25 May 1968

The sky is hanging down in slithers of purple and blue, with no more than a sprinkling of stars reflected back from an inky pool of water.

It is so very, very peaceful here. Margot is sleeping on the bed next to me, Noah on the sofa next door. If I listen carefully, I can hear them both breathing in their own unique rhythms. One long and labored, the other all in a rush, a quickstep then pause as she dreams.

He wants me to stay. Asked me again to marry him, this time with a beautiful sapphire ring, and I was so very tempted. But is he asking because of me, or because of Margot? I see the way he looks at her, with a different kind of longing to the way those eyes would land on me. He wants a family, a connection, a reason for getting up in the morning. I want it too, but not like this. We would argue, we always do, and Margot doesn’t belong to him. She doesn’t belong to anyone and neither do I.

He would make me into a wife, which comes with its own set of unspoken rules and I don’t do rules, not anymore.

I suppose I could go to Gigi. Raise Margot there as part of a larger, extended family. But it’s not my family, it’s not where I want to set down roots in this world. I still want to travel, to see what delights are hiding around the next corner, but I also understand how unfair that would be on Margot, at least when she is bigger and needs a life that isn’t dictated by her mother.

This is the part I wasn’t prepared for. Always thinking about someone else. Always basing your decisions on whether it would work for them, as well as you. But it’s my life too, so why can’t I just live it? The constant pull of the heart, the constant need to remember that I chose to bring her into this world, she was not of her own making. It is my responsibility to teach her about life, but also let her discover it for herself. How to find the balance? How to ever know if what I’m doing is right?

Or I stay. Give her the traditional family, with two parents, a home and, perhaps, one day, a sibling or two. But it would stagnate me and at some point I would come to resent the decisions I made on her behalf. I do not ever, not for a single second, want to regret anything about her.

But where to? The stigma of being an unmarried mother isn’t one that you can easily shake away. All the questions, the knowing looks, the judgment. Do I really want that? Do I actually care? Of course I do. We all care about the opinions of others. No one is completely immune to how we are perceived by the world.