Kindness to Ourselves

Last thought from Blue Ticket because we’ll soon get into spoiler-land. And, I promise, zero spoilers in these posts. But if you read the book and want to talk about it, I have plenty of other thoughts about the end.

On page 273, she reflects on two women she saw—one white ticket, one blue ticket—and the impulse to have a child when you can’t.

I wondered about the old woman in the bed and breakfast, and the woman I had seen at the swimming pool, serene in her childlessness the way you could be serene in your motherliness. They were a chorus, asking me, what do you even want it for? … To pathologize desire into flat compulsion reduces the possibilities of it. Which is not to say that I had not felt compulsion. But perhaps I was learning the difference, finally, between that and conviction … Call it kindness, finally, shown toward myself.

I love that. I love embracing a desire to reach for parenthood, even when it’s hard, as conviction rather than compulsion. As a kindness I’m showing myself by being true to what is in my heart.

I think so many times, our decisions are questioned. Decisions that are trying to help us reach what other people can do easily, and they’re weighted with judgment: we’re hysterical, obsessed, single-minded, jealous… compulsive. But we’re not. Or, as she says, that reduces the story to someone else’s judgment. We’re filled with conviction—whether we reach parenthood or not. Whether we reach it is not the point. The true story is how hard we work to be kind to ourselves.