The ghost ships that surround us

A few weeks ago, my husband asked me if I’d seriously considered religious life before I met him. I responded, only half joking, that it wasn’t until after I had kids that I started to wonder if I might have been better suited to the silence of a contemplative order of nuns. The conversation was in jest, but I started to think about how radically different my life might have been if I had converted to Catholicism just a year or two earlier, when I was single and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my life.

Although I am not generally one to invest much energy into wondering what could have been, recently I’ve found myself pondering the other lives I could have lived, and indeed, the ones that might still be possible. I think all the time about this quote that my Instagram friend Colleen (making_home_in_norway) shared in connection with her move (back) to Norway, as a Canadian married to a Norwegian.

The Ghost Ships That Didn’t Carry Us

“I’ll never know and neither will you the life you didn’t choose. We’ll only know whatever that sister life was, it was important, beautiful, and it was not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.” - Cheryl Strayed

The life you didn’t choose. Of course, to a large extent we don’t choose our lives, and it can be hard to parse out what was choice and what wasn’t. I tend to think I chose my fairly conventional family life, especially because it contrasts with the paths taken by most of my peers. But in reality, if I hadn’t met my husband when I did, if he hadn’t had a job that meant we could welcome babies and I could stay home with them, if this and that and the next thing hadn’t happened, then the life I chose wouldn’t be at all.

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

Yet, there were forks in the road, moments when I might easily have chosen a different direction. There are so many of those that it’s impossible to try to count them, but major ones in my life include the decision to move to London from a small city in Scotland when I was 17; to study and work abroad in the years after I finished my BA; to keep dating my now-husband long distance when I moved from Paris back to London after we’d only been together for a matter of months; the decision to move with him to Dublin when he got a job there before my lease was up in London; our last minute decision a few years later to move from Dublin back to Paris, rather than to Seattle, as had been the plan.

Ghost ships. These lives almost lived, lives that would have been unfathomably different to the one I have, in ways beyond my ken.

There are also the more fanciful ghost ships, ones that are so different and unconnected to my reality that they are more like fantasy ships. The life in which I was a journalist living in NYC, living in a small apartment with my husband and our only child, travelling solo for work and spending our weekends visiting museums and galleries and eating bagels and good Chinese food. Or the life in which I became a midwife, working long and exhausting hours, underpaid and underappreciated, but sure I was doing the work meant for me. Or the life in which I became a contemplative nun.

With each baby I’ve had - now three - I’ve felt more deeply sure that the vocation to family life is right and good for me, and that being my kids’ primary carer is my current calling. And yet, I’ve felt the presence of ghost ships so thickly around me, more and more as time goes on. Perhaps it’s because when I was in my 20s - even after having my first baby - I felt that sense that anything was possible. I had many lives left to live. I still felt confident that there was time to pursue all the things I wanted to, to live in different places, to waste time.

That sense has dissipated pretty quickly in the past few years. I’m not sure if it’s having more kids or just getting that little bit older, but every choice I make feels much more weighty, infinitely more consequential, than choices did in the past. When I make a decision for myself, or for one of my kids, or for our whole family, I can see several ghost ships leaving the port. I am more keenly aware that my time and resources are, in fact, finite, and that whilst I can certainly still chase new or old dreams, I have to be more discerning about where I invest that energy, and how it impacts the other members of my family.

There’s nothing to do but salute them from the shore. Once choices have been made, paths taken, ships boarded, there’s not much to do but to gaze upon what wasn’t as something that could also have been good and beautiful, or hard and harrowing (or all of those things); as points in the geography of your life where you took a different turn. Maybe one day life will bring you back round to that same point, and you’ll be presented with an opportunity to make a different choice. Even if not, though, they still matter. They still signal where you, presumably, chose the thing that seemed best from your vantage point as a mere mortal, in the absence of omniscience.

Ghost ships remind us not just of who or what we could have been, but also of who we were and are. They can point us back to some part of ourselves that we might have forgotten, or that we’ve hidden, or evolved from. As we salute them, they can give us a sense of direction, reminding us where we came from and, perhaps, giving us ideas about where we might go next. Sometimes they elicit a pang of regret, and other times a sigh of relief. Either way, they accompany us benignly, reminding us that we are not simply the person living the life we find ourselves in today, but also the person who might have lived many others.