The Hollow Woman

We are the hollow men
    We are the stuffed men
    Leaning together
    Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
    Our dried voices, when
    We whisper together
    Are quiet and meaningless
    As wind in dry grass
    Or rats' feet over broken glass
    In our dry cellar
~ "The Hollow Men" - T.S. Eliot
_______________________

Today was Baby Dedication at church.  Even though my cousin's youngest was in the lineup for the service, I had not planned to go.  Despite my mother's wistful disapproval, I was firm about skipping it, meeting up with everybody afterward to go out to eat.  I needed not to be there.

Of course, that's not the way it worked out.

I got a text about ten til ten telling me that I was needed to play for the service, so I gathered my fortitude and headed out.  I managed to put together some music, and it went okay.

I sat on the organ bench watching as the babies and their parents came forward, and I thought about my own life and my own situation.  I couldn't help it.  It wasn't about me, but it made me think about things I try desperately not to drag out into the light very often.

I am constantly surrounded by children, by families.  How is it I am not going to have that?  The most basic of single-celled organisms can reproduce, yet I won't.  Butterflies in the yard, crows in the treetops, they manage to find some other that they fit with, become a part of a pair.  What is wrong with me that I cannot?

And yet, I can't seriously feel as though I should be searching for anybody. I can't seriously feel that it has the least possibility of working, barring a miracle.  I'm too solitary, too...odd, too set in my own ways, too demanding, and then there's the always present whisper that I probably cannot have children.  How could I stick somebody with all of that?  Who would possibly want it?

So I walk around feeling hollow.  I feel somehow less real than other people, somehow like I am just a simulacrum of a woman, something that can trick the eye from a distance but is just paste and paint when viewed too close, something that can be taken out for emergencies and then neatly folded and put away again when it's not needed.

I can't say that I'm wildly unhappy.  I don't feel deeply depressed.  It's just days like today pile on top of me like that old Puritan punishment of pressing, one and another and another, eventually making it hard to breathe.