Molly Peacock | A Poetic Childfree Life

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May 26

Written By Population Balance

Raised in a chaotic and violent household, poet Molly Peacock knew from a young age that she didn't want to be a mother. Escaping the trauma that surrounded her, she developed a rich, internal world of poetic imagination fed by voracious reading and writing that would lead to her decades-long career as a poet, biographer, and essayist. An accidental pregnancy at age 38 led Molly to affirm her childfree choice with an abortion and tubal ligation. In her mid-forties she reconnected with her high school boyfriend and they remained happily married for decades until his death. Now widowed, Molly retains a deep joy for her richly creative and socially engaged life.

Molly Peacock (00:00):
I often heard from my father, Don't ever have children, Molly. My grandmother punctuated this with, Unless you want to. And my mother said, You can always do anything you want. I'm not sure other families discussed having children with their kids as frequently as mine did, but I heard again and again in various ways from these three people that having children wrecked everything, or this is how I interpreted don't ever have children, Molly. I looked at my little sister as she zoomed across the linoleum and hated her even more. I looked at my father drunk and my mother frightened and thought their lives would be better if they didn't have kids. Their lives would be better if they didn't have her, if they didn't have us, didn't have me. Their lives would be better. I'm not having any children. Somehow at five I was past childbearing age.
Nandita Bajaj (01:18):
That was today's guest, poet and biographer, Molly Peacock. Hi everyone and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandita Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism: Finding Fulfillment With or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with people from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. Each episode features a personal story, born out of liberated and informed choice, about redefining what family means, including being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. Hi, Molly, and welcome to the Beyond Pronatalism podcast. I cannot tell you how excited I am to have you.
Molly Peacock (02:16):
I'm thrilled to be here, Nandita. I've listened to so many of the interviews and it's an honor to be included in the podcast.
Nandita Bajaj (02:27):
Oh, Molly, the honor truly is mine to have you on. I've only come across your work really over the last five or so years through our common friend, Therese Schechter, known for her most recent film, My So-Called Selfish Life in which you were featured and we've gotten to know each other over the last few years doing a lot of these events around our choice to not have children. And it has been such a delight getting to know you recently and I'm enjoying reading so much both your personal stories and your stories about others that you've written. So congratulations on everything you've been doing to help shift the needle in society around pronatalism.
Molly Peacock (03:19):
Well, thank you so much. I didn't even know the phrase pronatalism when I began writing about my choice not to have children or my repeated challenges in making that choice throughout my life because I come to our conversation as a woman at the end of my 70s as a member of the very first generation to have access to birth control and societally to change my life in that way so that now when Therese Schechter asked me to be part of My So-Called Selfish Life and actually takes the title of that documentary from my memoir Paradise, Piece by Piece, which was published way back in the last century in 1998 and is something that I still get letters about. People are still finding that book and responding. That's how deep this conversation is and how old the conversation is and how much a part of, oh, society's waters, if you think of a society as an ocean, how it comes up onto the shore again and again.
Nandita Bajaj (04:40):
Yes, beautifully put. And I'm thrilled about exploring all the vulnerabilities that you've shared in that memoir, the joys and the grief and the losses that keep bringing you to this question of what is fulfillment. Before we begin, just by way of introduction, I'd like to read this little paragraph about you from your website to introduce to our listeners just how special of a guest you are. So here we go. Molly Peacock is a poet, biographer, essayist, and writer of tales whose multi-genre literary life has taken her from New York City to Toronto, from poetry to prose, and back again to poetry, from words to words and pictures, and from lyric self-examination to curiosity about the lives of others. So Molly, thanks for joining me today. And perhaps by way of introduction, you can start by sharing a bit about yourself.
Molly Peacock (05:41):
It's a joy to be here and a joy to be having this conversation. I was born just after World War II into a working class family in Buffalo, although I'm from a very binational family of Canadian roots and American roots. And I went to a state university, the State University of New York at Binghamton. I knew as a child that I wanted to be something special when I was asked, What are you going to be when you grow up? I didn't know what it was. I just wanted to be something special. I had encouragement from teachers my whole life and they encouraged my writing abilities and finally at university I thought, I think I can do this. I think I can write poetry. I think I can somehow find a way to live a life as a poet. I didn't know what that would be.
(06:42):
I didn't know how many choices that I would make that would impact my life as an artist. Nobody I grew up with even went to college, let alone became a writer. So all of those questions and issues were roiling around in my life, but I managed. I had a very young first marriage that then broke up as we both decided we would go back to graduate school. I did go to graduate school at Johns Hopkins and locate myself as a writer, but it took a long time and I never felt I could call myself a poet. That seemed like, I mean a poet, you mean the way John Keats was a poet? How could I possibly do that? So it took a long time and an emergence. And at the same time as I was emerging as a poet, I was emerging as a young woman who was quite convinced that I did not want to be a mother in the traditional sense.
(07:47):
When I wrote my memoir, I saw that my life had a shape. I know that sounds ridiculous. All lives have shapes, but I didn't fully understand myself in a social context until I did that. But I wrote the memoir after I had written a number of books of poetry. I've written nine books of poems and my most recent book of poems is The Widow's Crayon Box that I wrote after I lost my husband. And I think that writing poetry and writing about people's lives, for me, it fits my predilections and it fits my own searching through my own life for my own decisions because I might look like an ordinary person, but I've made a lot of radical choices in my life.
Nandita Bajaj (08:42):
Wonderful. We will definitely get a chance to explore your writing, how you've navigated these radical decisions in your life. And we can start with the early life to create a bit of an arc to today's story. Could you start by sharing the kinds of messages you were receiving during your upbringing around pronatalism, around the idea of creating family, what it means to be a woman during that time?
Molly Peacock (09:16):
I think that the best way for me to share my beginnings is to read a paragraph from Paradise piece by piece. I often heard from my father, Don't ever have children, Molly. My grandmother punctuated this with, Unless you want to. And my mother said, You can always do anything you want. I'm not sure other families discussed having children with their kids as frequently as mine did, but I heard again and again in various ways from these three people that having children wrecked everything or this is how I interpreted, Don't ever have children, Molly. I looked at my little sister as she zoomed across the linoleum and hated her even more. I looked at my father drunk and my mother frightened and thought their lives would be better if they didn't have kids. Their lives would be better if they didn't have her, if they didn't have us, didn't have me. Their lives would be better. I'm not having any children. Somehow at five, I was past childbearing age.
Nandita Bajaj (10:31):
Very powerful. There was a lot going on in your family at the time and you were thrown into the role of a caregiver at a very young age and made to realize some of these bigger questions that most children don't have to navigate. You start the book by saying you've decided at age five that you're not having children and it's a decision you make along the way many, many times. What was the family situation like that ended up making you decide to go that way?
Molly Peacock (11:06):
My dad was a violent alcoholic so I grew up in an atmosphere of fear and unpredictability. My mother, who was much steadier, but she had worked during World War II. She had been on her adventures. She didn't start having a family until she was 28, but at that point she's not working. She's a stay-at-home mom with two little girls and an explosive husband and it's in the early 1950s and there were terrifying incidents. I remember my father trying to push my mother down the cellar stairs and my sister and I running, we're little. She's maybe two when I'm five, running down the stairs between their legs to then push back up against my mother so that she wouldn't fall down and hit the cement on the basement floor. Those traumatic situations took place while my grandparents were living on the other side of the wall.
(12:16):
We lived in a duplex. By the time I was 12 and my mother had an idea that she would replicate what her father did, my grandfather had a general store and gas station in upstate New York so that she was going to have this small grocery store and she did. My father was supposed to come home from his job with the electric company. I was supposed to fix him dinner, iron a fresh shirt for him and pack him off to his night job, which would be to relieve my mother in the store. At the same time, I was supposed to be supervising my very rambunctious younger sister's homework. As I look back, my sister had all of the characteristics of an ADD kid, of course was not diagnosed at the time. So I'm 12. Imagine yourself when you're 12 years old doing this and it fell apart.
(13:17):
I was a terrible supervisor of my sister's homework. I was not a very good ironer of my father's shirts. I was a cook who learned how to cook over the phone from my mother who would say, Okay, now do this. Now do that. And my mother was saying to me, When you do the dishes, Molly, put the knives away. And I know that putting the knives away was a signal that she felt that my father could in a rage pick up a knife and harm us. So there's terror there and school is a sanctuary, an absolute sanctuary because I'm a bright creative girl and there's so much responses from my teachers. I had the kind of childhood that some people don't survive from, but other people who've had difficult childhoods and many people have had much worse childhood than mine do survive and thrive.
(14:16):
And I don't know exactly the mechanism of that, the psychological mechanism, but I do know that I always made art. I always wrote and drew and found a way through my own self-expression to make my own private worlds that were quite separate from the craziness that was going on. That situation collapsed. My father's alcoholism progressed so he would come home and just he could be violent and tear the legs off the kitchen table or he could just collapse and snore on the couch. But my mother then didn't come home until 10 o'clock at night. So in some ways effectively we were abandoned. I was abandoned to his volatility and I was in a role of a wife and mother, not a sexualized wife, but that kind of role. So my experiences from the age of 12 to 17 were of hyper-responsibility, hyper-vigilance because I never knew what was going to happen, devotion to my homework and my success in school and secretly wanting some kind of normal life, whatever that was.
Nandita Bajaj (15:43):
Right. And so writing in school you said became a sanctuary for you. When did you start writing and what were you writing about?
Molly Peacock (15:54):
I started writing when I was 10. My first poem was about the month of March and I didn't write about my life. I wrote about things just looking at things or plans or months or a young girl imagining that the Greek gods and goddesses were alive and walking the earth. I wrote from the imagination that was stimulated by reading. My mother was a great reader and the library was a big part of my childhood and my adolescence. It wasn't until I got to university and started reading contemporary poetry where I saw people writing about their lives where I read a poet named Anne Sexton who wrote about her marriage, who wrote about her abortion, who wrote about her sexuality. I thought, Oh my gosh, you can write about this. So then I began to write the poems that I wanted to read. Growing up in the way I did, I had a very developed external self.
(17:07):
I could cope with the external world and to this day I'm an organized person, but internally I didn't have a chance to grow. The metaphor I always use for this is I was like a pale, a fully developed outside and I could carry a lot. You could put a lot in me and I could carry it, but essentially empty inside. And part of my early choices of not to have children, that was a reaction saying, If my parents didn't have kids, they wouldn't have these lives. They would have different lives. My mother never read Virginia Woolf, but she understood the importance of having a room of one's own. She would have loved to have a room of her own. And because I just did not want to replicate my family, I thought, I am not doing this. I will not do this. A strength came in me, a fiber grew in me that said, I will not recreate this situation in any way.
(18:09):
I have to find another way to live. And I read about lots of women who had other ways of living. Often they were fictional. I wasn't making that distinction. So by the time I got to university, it was clear to me that I did not want a traditional life as a suburban mom, but I didn't know what an untraditional life would be like because untraditional lives seemed to me to involve drugs and weird sexist yuck that I didn't want to be involved in either. I just was not sure how to navigate except I did know and was able to say as I was dating my first husband at a young marriage, I was able to say to him, I don't want to do this. I don't want to have, I think I probably said a regular or a normal life, that I wanted to have an abnormal life.
(19:10):
I think what I wanted was an original life, but I didn't know how to say that at the time. So that got me to that decision and I became a devoted, devoted user of birth control. I knew exactly what time I should take them. I knew exactly what should be going on in my medication. I waited for that period to come every month. It reassured me that I was keeping to my resolve not to have a quote unquote mistake happen to me.
Nandita Bajaj (19:46):
Yes. And did you ever have that conversation with your first husband?
Molly Peacock (19:51):
Yes, I did. Yes, I did. I don't know whether he believed me. People are always saying to young women, Oh, you'll change your mind.
Nandita Bajaj (20:01):
Yes.
Molly Peacock (20:04):
But yes, we had the conversation.
Nandita Bajaj (20:06):
And how long did that marriage last and was not having children any part of the reason for the breakup?
Molly Peacock (20:15):
I think that young marriage was a little sanctuary for both of us while we grew up. We were able to kind of parent one another as happens in child- marriages. Childfree marriages can be quite close and we were quite close in that way. We both developed and we both came to radical decisions. I really then wanted to become a poet and devote my life to writing. He wanted to abandon his studies in philosophy and become the thing that shocked his parents who were both attorneys. He wanted to become a nurse. He wanted to help people physically and they would say, We'll pay for medical school. He didn't want to be a doctor. He wanted to be a caregiver. He wasn't cared for as a child. I mean, he wasn't neglected, but that internal care, the care that he would've processed internally wasn't there in the same way it wasn't there for me.
(21:19):
When we were able to give that to one another, we both applied to graduate schools in different cities, hundreds of miles away and then looked at each other and thought, Oh, I was the one who said it. I said, I don't want to be married anymore. I want to go off in my life. So I was the breaker upper, but he was the transformer. He lost a hundred pounds. He got into graduate school as a nurse. He totally changed his life from the bearded gourmand philosopher that I had married and I totally changed my life. And so we went off and remained in touch until he passed away a number of years ago and going off to artist colonies, to graduate school, meeting other young artists who were making their way, then I began to see possibilities and make further choices in my life.
Nandita Bajaj (22:19):
You said you were a devoted user of birth control. Coming back to the decision around having and not having children, what were some of the other experiences like around this decision? Did you ever think that you'd change your mind?
Molly Peacock (22:34):
I would have fantasies of somehow or another having enough money, having enough stability in my life. Maybe I could have children. Maybe that could be part of my life and maybe I could quote unquote have it all. Because what happened to me is I ended up going to New York City and my first husband was from New York and I had a lot of experience in New York. I was working in New York at Friends Seminary School, a Quaker school. I thought, well, is this possible for me? But I did not have the money of the families of the children I taught. I was always, always struggling, always going back and forth. What kind of job could I have that would support my life as a writer and where was my core? I was still developing that interior. And my sister at that point had been a heroin addict.
(23:35):
She of course had her adventures with alcohol. She was on methadone. She had such a different life from mine and I felt guilty and responsible because I hadn't brought her up very well as being only three years older than she. I've long since forgiven myself, but at the time when I was young, I thought I contributed to this. And when I got a phone call that she was breaking up furniture in a bar just the way my father would do, it threw me into seeking a therapist and I went into 28 years of psychotherapy. I'm speaking to you as a person who's examined every part of my life and I'm so happy that I found a therapist who would go on this journey with me and who would allow me eventually to separate motherhood from female identity and allow me to realize that I wanted to live a life as a creative woman and that there are so many ways to love, not simply mother love.
Nandita Bajaj (24:52):
That's beautiful. That must have been so freeing to hear about your identity. Being allowed to be independent of this role of motherhood that we all have been prescribed growing up.
Molly Peacock (25:06):
And I did quite a bit of sideline mothering as a teacher. If you're a mentor of your students, there is a parental aspect to that. And I'm a talented teacher. I'm able to do that and have been able to do it for many students, including those 12-year-olds I taught at Friends Seminary, any number of whom I am still in touch with. So as I'm examining myself, my poetry is getting deeper and more interestingly complex and because I'm from a working class background and most of the artists I know are from much more middle class or upper class backgrounds I go to a state university. All of my friends went to Ivy League schools. I began being interested in formal poetry. I thought, well, I can call myself a poet if I can do what John Keats could do formally, not in terms of the impact of his poems, but I could write a sonnet.
(26:12):
I can learn how to do these wonderful historical poetic techniques and that way I can write about myself and my background and no one will accuse me of making poetry from quote unquote mere self-expression, mere confession as young women who wrote about their lives were often charged with. So all that is going on and I get pregnant using a diaphragm. The pill was hard for me hormonally to take and I had turned to a diaphragm and I had left an old diaphragm at a boyfriend's house thinking it was still working and it didn't. And so when I was 38 with my quote unquote biological clock ticking and my still emerging sense of who I am, it took a long time for me to grow up, probably because I seemed so grown up to other people and the boyfriend I was with clearly did not want to be a father.
(27:20):
I mean, that was out. And my mother said to me on the phone, I'll help you, Molly. And I was filled with anger. I thought, Oh, the way you helped me grow up, I couldn't imagine it. I knew I would have to get a corporate job because I couldn't have a teacher job that would leave me free in the summertimes to write my books. And all of that, I mean, that was the exterior of it. The interior of it is I know I can't have it all, nor do I want to have it all. I want to have my creative life and I want that to be enough. Also at the time, and I've done this all my life and feel very strongly about this, I volunteered. I could barely pay my rent, but I was a volunteer. I volunteered at the Poetry Society of America.
(28:17):
I became president. I became with the director, the initiator of Poetry In Motion on New York City's buses and subways. It's a cultural institution now. I knew that those kinds of things that I'm good at. I'm good at organizing things and I'm good at creative things and I could help make a cultural institution, but I wasn't at all sure that I could bring up a child ignoring the needs of that child in order to write my poetry and later my biographies and memoir. I had been an ignored child. I understood the dynamic from both sides of that. I had an understanding of the shock that many young women feel when they lose their identities as they become mothers. I knew I would lose an identity I barely had. All of the mommy memoirs and sudden outrage of the deep sexism in the culture that young women suddenly experience when they become mothers, all of that I had a terrible understanding of since I was 15 years old, I understood that erasure and I knew I had no one to help me.
(29:43):
Father wasn't going to help me. My mother with all the goodwill in the world wouldn't have been able to help me and profoundly internally I did not want to do it and I came to that decision in tears, lying on my therapist's couch in a different atmosphere than younger women go to that decision now. The so-called pro-life movement was not as volatile as it is now. Roe was absolutely part of a cultural decision as well as a Supreme Court decision. It was not the same atmosphere as it is now. I think it's a terrifying atmosphere now. So I came to this decision. I did have that abortion and I knew that it was over and that was what provoked me then to get a tubal ligation. I thought I'm not going to repeat this again. I'm going to make this decision biologically, medically right now.
(30:50):
By that time I'm almost 40 years old. I mean, surely I can make that decision. And had a wonderful gynecologist and had that procedure and experienced a relief and a release into the rest of my life. And that was almost half my life ago. In a year I'll be 80. That was an opening into my complete life even though I was supposed to be quote unquote complete by becoming a mother.
Nandita Bajaj (31:20):
Yes. When you said this message that we all receive of we can either have it all or we can't have it all. And the all has to include a child and the decision to not have it all means you're making a compromise. And the way you've just described your own transformation from the internalized message of I couldn't have it all to now seeing your life is all. And it is complete and it is exactly as it needed to be for you. And it's such a powerful message to break through. And once we let go of this identity that there's no greater love than a mother's love, we start to see all of these amazing expressions of love that have been sidelined throughout history. And you are an example of that. I'd love to transfer into the next stage of your life speaking about love and completeness, your relationship with your late husband, Mike.
(32:31):
So can you share your life story beginning with when you met your late husband and what was that like sharing a life together without children?
Molly Peacock (32:46):
So the freedom to go into the rest of my life came just after I had published my second book of poems and it got a lot of critical attention. So there was a review in the New York Times book review and suddenly people who read poetry that that's not most of the population I know, but knew about the book and so did my high school boyfriend. So while I was busy doing all of this stuff with my family, I did have a boyfriend and his name was Mike, Michael Groden, and we were boyfriend and girlfriend in high school, junior prom, senior prom breakup first year of university, don't see each other for 19 years. Suddenly he realizes reading the Times that that must be me. And I give a poetry reading where there is a faculty member who was an old girlfriend of his and who brings up his name.
(33:46):
Yes. So I'm going, whoa, he's out there. He was no longer a math major. He had become a distinguished and world influential scholar of James Joyce's novels. So he was writing to me at the same time as I was trying to contact him. We did make contact. We were both involved with other people. We developed a grown up friendship for six or seven years of phone calls because we both knew each other's families and his family was nutty in its own way. And so we would have these conversations and he was a cancer survivor and that was an important part of our telephone reunion. And he was a professor at Western University in Canada. Finally, the other relationships in my case exploded, in his case calmly faded away, and he invited me to Canada. I got off that plane. I fell into his arms and I thought, Molly Peacock, this is unbelievably so you.
(35:00):
You always get in at the shallow end of the pool. I mean, I got into the shallow end of the pool and I'm 16 years old and finally I'm 45 and I recognize a life choice that really I had made when I was 16 and he felt the same way. But the issue of children came up because his mother instantly thought, Oh, there's still a chance finally. Oh man.
(35:28):
And I said, I did it already. I had that procedure. Sometimes vasectomies get reversed, but not too many tubal ligations get reversed. And he said, I've never thought about this deeply seriously in all of my relationships. And here we are and I'm thinking about it seriously now. And since it hasn't been something I've been committed to, obviously I've made that decision too. So that started us off. We were two people getting married at 45 to a thriving intimacy where we both supported one another's callings and we both had very different skillsets. He would claim that he didn't have a creative bone in his body and he did everything regularly on time and he was the person who did our taxes. And I was the person who maintained our emotional connections and our social lives, et cetera. We were a very good fit and we pulled together and we wanted that because neither of us came from parents who had that kind of marriage where the people are in sync.
(36:45):
And I was a student of those marriages. I would see them and I would think, That's what I want. Can I have that? And yes, yes, yes, you can have it. You create it. And that was another creative thing that I was able to do. And even though he claimed he didn't have a creative bone in his body, he was able to do too.
Nandita Bajaj (37:05):
Yes. Oh, I love the description of your relationship as a creative endeavor. It's such a nice way to describe it, which is what great relationships always are because there's always regeneration going on. There's movement and evolution and you're allowing each other to become your whole selves. And how long were you both married for?
Molly Peacock (37:32):
About 30 years. It's hard to say because I first saw him across the hall when we were 13. Since we started dating when we were 16, really we knew each other almost 60 years. But as a cancer survivor, he was very unusual. He was also a marathon runner. He was an athlete and a scholar. And I think that those things really helped him live through 30 years of stage four melanoma, quite remarkable and remarkable to all of his physicians. And finally, it's even hard to count the number of recurrences. Let's say the seventh major recurrence, but there were other little difficulties along the way was during COVID and that really was the end. And obviously it put a lot of pressure on our marriage. I did a tremendous amount of caregiving and it replicated my feeling I was a failure as a caregiver in my teenage years and there was a volatility and unpredictability to the disease that also replicated my growing up.
(38:52):
Needless to say, I went back into therapy in order to handle all of this and I'm so pleased to say that I was able to handle it. I stepped up to the plate time and again and he did too, even to the very end when he decided that he would take the option of the MAID process, medical assistance in dying, which is another choice that can be perceived as a radical life choice. It's a radical death choice and we were both so happy that he was able to have some control over his life at the end. And so much of what we're talking about is being in circumstances where you have no control and attempting through your own creative thinking to get to a place where you can control these circumstances. I never actually thought of medical assistance in dying and the choice not to have children in the same sentence before, but I think of them now and see the obvious relationship.
Nandita Bajaj (39:59):
Yes, so do I. And you've written a beautiful book of poems, The Widow's Crayon Box, to dedicate to Mike and your life together and the grief of losing him and the many different emotional expressions of your newfound person that you have become as we come to the end of the conversation and you realize you're in a stage where you are the Molly who is now not a mother, not a wife, not a caregiver. You've entered into a new phase of your life where you are once again redefining who Molly is. Can you talk about what it means to find fulfillment at this stage of your life and what it means to age as a person beyond these prescriptive roles?
Molly Peacock (40:53):
I couldn't imagine my life as a widow. I didn't have that many role models. And when I realized that I was not going to be weeping at the end of a couch in a mauve bathrobe, but instead was going to experience all of my emotions in all of the different colors of the big crayon box, the 152 crayon box, that's what allowed me to write the Widow's Crayon Box and also allowed me to begin feeling all kinds of emotions because I was allowed to be myself and observe so many things in life and notice so many things in life and return to my creativity. And there is an interesting phenomenon as a person ages and is free as I became free of many constrictions, it returned me to the creativity of my girlhood without the responsibility and the fear. So that sense of growth that now has the light and lightness of the confidence that comes of a lifetime of creative endeavors, including those two biographies that I wrote.
(42:14):
So all of that was happening and women age out of their careers and poets do too. Poets age just the way actors do. Women actors hit their 50s and their roles dry up. Women poets hit their 50s and they lose their publishers. Unbelievably, I have kept mine and unbelievably I have kept writing prose nonfiction, kept writing poetry because it's nourishing to me and because it keeps me on an even keel. I don't know how people process the traumas in their lives, the crises that they experience and everyone experiences crises. I don't know how they do it without making some kind of art. I mean, they do, but I think that making anything, even making dinner, making a cake, sewing, gardening, it doesn't have to be high art, so to speak, allows you to process your life. You are making something out of your own feelings and perceptions.
(43:20):
And I love that aspect of making and I feel so privileged that so many people have responded so well to it. I mean, I don't get the offers, for instance, that I would've gotten in the middle of my career, but I get enough, enough so that I'm a little bit too busy and have found myself, for instance, an eminence grise in the childfree movement, never expected to find myself here. Another kind of eminence grise in the poetry world, never expected to still be publishing with my beloved major publisher, W.W. Norton and Company, writing about flowers and botany and visual art, never expecting to be welcomed into that world, to have the doors of museum vaults opened to me for that reason. And I have many friends and that is luck and work. I meet many people. I connect to many people. I'm privileged to say they're drawn to me and I think they're drawn to a kind of happiness, electricity of happy creativity in me.
(44:33):
So they want to know me and I'm delighted to know them and I've mentored many people. I have worked one-to-one with writers for 40 years. I have taught at an institution called 92 New York, formerly the 92nd Street Y in New York City, even though I'm a happy Canadian living in Toronto also for 40 years. Relationships that I expected to evaporate have not evaporated. They've stayed, they've grown, they've enriched and I have lifelong friendships that are enriching. And yes, one has one's physical frailties as one approaches 80 as I am approaching. There's no doubt about that, but at the same time with a fantastic exercise program and all the other things that I do, it's a very fulfilling time. I obviously adored my husband, but I also adore this fascinating coda I'm living to the symphony of my life.
Nandita Bajaj (45:39):
Wow. What a beautiful ending, Molly. Thank you so much for sharing all of these different aspects of a really intentional life and awakened life, a creative life, an energetic life. And you are such an incredible example of how to remain awake to everything that life is giving us and how to move with the happenings, the comings and goings of life. You're such a remarkable person. You started the podcast by saying you wanted to live an original life and I don't know if there's anything more original to you than your life, Molly. This is a real testament to what you've made for yourself. Thank you so much. This was a remarkable interview.
Molly Peacock (46:26):
Thank you so much. Thanks back to you, Nandita, and thank you for that phrase, awakened and intentional. I've taken that in and I hope you won't mind if I use that for myself.
Nandita Bajaj (46:41):
It would be an honor if you did. That's all for this edition of Beyond Pronatalism. To share feedback about the show or a particular episode or to share your own story on the podcast, please get in touch with me using the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one-time or a recurring donation. Thank you so much again for joining me today as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. This podcast is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing the rights and wellbeing of people, animals and the planet by confronting pronatalism and other harmful ideologies. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team, Josh Wild and Alan Ware.