Acceptance in fiction

I recently read Red Clocks by Leni Zumas. Huge thanks to Jess for reviewing and recommending it. It looks at five women – each dealing with different issues around motherhood, including being single, assisted reproduction, wanting to complete your family when a spouse doesn’t, an unwanted pregnancy, abortion, adoption, and more. I loved it. I loved the presentation of the different perspectives, each of them valid, each of them real. (I also love the title.)

One character in particular, who is trying to conceive but trying also to accept that she may not, explores the thinking processes with which we are probably all familiar.

“Acceptance, thinks the biographer, is the ability to see what is. But also to see what is possible.”

That really sums it up. We don’t have to have liked “what is.” But we have no choice, and therefore looking forward to see what is possible makes our life meaningful. And not to see what is possible, but only to mourn what is not possible, is a tragedy. A loss of two lives.

The same character later:

“How can she tell her students to reject the myth that their happiness depends on having a mate if she believes the same myth about having a child?”

and

“There are millions of things the biographer will never do that she doesn’t pity herself for missing. (Climbing a mountain, cracking a code, attending her own wedding.) So why this thing?”

I’ve listed the things I’ll never do a number of times. The things I’ll never do because I won’t be a mother (here and here), but also those other things I’ll never do in an old blog here. Like learn to ski, sing confidently, be fluent in a language other than English (which is not to say I haven’t tried), not be afraid of heights, and a myriad other activities that I can’t do. I mourn some of them from time to time (I’d love to be able to ski), but just accept others, and even embrace others I am glad I never did.

At the end of the book, the same character recognises that she “wants more than one thing.”

“She wants to stretch her mind wider than “to have one.”
Wider than “not to have one.”
To quit shrinking life to a checked box, a calendar square. ...
To see what is. And to see what is possible."

I like the fact that this character asks questions of herself, even if for much of the book she isn’t quite ready to give herself the answers she knows are there. Because the character is still very much in the yearning stage, but starting to see what might be beyond that. If there were more chapters, or a follow-up book, then the character could and should develop further. That she could come to embrace “what is possible” and accept the “I will nevers” as dreams that were lost, in order to make way for dreams to come. I’ve seen it happen in myself, and I’ve seen it time and time again with women online, first in my support group, then online with blogs and other communities. We do move on. We do accept, and we live and love the life which is possible.