unknown, torn between grief and awe, between possibility and impossibility.

It is discovering that the self is never finished. that we are not the authors of our own certainties, only their scribes. That desire can come unannounced like a stranger at the door, and demand to be let in. It is realising that it might never be.

No longer the woman who says; never. Forever the woman who says Maybe, Yes, please, let it be. An ache itself proof. My soul; still alive, still breaking, still blooming.