All Used Up

How do you spell "stretch?"

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

I’d like to die all used up. But then, who wouldn’t? Waste not want not. George Bernard Shaw said “This is the true joy in life…the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”

Todd and I are in the hot tub at the Y, birthplace, ancestral home, and shrine to “Spirit, Mind, Body”, my favourite place of worship, when he, the bearded, mid-thirties embodiment of detached cool and self-confessed overthinker asks whether I’m glad I had kids. I’m ideally situated, tailbone to water jet, to hold forth. Todd bobs a few feet away.

I tell him I want to die all used up and that kids have been an excellent way to do that. Early on, parenting made it clear to me that I’d be leaving none of myself on the table. I didn’t have kids in order to die all used up but once a mother I knew it came with the territory. Kids required a lot of time and effort, the burn rate when it came to mental, emotional, and physical inputs on par with pyramid building. Mini pyramids. I reserved the right to bitch and complain when I wanted, that was the sound of stretch, of working muscle, but I was fully invested. Huh, said Todd, reflective, I just thought I should have a kid so there’d be someone to take care of me in old age. What if they don’t like you?, I asked him, It’s a crap shoot.

Having kids is not a glad or not-glad thing. Glad doesn’t cut it. Parenthood stretches you in ways you’d never stretch voluntarily. It strains your brain and frustrates your certainty and delusions of control and of being the boss of things. “Glad” I associate with getting my teeth cleaned or remembering to close the car windows. Parenting isn’t like that, it’s too big and brawling and messy. It’s selflessness-forward. You can power through and tell yourself you’re in charge but you’re better off admitting from the get-go that it’s a two-way street. 

My kids had this effect on me and I had it on my parents and they on theirs all the way back to the beginning of time. There were times my scalp tingled with apoplexy, follicles screaming, Enough!, my brain taking it out on my hair, hair spilling its colour in surrender and defeat, drained and white. I experienced physical and emotional exhaustion beyond describing, drawn and quartered by relentlessness. Kids get at every last bit of you, none of your stones left unturned, nothing unmanhandled, sticky fingerprints the length of you and your fresh laundry. Parenting demands that you put out in ways big, small, and unconditional including the bits you had it in mind to save for later when they were in bed or had left home. 

For the Todds of the world the question is where you stand on the idea of surrender to small and routinely unreasonable beings. Demanding. How do you feel about resistance being futile and meaningless and met with derision, your wants immaterial? Parenthood tapped strengths in me I didn’t know I had it in me to tap, took me places I didn’t know I had it in me to go or wanted to or whether I’d survive once there but I did and then I did it again and again and again. Four times. It seems I liked stretching. Maybe another name was love.

The ability to produce humans delighted me and made maximum good use of my design-driven, factory-issued parts: female. How could I resist? It would have been like having a dishwasher and not using the bottom rack. I was a human party trick, a human-producing human party trick, balloon animals only better. There I was getting all those parts in the right place time after time: lashes on lids, noses on faces, wax in ears, elbows on arms, touch in fingers. I could have stopped at a brain or a heart and called it a day but I created entire endocrine systems and all those ridiculous Latin derivatives: the hypothalamus, the pineal, pituitary, and thyroid gland, and a pancreas. I was unstoppable. Unbeatable. A marvel. Men can’t do that. Women are Swiss Army knives. And once we birth a human we grow it to even greater proportions using another of our tricks: lactation. Look at you, I once said to one of my kids, gesturing up and down their now years-old length, I made you, I’m amazing.

By virtue of being a male Todd will never know this omnipotence, the male contribution being relatively puny. Nor will he experience the part where after nine months of togetherness he has to share his creation with the world only to learn that he’s now doubled his vulnerability quotient, doubled the slings and arrows to which he’s subject, his own fate now secondary to his child’s. With giving birth my Achilles heel was now all of me. I was four heels, four exposed tendons. Never again would I able to shield each child to the extent I had when they were in utero. It was too late for all that. They were officially their own citizens of an indifferent world.

It continues to be the case that I am most at ease when they are at ease, adults though they now are. It will never stop. But now I’m free to use myself up differently. It’s still the case that I want none of me dying in my original packaging, tags still on. Old school advice columnist Ann Landers once shared a poem from a reader that said they didn’t see themselves at death’s door wishing they’d eaten more beans, too few beans an unlikely deathbed regret, and since their bean intake wouldn’t plague them in death they refused to let it bother them in life. I’m with them.

For the past many years I’ve used myself for more self-centred reasons. My brain has bitten off large projects—elected office, a masters degree, a manuscript—and felt stretched to the breaking point at the scale of each. Just what I wanted. Each helped itself to the relevant parts of me, emptying me, fulfilling me, converting themselves into new forms of energy, depleting me as I ran up against my limits and pushed on. I want to use every last morsel of me.

It helps to know how you want to stretch, I say to Todd, maybe kids are it for you, maybe they’re not. The important thing is to stretch and exhaust whatever you’ve got in whatever form it takes. Joyfully. Kids were it for me, a big part, and they received my full life-giving, love-giving self, all of it. “Glad”? If you insist. I couldn’t be happier.