“You have a certain amount of eggs in your lifetime. And once they run out, they’re gone.”

My fertility specialist was kind and gentle as he lay this news on me like a wreath. I picked myself up from the floor after 33 years on this earth. What was I meant to do now? What was the point of my life? This was not how it was supposed to go.

This is how it’s supposed to go : wayward childhood, rapscallion teen years, wild-out-of-control-messy 20s. Then, settling down, ease into your 30s and finally, the motherhood milestone. The era of being Mother! Always there, at the end of it all, to fall back on. Now, without that, was I just falling, flopping, straight into the abyss?

It was decided then. I would take a holiday. Nothing serious. Some time off. I traipsed around Europe, months running into more months. But was I running away? There were moments of forced reckoning at various junctures of the trip, friends pulling me aside to ask if I was okay. Of course I’m okay! I’m having the time of my life! Late nights partying into the wee hours. Each night a different date, pursued by someone new, someone beautiful. Feeling beautiful. Walking, running, dancing! Just taking some time off from thinking about it all, I would say, hands crossed while cradling a frozen mastiha shot glass, as early to mid twenty-somethings on an island in Greece, hung off my every word. But there was pain, too, not always visible.

With time, I could understand that it was not running away, but running towards who I was meant to become. Rumi once said, ‘you have to keep breaking your heart until it opens’. Well this, I could do. Behold my many fractured, splintered, smashed collections of hearts! I specialise in this field. Part of that had to do with simplifying my existence. All I had to do was get to the next moment. Forget everyone else. The first of your generation to live with such freedom as a woman, means you are what some of your ancestors had always dreamed of. 

When I returned, I felt renewed and emboldened. I would just be an international woman living in foreign places, enjoying her life! Living just for me! I went back overseas the following year, thinking I had it all figured out. But something had shifted this time, even then. Something was always off. Never quite right. I found myself missing something. There was an open vacancy in my heart. My family, my friends, my community. Without them, who was I? What purpose did I have? What was the point of — *gesticulates wildly* — all of this! This beauty. This comfort. This pleasure, prioritised. Was I just floating through life aimlessly? I was so present, so living for the moment. But I had zoomed so far in, that I couldn’t see what surrounded me. I had to zoom out again. And look around at the earth. And while it was now on fire in ways that wounded my soul, my homeland, my people, I still felt paralysed and unmoored once again on a personal level. Neither fulfilled personally, nor on the worldscale, I felt it all closing in on me. Helpless and hurting. 

And then one day, everything slowly opened up again, like unfurling rose petals. All the ways I was not just needed, but what light I could add to the world. My baby niece gradually became aware of who I was. Aunty. She would hobble over to me every time she saw me. Remember all the games I’d created for her. Become fixated on movies I’d accidentally introduced her to, like Howl’s Moving Castle (which taught her the concept of fear — “scary!” — she would repeat after me, not quite sure what this meant). At first, she would know me by my jewellery. Every trinket I had would delight her. She loves necklaces and earrings, pink and red hearts, pink compacts and cosmetics. She particularly loves a necklace with a pendant of the Virgin Mary, a crucifix of Jesus and a vintage salmon pink, gold love heart that opens to a photo of my mum and dad when they were young and in love. I told her once that this was Teta and Jidoo, and the next time she said in her tiny voice, “Open?” (“What do you say?’ ‘Open please, Aunty!’ she responds, tiny chubby hands placed together in prayer). She looks at the photo and repeats dutifully, “Tata and Doodoo”, because she is a tiny genius.

When she was born, I joked that they could give her to me. You already have two sons. Couldn’t I have this one? Everyone laughed, but I was serious in my soul. Sometimes I slip up and say, my baby, when referring to my niece and nephews. But soon I noticed this same kind of devoted love, time, attention and energy found its way across everything and everyone in my life. The community made itself known and began to open up. All the ways we’re connected. How this was what was missing on my travels.

I no longer felt like sequestering myself off from the world. I had boundless reserves of love all lined up, ready and waiting. It gave me a renewed and clear purpose. I now understood something I had always done well —my ability to mentor young people in my career and work roles — young writers who credit me as being pivotal to their careers. I now had the time and energy to dedicate to changing the discourse and becoming more politically active in leadership roles, where perhaps families aren’t equipped with the time and energy to be as invested. The opportunity to finally follow my dreams and launch myself full-time into becoming the writer I had always felt I could be, to set the example for those around me in my Lebanese community.

What is the village besides an all-encompassing community? We feel we have lost the village somewhat, and maybe that’s true. That comforting commune where everyone knows their role and their place and everyone steps up to help each other. I had always feared becoming the self sacrificial aunty who becomes a martyr in my extended Lebanese community, as though her life is only defined by what she doesn’t have, this sad story she is sidled with, sequestered away from the world. Assumed available to always be there, to do all the roles that parents and those with families can’t step in and do. But now, instead of fearing it, I decided to reframe it away from a forced, assumed obligation, to one that brought joy and purpose.

When the children around me cry because a parent or grandparent has been necessarily strict with them — it’s the aunty, the godmother, the friend — who is there to bring comfort. A knowing glance between two pals. A clandestine cuddle. A promise that it will all be okay. The advice needed to rise above the painful parts of life. But also to show them how to fully live life. What that means. What it could look like.

Society feels like it has lost the village. But aunties, we single women without children, are what makes the village what it is. Throwing my weight behind this role made me want to stop running and lean into what I already had. Acts of service are my love language, but it’s more than that. We are part of something bigger than ourselves, extending out into the lives of children and their children, without limits.

Even now, living with my grandmother, who has been alive for almost a century, continues to transform me. She is a village in herself; always helping and cooking and teaching and asking and supporting. Her ways of living, her thinking and her wisdom, and her endless capacity to love, all of it flows through me and it feels like unlocking the secrets of life.

While some of us didn’t choose this life, this life of not being a mother, there is a kind of comfort in finding a place to pour out all this love into, this deeply cavernous love which has to find a home somewhere.