By Lisa Manterfield
Thanks to Iris for forwarding this article about living happily without children.
I love this author’s attitude to the hand she’s been dealt. At first read, she seems almost flippant about her inability to have children, but she’s packed a whole life story into one article, and reading between the lines, it’s clear to see the pain she felt, the struggles she and her partner went through in coming-to-terms with being childfree, and the attitudes she still has to endure from others. But her whole outlook was encapsulated in this paragraph:
“We didn’t get to have something. We had 2 choices as a result of that – let it control, dictate and sadden the rest of our lives or find something else to do instead. Either way, we still wouldn’t get to have kids. So which is the best choice?”
Are you still struggling to come to terms with your own situation and feeling that childlessness is “controlling, dictating, and saddening” your life? If so, can you see what your “find something else to do instead” could be? And could you do it?
I don’t this author is trivializing the blow she was dealt – far from it – but I love that she’s found a way to turn her situation to her advantage. What do you think?
Amazing article! I particularly like this line, “We have learned though, that it is not about comparing your life to others: it is about living the best that you possibly can, about finding your place.” So much truth in that statement…
The author also made me smile when she said we get the “best” of kids. I absolutely love being the fun aunt and uncle who get to spoil our nieces and nephews. At Christmas, we took the kids to see a movie and then out to eat and for ice-cream. Our nephew was so impressed that he got popcorn at the movie, Freddy’s hamburgers for dinner, AND ice-cream for dessert. I cherish those moments!
Thanks Lisa – I love this article, it helps a great deal to see how others cope and get through the difficult choice to stop pursuing parenting and dare to dream of a different life – and the fact it takes quite some time to reach a different way of thinking but it is possible. I particularly identify with “There are the rare occasions where either my partner or I will pause wistfully for a moment as we watch a father playing with his children on the beach or a tiny child rushing up to its mother full of excitement. But they are brief. We just hitch our surf boards a little higher under our arms and head off into the waves to play.” We haven’t dramatically changed our lives – we both work full time and live in the same house but we’ve shifted our thinking and are grateful that we head off to snowboard or ski in the mountains during the winter and “play”. This helps a lot.
I confess that I get jealous of having a partner that empathizes about not having a child of our own.
My husband has 3 of his own. My (our) miscarriages are not even a blip on his radar of losses. He can’t empathize with me because he’s not walked my walk. Also, he has symptoms of Aspbergers, so even if he didn’t have his own kids, he’d likely not be very good at comforting me anyway.
On the flip side, I’m always very happy when I hear of someone who’s processed enough grief to where they can enjoy the life they do have.
I’m so sorry for your losses – this is such an isolating path to walk. My husband is compassionate and understanding nowadays – we are 4 years from ending our journey and its still hard. However, when we were in the thick of it, he was dismissive and wouldn’t acknowledge the pain or discuss it. Keep visiting LWB, we truly know how this feels and I can honestly say the only way is to go through the grieving process. I read Silent Sorority and Lisa’s “I’m taking my eggs and going home” – it took me around 2 years before I was ready to work through the exercises but reading their journey was the first time I acknowledged to myself that infertility is a massive loss. I would never have believed I could also add that life is joyful again. Thinking of you
I loved this article, and how it shows one way to cope with living without children and have a full life. It seems very romantic, being off and transient, and while that’s not for everyone, I love that she is so passionate about their freedom, about the decision to do what makes them happy especially because they wouldn’t have been able to had they had children. It also makes me grateful for the fact that our childlessness is a result of multiple factors, and we each had a biological part in it, so there wasn’t that lopsidedness that adds extra dimension to the pain and the coping.
I loved this quote: “But gradually we came to realize that people had every right to their own take on the situation but it would only impact on us if we let it. We could choose whether or not to let emotions irrelevant to us affect us. We chose not to.”
That can be hard for me, as I have slowly been learning to just say “no” when someone asks if I have children and not feel like I have to justify it all and regale them with my sad story, prove to them that I tried, I really did, and then get faced with questions about why we didn’t do this or the other thing from people who never had to make those kinds of decisions. We are in a pretty good place a little over a year since we made our decision to end our parenthood quest, it was the little things that helped, like buying all new furniture in light colors and going wine shopping and toasting to no daycare… The sadness is there, but it helps to have all the positives (well, most of them) that Denice states in her article. Thanks for sharing!