One of Substance
Nullipara 1. noun: a woman who has never given birth
Article by Charlotte Maley Art by Avery Carrington
Trigger Warning: Eating disorder
There are small, figurine-type toys called Little People… My kid sister has a set of them like the one that I had, almost two decades ago. As I sit on my single dad’s dirty green couch, looking lazily at this familiar group of playthings scattered across an unkempt floor, I am taken back to mementos of my own childhood. Amongst all the figurines of farm animals, magical creatures, and beings whose categorization I could never place, I remember that I only ever wanted to play with the one which was shaped like a baby. Barely more than a toddler, I had no other inclination than to be a mother.
I have always experienced what so many people like to call real life as a dream. I often blur these two allegedly distinct realms; I mistake visions for memories and forget true events as hallucinations. I exist in liminal space, and it is because of this that I’m convinced that children who gravitate towards baby dolls are not sweet or caring by nature. Children only like these dolls because they’re trying to make sense of an emptiness. I have always felt as though, if only I could have a baby, just once, then I could convince myself that I had really been here after all, despite my doubts. Babies serve this purpose only.
This void that I speak of is not one regarding meaning, but one of substance. I could care less about purpose. So much of philosophy fears that all which is real is our soul and thoughts and nothing that is material. I fear the opposite. I am convinced that there is a world which is pulsating with life, but that I am not part of it; I’ve never felt love. I see the connection between other people, as real and as undeniable as it can be, but have never experienced such a tether to this planet. It is as though I am a hollow tree trunk with no roots to nurture or intertwine with others. I am completely for show, and cannot even reach out to take the nutrients of my neighbors. I am excluded from the ecosystem… a being who is unconcerned with conviction, I am a plastic tree in a vibrant forest.
For the longest time, I was convinced that deep within me was that substance, that soul, which allows everyone else to bond with each other. I thought that everyone had a plethora of gilded keys in their pockets, and that they could love me if only I gave them the small, golden jewelry box that lay hidden somewhere, buried in the depths of my gut. If only they could see the box, they could use this key, and open it to reveal that pure and loveable substance. I think that this is why I starved myself for so much of my life. But why, people ask, would you ever want to starve yourself if you already feel empty? The stupid answer that I’ve heard other anorexics give is that they want the physical state to match, metaphorically, the barren land within, blah blah blah.
The truth is that at some point, we convince ourselves that this magical little box, that which everyone has a key to, could be revealed if only it weren't trapped under layers of fat and skin. Like buried treasure, we dig and never find it. All that anorexics are is a dirty old man on the beach with a rusted metal detector, whose skin is scourged from years in the sun and whose plastic shark-tooth necklace has long rotted away, only we never find so much as an old coin or tin can. This delusion, the one that convinced me that underneath all the flab and muscle is me and that, if only I could free her, then I would feel alive, was broken the moment I turned to nothing but skin and bone, only to find no pointy corner of my jewelry box sticking from my abdomen, waiting to be opened by others. I had waited so long to reveal my jewelry box to everyone. It was like my very own elementary school show-and-tell day that you wait for since the first day of school when the sign-up sheet goes up. Ok, November 4th, that’s my date! The biggest heartbreak of my life came when I realized that I was empty, meaning that I would have nothing to show the class waiting patiently on the rainbow rug of the dim, musty classroom. When people ask me how I recovered from the deadliest psychotic illness in this country, I can only say this; the moment I failed to find my soul, I regressed to wanting a baby once again.
A few weeks ago, I was at work and took some students that I mentor to a bar in downtown Colorado Springs. One of them studied palmistry, and naturally took up my sweaty hand to examine it. Among the observations that I’m an artist, a traveler, a liar, and a leader was one that I would never have children. It was here that I panicked.I had once and for all ran out of options. There were no other answers to my problem. I would never find out if I was ever here. As he went around the table situated in the damp, intimate cafe, exclaiming that everyone else was foretold children, it was only confirmation that everyone else is real but me. I am not convinced, yet, that I am damned to be a regular nullipara based upon lines of my palm, for this is a fortune I cannot accept.
When I was eight years old, the baby Jesus from my mother’s old nativity scene went missing. Every year, even when we would move houses and most everything had not been unpacked yet, the carefully constructed first-Christmas replica would end up somewhere in the kitchen, living room, or vacant shelf. Each time, the many skillfully painted figurines would all be staring into an empty faux straw cradle. Every year, my mother would sigh for the missing child. The truth, that I thought I would take to my grave, was that I was the one who stole Jesus. I kept him in a miniature dollhouse amidst my polly pockets and neglected barbie dolls until, one day, the baby boy wearing an unfasted linen diaper went missing. God wouldn't even let me have a fake child. No food, no golden jewelry box, no baby… I am a cave that bats find inhospitable… a vacant shack which will only rot and fall. Laying on that couch, observing each toy, I mourn a self that would never be lost, for it never existed.