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Dearest First name / One,

 

As I move through my second year of Long Covid, with its attendant very low energy levels, I'm having to take a hard look at how much my idea of myself and my identity is tied to productivity. And I've been thinking how that relates to my non-productivity as a non-mother and non-grandmother too. 

 

Over the fifteen years since I created Gateway Women, I've lost of the amount of times that people have said to me, ‘Oh, I don’t know how you do it all!' and I've shrugged it off, because I was always more attuned to what wasn't getting done: the podcast I never started; the book about the specific experience of being both single and childlness I didn't write; the workshops that didn't sell; the meetups I created that no one turned up for. As an entrepreneur, people see and remember what worked, not the many things that didn't happen or didn't work. I wish I had been more appreciative of my own capacity for incredibly hard work and output during those years, and had taken those comments as the compliments (and perhaps warning!) that they were. During most of that time, I was unpartnered too, and I can see how my studies to become a psychotherapist and my work creating and sustaining Gateway Women were the twin poles I hitched my identity flag to: work was my identity.   

 

As someone who has managed a couple of chronic pain conditions already in my life (and let's not forget unexplained infertility!), I'm not unused to dealing with the restrictions of health conditions on my goals and dreams. But combining my Long Covid with a definite inward shift in my personality as I move through my sixties, I'm having to dig very deep into ‘who’ I am to adjust to the fact that I now move at a much slower pace, or am wiped out for a few days by even a minor ‘push’. At the beginning of this year, and faced with the very real possibility of a life-threatening diagnosis (thankfully ruled out in June), I gave myself an entirely self-imposed deadline to finish the third draft of my novel about a single, childless, midlife woman by the end of October – but I can now see there's no way I'm going to make it. Writing a novel involves holding a whole world in your head as you write, which requires huge cognitive capacity, and I'm currently only able to sustain that for short periods of time, not the two-to-four hours a day, 5 days a week, I'd set for myself. Ha! It seems the old driven version of me isn't giving up just yet!

 

Which brings me to my garden. This is only my second year of gardening, having longed to have a garden for the 30-odd years I lived in London. For the medium amount of effort I put into her, she rewards me with the most magically productive results that make my heart swell, and keeps my kitchen full of delicious food too. (Plus plenty of disasters because in gardening, like life, you learn from making mistakes!) It's the only activity I can engage in that doesn't exhaust me, because she nourishes me as I nourish her; it's a relationship, not a task. She also doesn't ask of me ‘who are you?’ or judge me if I'm not doing things fast enough, or leave things too late. Gardening works at nature's speed, not the inhuman speed of a machine, and I'm learning that I am nature too, and that I have days when my growth is spurting and I'm producing fruit, and other days when nothing much seems to be happening. So the question is, can I treat myself more like a garden, and trust that even when things look quiet, processes are powerfully underway out of sight? 

 

Living in a profoundly rural area where almost every woman is a mother and grandmother, identities that fill up their inner and outer worlds without anyone questioning them about either their productivity or value, I still rely on my ‘output' identity - answering ‘I’m a writer' if asked. I'm wondering how I might shift that, and what I might say instead? I don't have an answer to this yet, and these are the kinds of things I ponder as I prune my tomatoes and try to save my brassicas from the storm of hungry butterflies that have descended on them in the very warm weather we've been having (for Ireland). So, at the end of the day, all I can do is to steward my little patch of this beautiful earth, and do my best to become a good ancestor, knowing that eventually I will once again become soil. It kind of puts productivity into perspective a bit, doesn't it?!

 

For now, I would like to say a particular thank you to those of you who have remained as paid subscribers to my Substack, even though I'm publishing very rarely at the moment (my writing energy is going into that darn novel!), and to those of you whom almost every month leave me a tip after reading this newsletter – showing how you value me above any capitalist measurements of ‘productivity’. There are also many of you who drop me a line (just click reply) to say how much you appreciate this newsletter and how you look forward to it dropping into your inbox each month – that's a heck of a compliment these days! Comments and actions like these have kept me showing up here each month, even as the effort of doing so often seems like something else I need to pull back from. 

 

You have shown me again and again how much you value my reflections on my evolving childless life, and I am deeply touched by that. Thank you. 

 

From your greenish-fingered friend until next month,

I love this picture by the very talented Zöe Noble of We Are Childfree; you can book your own non-parent portrait session here.