ode to a beautiful uselessness

(be the weirdo who dares to enjoy)

An American friend moved to Canada during the pandemic. A few short moons after arriving, her wiry little mutt died. When her grieving eased up—or maybe become too much?—she began looking into adopting another dog. So, she did as the bleeding hearts do. She called her local shelter. The only problem was her local shelter was fresh out of strays. “Erin,” she says to me, her eyes wide over Zoom, “Can you even believe Canada? They’ve, like, SOLVED animal overpopulation.” I take in this information, slowly, jealously, the wheels greasing into a never-before-imagined-future, “Oh my God, Jessica. Does this mean you can get any breed you want?” “It’s obscene,” she cackles. “It really, really is,” I concede, “and also really lovely.”

It made me wonder:

What would I choose if I didn’t have to be so useful?

Jessica and I are both foster-to-adopt parents. Our stories are wildly different (read my profile of her here) but the premise is somewhat the same. There were people in our community who needed homes. We had capacity in our homes. For all its simplicity, it’s a tricky premise to explain. Maybe not for Jessica who wanted to be a parent but couldn’t get pregnant safely for health reasons. But for me, formally and stubbornly childfree, the decision reads nonsensical at times. The trouble for both of us, though, is that there are plenty of people with a spare bedroom or spare season who aren’t compelled to share it with strangers’ children. So, why did I? Well, one version goes, I wanted to be useful.

I suspect it’s because childless women have historically been viewed as useless that I felt at least a little compelled to prove my worth in community. See, I’m not a monster! See, I can talk to children! Meghan Daum writes about this impulse with painstaking honesty in an old New Yorker piece called Difference Maker. Of her time mentoring youth in the Big Brothers-Big Sisters program, she writes, “It helped that if anyone, upon learning my feelings about having children, lobbed the predictable “selfish” grenade, I could casually let them know that I was doing my part to shape and enrich the next generation.” Daum hits the nail on an insidious social bargain. As long as you’re a mentor, teacher, or like a mother to other people’s children, you get a pass on the worst of the childless stigma. See! You are doing your part. You are filling in the gaps. Can you please work overtime again? You are making up for your lack.

I understand now why Younger Erin was prone to this thinking. The veneration of women’s usefulness has deep roots in American Christianity. For example, according to author Rebecca Traister, the Cult of Single Blessedness was a phenomenon of the early-nineteenth century in which single women were considered “pious vessels whose commitment to service, undiluted by the needs of husbands or children, made them perfect servants of god, family, and community.” In other words, if you weren’t going to put your womb to good use for God, you had better put your work to good use for the world. You could adopt stray dogs and volunteer with the housing insecure and write really helpful books on belonging to your local church. (Oh, HI.) Single or not, we might call this the Cult of Childless Blessedness.

But seriously. Wanting to be useful isn’t all bad. I once broke up with a local church by reading the senior pastor Marge Piercy’s poem To Be of Use—the subtext being I was woefully not. Usefulness can be beautiful when it springs from a desire, as Piercy writes, to “jump into the work head first without dallying in the shadows,” to “strain in the muck and mud to move things forward,” to “move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire must be put out.” How good to feel the competence of your small hands and their part in the big Us. This is a version of my story, too, the one in which the big Us compelled me to do something that was too big to go alone and too worthy not to go at all. What I am telling you is I wanted to write a grander, weirder story than the one I was curating on my own.

Now I sense it’s time to do that again, only this time by becoming more useless, not useful. A beautiful uselessness. I want to be a women who doesn’t feel the need to always play part-doer or gap-filler or worth-prover but who can luxuriate in the spilt perfume of her own life. (Was Mary of Bethany not one of the OG Beautiful Useless Women?) So much of my socialization as a Nice White Woman has been to assess needs and meet needs as a way to approximate power. It’s stunning how far you can get in life simply by putting your name in the top right corner and following someone else’s directions. But I’ve also ceded power by asking what’s needed before what’s wanted. It’s one of the reasons I chose to become a publicist in my twenties rather than an editor like I dreamed. There were job openings for publicists. And all the editorial assistants had PhDs.

Some things that are helping me in my new quest to be beautifully useless: reading fiction books (next up: Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochil Gonzalez), collecting twigs for the yard waste bin (a meditative exercise in futility), hopping on the butter board trend (looks like a lazy appetizer dream.) At the very least, I’d like to know how I’d answer the question, “What would I choose if I didn’t have to be so useful?” and then choose to move forward with generosity rather than goody-good anxiety. (I would choose two cream and brown Australian Shepherds with tails intact. Until I move to Canada, I will lovingly choose Chow mix wanna-be’s.)

One more thing. I want to be more beautifully useless in my writing, too. Maybe it’s the publicist in me, or the Puritan, that’s always asking, “But what do THE PEOPLE want? What would be helpful?” It’s then I want to remember that Big Magic advice from childfree elder, Liz Gilbert, when she writes: “Please don't try to help me. I mean it's very kind of you to help people, but please don't make it your sole creative motive because we will feel the weight of your heavy intention, and it will put a strain upon our souls.”

Instead, she counsels:

“Be the weirdo who dares to enjoy.”

So, here we begin again—the beautiful, useless, weirdos who dare to enjoy writing our own lives. I’ve learned over the last month that this means I want to keep making my tiny victory prompts available for free to everyone, and I want to start swapping my own tiny victories of the week with this budding community of paid subscribers. Think beautiful, useless micro-essays (100 words or less) about the small stuff that is helping us grow large. Like how you got rid of your plastic loofah and love the feel of hands on skin. Or how you asked for a do-over when you did that “Impenetrable Adult Voice” kids hate. (Oh, HI, again).

Honestly? My favorite writer friends are mixed on this strategy. One hems, “Do you think people will actually pay for micro-essays?” Another says, “I mean, aren’t we paying because we love anything you write?” I trust you’ll let me know. But whatever the road ahead, I sincerely promise to stop talking about it so much and just keep trying. I will try to rest so (unhelp)fully in the scent of my own life that it can’t help but spill at the feet of others.

Smell you later,
Erin

my beloved Chow mix wanna-be, Alvin

P.S. I’m loving writing wry, wrought pieces for a new gig at Scary Mommy. See my first two pieces on why my kids don’t call me mom and why I’m so over bro culture.

P.P.S. I had the pleasure of attending a retreat (that was more like an extended Q&A) with Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxane Gay this summer. Just finished Tressie’s anthology, Thick, which is not fiction but entirely beautiful and dynamite. 5 stars.

P.P.P.S. It’s October and spook is in the air. Currently binge-watching Bad Sisters on AppleTV, a femme murder mystery with a somewhat empowered childless lead (played by Sharon Horgan). Dead animals aside, I’m into it.