Dropped Threads 2 (13 page)

Virgin
              Crone

Marianne Brandis

Virgin, Mother, Crone. It’s a well-recognized triad, the pattern of most women’s lives. The Virgin at a certain point becomes a Mother, and eventually a wise woman, a Crone.

But there are some women who bypass the Mother phase and go straight from being a Virgin to being a Crone. This is the kind of woman who, as her younger years pass, reaches an age when she realizes that she is unlikely to marry or, perhaps almost unaware, has chosen not to. She has no children. The woman I’m focusing on lives alone, or virtually alone, so that she has considerable autonomy and solitude. She doesn’t fit many of the conditions usually taken to define women’s lives. She has a different centre and different priorities.

The Virgin-Mother-Crone triad assumes that the experience of being a Mother is essential to the Crone’s wisdom: it’s the only kind of experience that’s even considered. But what kind of Crone does a woman become who has never been a Mother? What kind of person is the middle-aged woman who is not a Mother but is definitely on the way to Cronehood? Is the wisdom of the Virgin Crone different from that of the Crone who is a Mother?

It was in my early twenties—in about 1960—that I began thinking about marriage and singleness. I got along well with men; also—but on a different track, as it were—I had frequent and mostly humiliating crushes on them. I disliked the idea of spending the rest of my life alone, but at the same time I was attracted to solitude and independence. I realized that I was most fully myself when studying, researching, reading, writing.

The crushes were an imaginative search for the kind of husband I could visualize having. In spite of vague visions of being married, however, I never pictured myself as a housewife and mother. The only kind of marriage I could contemplate was one without children.

I began to realize that I might remain single. Sometimes I regarded the prospect with a gloomy sense that there was no other possible destiny for someone as awkward and eccentric as I. At other times, I was more positive: if I was single I could travel, be free, live as I wanted to.

Examples of married life were all around me, in real life and in books and movies, but I knew very few older women who were single in the sense that I’ve defined it. The single and solitary women around me were either young, not yet married but intending and expecting to, or they were widows, mostly with children and grandchildren. Women who had jobs or professions also had husbands and children. None of these were models for the sort of life I was warily contemplating. The one or two older single women I knew didn’t talk about their lives, and I didn’t ask them. I should have. I should have regarded them as Virgins on the way to becoming Crones, possessors of a wisdom far more rare than that of a Mother.

In my journal I was trying to weigh the alternatives, visualize both kinds of life—the novelist-to-be sketching scenarios, writing imaginary biographies. It would have been helpful to have more images of how a single woman lived, both outwardly and inside herself, images that might have guided me through all the innumerable choices, many of them unconscious and instinctive, that shape a life.

There were very few. Older single women at that time were mostly silent about their lifestyle, knowing that in spite of their professional and other achievements—which might be considerable, and highly respected—they were regarded as living incomplete lives. Nobody articulated this; nobody needed to. With women friends of my own age I talked about men, but never, to my recollection (and according to my journal), did we discuss the possibility that we might remain single. We didn’t consider how we would design our lives if (heaven forbid) that was what happened. Being single would mean being a reject: you didn’t contemplate that, let alone plan for it, least of all choose it.

Therefore we were living provisional, temporary lives. Sooner or later this transitional period would end and “real life” start. While waiting, some of us had a good time. I did too, occasionally, but as I moved through my twenties I felt increasingly uncertain, unfocused, depressed, desperate. The year of my M.A. studies was particularly bad. Where was I going from here? Should I work toward a Ph.D.? Find a job? What sort of job? Writing, which was what I really wanted to do, would almost certainly not earn me a livelihood, so something else was needed.

There was no one moment when I decided to remain single. None of those men proposed to me, so I never actually said no, though I must have been giving “no” signals to them as well as to myself. I was eccentric and introverted, and for these and other reasons I was probably best suited to single life. Though at the time it was socially impermissible to live according to this inner blueprint, I did remain single, and I did become a writer. While I was half-heartedly trying to do the expected thing, something inside me followed my individual blueprint as much as possible.

I had two assets that helped me to shape a single life. My mother never pushed me into marriage; in fact, she occasionally spoke of the possibility that I might never marry, and she accepted that. Also, we were immigrants; we had come from Holland when I was eight. I had watched my parents draft a new blueprint for us, as all immigrants do, and I knew that it could be done.

At whatever age it is—thirty? thirty-five? forty?—the woman who is still single has to invent a life that’s different from the one she had probably expected to have. It requires creativity and courage, as well as common sense.

When I reached that stage, what I needed was a clearer, prouder image of the kind of person I was, the kind of life I wanted. Something in me—no doubt the same part that had been speculating about singleness—had already been collecting ideas. In books, I had come across a few images of unmarried professional women, with briefcases and tailored suits, their lives centred on absorbing and important work. I knew about the Victorian ladies who travelled to out-of-the-way parts of the planet, botanizing, sketching, writing—but they were not all single. And there was the very attractive image of the graduate student, whose life is transitional but acceptably so. Teaching English at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto, and researching and writing books—as I eventually did—had a graduate-student feel about it. My life is still much like that, the transitional quality long ago made permanent.

A few images came from the lives of single men that, especially in literature, tended in past times to be seen in a more attractive light than those of single women. One of my favourites was of a man sitting by a fireplace in the evening, reading. No doubt women did so too, but the picture I have comes from the time when women, especially those leading non-traditional lives, were less visible than they are now. My image was of a man totally absorbed, oblivious to but sheltered and nourished by the atmosphere of books, firelight and lamplight, comfortable and slightly shabby furniture. There’s no sign of wife or children. I savoured that image.

These, then, are some of the experiences that a woman like me might bring into Cronehood. Not being “chosen,” or being chosen but saying no. Muddling through a decade, more or less, of indecisiveness, unable to shape a very definite life of her own because “anything might happen.” Then, gradually or suddenly, realizing that nothing is going to happen, that she had better get on with it, regard as permanent what has been temporary. Perhaps she has a sense that this is second best—not necessarily because she thinks so but because society tells her so—which may lead to a deep-seated feeling of being wrong and unacceptable.

And then, perhaps to her surprise, she may come to accept it and perhaps even rejoice in it, delight in having the opportunity to be as fully as possible what she has it in her to be.

Some of my best times now are spent sitting in my armchair, by the fire, under a lamp, with a book. I’ve made this image real. This is me, now, and I’m sitting in my own house, by my own fireplace, reading—researcher, writer, perpetual student. The house is full of books and papers and all the clutter of a full-time writer.

I reached this point by indirect ways—oblique and confused on the surface, with many turns that even now I can’t label as being right or wrong, but largely guided by that inner sense of what I really needed and wanted. I abandoned the ideas—serious enough at the time—of becoming a media personality or an economics professor. Instead, I worked for four years as a writer for radio, then for twenty-three years taught university English. All along, I was learning to be a writer, and eventually my books began to be published.

I’m self-employed now and work at home; I have to make a point of going out to where the people are, of inviting them here. Social life is extremely important to me, but it is always framed by solitude, and that is how I like it. I sometimes miss the casual companionship that comes from sharing a roof with someone, but I need the solitude and the space. Like a solitary tree, I grow mostly according to my nature and choices, shaped by soil and weather but with an open area around me. Mostly I love that space; what brings on my darker moods is not some simple form of loneliness. Having 360 degrees all to myself can be difficult, but it can also be a pleasure.

I’m not defined by a relationship to a husband and children. I’ve never had to centre myself on them, nor have I been the centre of their lives. In my adult years I’ve never lived with anyone for long enough to have my eccentric corners rubbed off. My primary focus is my writing and what’s needed to make it possible, which includes the whole structure of house, garden, intellectual stimulation, connections with other people and time spent alone.

Being single means that I’m not always firmly fixed in my age and generation; I often surprise myself by thinking like a younger or an older person. Immigration and many moves within Canada kept me comparatively rootless, and the wide-ranging imagination needed for writing made all connections temporary, provisional.

All these elements are part of who I am now, and I carry them with me into old age. At sixty-three, I’m on the way to becoming a Crone. When I get there, I will have travelled by a different road from that taken by the traditional Crone, for whom the Mother phase is assumed to be central. But the road I took need not be defined in terms of negatives, of things lacking—at least no more so than any other course of life. It has an identity and pattern of its own, and the process of shaping it continues.