notes from a non-conforming woman

OFFLINE BLING is a free newsletter about offline life musings, burnout recovery and personal essays. Thank you so much to those that have become paid subscribers. If you haven't, it would be a lot cooler if you did. If you don't get that movie reference, we had vastly different high school experiences. Thanks for taking the time to read and support my writing. 

Do you want to know when I realized I was on a different life trajectory than most of my girlfriends? 

In my last year of high school, there were them, and there was me, which still rings true. It isn't a "they vs. me" thing; these friends are some of the best humans I know. These nuances were there when we were younger. What used to feel like personal failures in the ways I was different from my friends is now an inner knowing of why, once I reached high school age, my experiences were trying and traumatic at times. I didn't know how to name it, but naming it now is helping me heal and understand myself and others better. My capacity for difference is expanding, making me want to tap into the essence of my grades 6 and 7 self before I was conscious of idealized womanhood or the social codes we are told to follow for belonging— before the twists, bends, and breaks from a fragmented self.

Where we diverge is mostly around societal expectations that women face, my frame of reference being vastly different than those of women in some other parts of the world where women are subjugated or the ones here with fundamentalist religious backgrounds or those fixated on strict gender roles and oppressive ideologies preventing them from having a choice of what kind of woman they would like to be or policing others in the name of it.

Some of the present societally measured differences are that I am unmarried (although I have a partner of 11 years), neurodivergent, I have a brain that works differently than most of the population (late ADHD diagnosis), and I am the only one without kids by choice.

The messiness of life in my early twenties, the healing I had to do in my thirties, the lack of maturity, and the wild adventures I've been on due to impulsiveness and lack of guardrails with a brain like mine have been a reflection point lately. All the roads I took and didn't take because I didn't fit traditional gender roles and the neurotypical mould.

I did not envision myself as a wife or mother in the conventional sense. I saw myself as equal to my partner. After a few agonizing attempts, I found that in a man. I bent but did not break. I saw myself as an auntie and wondered why that wasn't enough. I was aware of how society treated mothers and how some husbands did too—a comprehensive pattern seeker with a deep-rooted need to understand how the world worked and how entitled certain people feel towards women's bodies, their care and energy. I did not see myself in that role. I had other plans, but never as separate from other women.

I spent most of my last year in high school playing Euchre in the quad, catching up with old friends I went to grade and middle school with. From grade 9 to 12, I went to a Catholic high school— plaid skirts, white button-down dress shirts, dark blue cardigans and boring black shoes worn daily, a sea of sameness, orderly and dull. I transferred to the high school where my old pals were. The ones I only saw on the weekends or at sporting events. I went to start anew and get a change of scenery.

If I wasn't in the quad, you could find me playing with clay, painting in the art room, or taking a chemistry class. I was there to retake the class I failed, and the art was a bonus. The periodic table of elements I failed to care about a year ago was back in my life: hydrogen, lithium, magnesium, potassium, and my favourite, boron, atomic number five. Those elements now mean more to me as I age, especially magnesium. I need that shit to sleep.

My carefree attitude was also an over-compensation for how I cut myself off from potential avenues for my future due to school anxieties and lack of support for what was most likely some learning challenges. I was terrified of being picked to read out loud in class. A guidance counsellor worsened my school experience by making me feel dumb. To prove my worth somehow resulted in me presenting an aloofness, no-care attitude, still cool in others' eyes but already wounded and exhausted by the time I reached the end of high school. I found my method of fitting in by not letting myself be fully known while covering up the things that our culture deems as weak and unacceptable. I discovered a way to protect myself by limiting disappointment of my own and by others. In ways, I fell for what society expects women to be and do, but I pushed back in small and big ways as time passed.

While my girlfriends were filling out their university transcripts, I was looking for cherry orchards to work at in the Okanagan Valley for the summer. I dreamed of a backpacker's life, travelling across the country by bus, along the way, stopping in cities I'd never been and figuring that plan out from my childhood home's chilly basement, where my dad's dial-up internet allowed me to look for ways to make it so.

Exploring new places, picking cherries straight off the trees for breakfast, smoking rolled cigarettes around a campfire with new friends, living in a tent for the summer with one of my best friends, and gleefully embracing our unshaven legs for months. That painfully slow computer also helped me plan a three-month trip to Southeast Asia years after finishing two years of my massage therapy college course. I was running from my life and the abusive relationship I was in. That basement where my dad's messy desk was, his floppy disks strewn about, multicolour paperclips, binders thick with work papers and an assortment of fancy pens he'd get from work, the left side of the desk sat that off-white computer with its boisterous keyboard was my portal—a way to get with different.

The question often gets lofted in subtle or blatant ways: what is your life if you aren't a wife or mother? What is your place, and what is its meaning? In other words, "get in the damn box, you're making me uncomfortable." The non-wife and non-mother discourse has been hot on TikTok and other social media platforms for a while, as it still holds a stigma even in 2024. Ruby Warrington recently wrote a book I have yet to read called Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood.

According to a small study in 2017, 197 undergraduate psychology students participated in the research and found that people view parenthood as a moral imperative. They were told the experiment was about people's sense of intuition and how accurately they can predict the future. They were asked to rate how psychologically fulfilled they thought the subject was. In another series of questions, researchers also obtained data from their participants on whether they felt disapproval, anger, outrage, annoyance, or disgust toward the subject. The participants perceived childfree by choice male and female subjects to be "significantly less psychologically fulfilled than targets with two children," they also reported "significantly greater moral outrage" toward them.

People can keep their moral outrage for someone else because I am utterly uninterested. I want to know the person before me, not for how well they perform from the box they were told to be in. The stereotype women like myself face is exhaustive. No, I'm not selfish; I am realistic. I know enough not to become a mother when I don't want to. I don't hate kids, and I also don't hate men. As someone I deeply admire, Rachael Rice often says, "There's no such thing as other people's children." I wish more mothers would let me be auntie in this way. The chasm between the taut nuclear family and those living outside it, in my experience, misses these connection cues or assumes that because I don't have kids of my own, I don't want to be part of their daily lives.

I love my married and mother friends, their kids and the lives they have built; even if one of my ex-friends tried to say that I didn't, she went as far as to say that "I hated her life," I didn't have the energy at the time to unpack that for a plethora of reasons, mainly that it's inexplicably untrue, demonstrably so. What is true is that I get frustrated with what is expected of mothers and their unequal load compared to their husbands regarding parenting. I don't take kindly to watching women drown for the sake of being told how selfless she is. I want entire families, their mothers, their mothers, and mothers to be thought of in ways that weave us into remembering their essence, to be loved, cherished, and nourished, and the same for the men of their lives, to disentangle from patriarchy so they too can be free. How wrong we can read each other because of these made-up constructs. More broadly, these parameters of what womanhood should be and look like restrict our connection to each other and our ability to imagine a woman's life living outside these expectations without contempt.

What is also true is that I want, and in the case of the friendship that is no longer, was to be integrated into the people I love lives and her children's lives while also being seen in who I am and my differences being an asset, not a reason to alienate. As another person whom I learn so much from says, "difference holds possibility" James-Olivia Chu Hillman.