Coming to terms with childlessness (with a little help from my mother-in-law)

I should've stuck to beer, my usual, but my mother-in-law, Isabelle, told me to live a little. We were in a supper club, after all — where people never stick to beer.

Plus her boyfriend, Hank, was paying.

We were enjoying an evening at the Elmo Club in Platteville, Wis. I watched the bartender, wearing a loosefitting Green Bay Packers jersey, load another glass with ice for me. He filled it halfway with vodka, added the spicy tomato juice swill, and threw in a wilted celery stick — which I ate before taking a sip.

A final round of fertility treatments had left me feeling crazy. I'd been trying to become pregnant, but right then felt I didn't deserve to be. I knew what kind of woman orders a third badly made cocktail within one hour.

My husband, Sean, and I had lived 10 years with blithe indecision about when to have kids. I didn't even hear the ticking of our biological clock until its alarm went off.

We always expected to have children. Now we couldn't. And we felt estranged from life's purpose. What would we be working toward in life, as a couple, if we didn't have a family?

Sitting on the bar stool at the Elmo, I felt the weight of consequence. The bloody marys left an acidic ache in my chest that even drunkenness couldn't erase.

Sean managed to hide from the onslaught by talking about the weather with Hank, a retired farmer. But the women were working overtime to make me feel welcome. So I smiled. They thought my life in Minneapolis sounded glamorous. I didn't tell them it was just a home with a dog and two cats.

The herd of women eventually dispersed to Formica tables surrounding the supper club's dance floor, leaving Isabelle and me to talk.

A few years ago Isabelle was thrilled to be elected Irish Rose — the older version of homecoming queen — by the Lafayette County Shamrock Club in southwestern Wisconsin. Sean and I even went to her "coronation," where she wore a green vest over a white pantsuit, her puffy white hair topped with a large, green hat.

When she was my age, Isabelle said, the Catholic Church and society kept women in their place. Wife and mother were your only options.

As she talked, I felt my own sense of unease. I was seeking, and expected, a different rite of passage through love and motherhood, one based on mutual consideration and equality. But it had been thwarted by my own uncertainty.

Sean's father told her he'd divorce her if she took that job.

She said, "Well then, my prayers have been answered twice in one day." As she told me about her first year on the river, her voice became conspiratorial. "I would sit in my room on that boat sometimes — it had a window above the dresser — and I would just watch the Mississippi. It seemed I was always looking back that first year on the boat."

She explained how she felt overwhelmed by feelings and memories. "I'd throw a little of what my life had been till then out in the water and watch it float away. There goes all those bad years," Isabelle motioned with her hand over her head. "I did that over and over."

Her life had been chaotic on land, but on the boat it gradually assumed the river's peaceful rhythms.

Isabelle held her hands out, palms open before me, and said: "Patty, these are what got me through."

I realized she was trying to give me advice. Pretty and child-free Patty, adrift and pitiful? Nope. Isabelle wasn't buying it.

The band was getting ready to start. Someone sprinkled something on the floor that looked like laundry detergent. Dance floor wax, Isabelle explained.

The man swept it into the corner and the band started playing. The dance floor was immediately packed with senior citizens.

Isabelle revealed the medical histories of the pairs that danced past our seats at the bar. This one's got arthritis in both knees. There goes a hip replacement. That one's got a wife in a nursing home. Alzheimer's.

Isabelle grabbed my arm and pulled me off the bar stool, adding "torn rotator cuff" and "barren" to the parade of ailments.

During the "Tennessee Waltz," we even managed to turn a couple times. I was thrilled when we got the groove. As I turned to face a new direction, my feet moved effortlessly.

As Isabelle sang along to her generation's "Achy Breaky Heart," I felt I couldn't relate. There was an unfillable place at my family seating chart, and popular music doesn't have commiserating chart-toppers about childlessness.

But as I listened to Isabelle warble, I understood what I did have: a mother-in-law I could count as a friend.

My prayers, if you could call them that, had already been answered in many ways. I could chuck the pity-me attitude and calm the turbulence the old-fashioned way, with pride and dignity.

Well, maybe not dignity. Thanks to the dance floor wax, I landed flat on my back an instant later, left staring up at the smoke-browned ceiling tiles of the Elmo Club. Isabelle and I were still holding hands when I turned to look at her. She looked peaceful, familial. But I could've melted into the floor with all those dancing grannies staring down at us.

Isabelle and I stood in place for a moment, waiting for the dance floor to feel solid under our feet. Dancers slid past us, watching. Then I took her hands in mine.

It was my turn to lead.

Patricia Cumbie is a Minneapolis writer and dancer. She can be found online at www.patriciacumbie.com.