Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

It Got Me Thinking…About Being Childless and Single

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

One of the many beautiful things about our community here at Life Without Baby is the variety of voices and perspectives we’ve brought together. We’ve created a safe place here where we can cry, offer support, share hard-earned wisdom, and even whine about our different yet similar experiences. But as I read through recent posts and revisit older gems, I feel there’s one segment of our group that we need to encourage to join in more. Single gals: This is your invitation to speak up!

The whole childfree-by-chance-or-circumstance status is painful, period, and I’d like those of us who are lucky to be in happy relationships to pause and acknowledge the quagmire of emotions when it’s compounded by the whole single-not-by-choice scenario. In my case, I spent my youth dreaming about the family I would create for myself. My 20s contained a series of disappointments and heartbreaks. By my early 30s, I hated how women (and men) would come up to me at weddings and baby showers and say “You’re next!” when I wanted so desperately to be part of the married and mommy clubs. Every time I heard what was intended as encouragement, it came across as another acknowledgement of my failings.

It got worse when I hit 40. I’d be standing in the middle of a country club, draped in a hideous bridesmaid dress, toes crammed in hideous shoes, smile frozen on my face while I stood among the other single ladies hoping to catch the bouquet and magically change my fate. I’d look around at all the seemingly happily married couples and think, Everyone else has given up on me too. I felt myself growing invisible, and I don’t want any of us to feel that way.

Platitudes such as “It will happen when you least expect it…God must have a plan for you to birth something else…You need to love yourself more, then love will find you” just don’t fly here. At LWB, we’re about having real, open, and often painful discussions about who we are and what we experience. Through our efforts, we hope to promote awareness and acceptance, to create a more inclusive culture, and to heal ourselves.

So, if you’re a gal who happens to be childless and single, join the conversation. Comment on posts and share your unique perspectives. Check out the “childless couples—childless singles” discussion initiated by Elena K. Start your own discussion or create a group on our Home page. Or, consider sharing your story by completing and submitting the questionnaire for Our Stories.

Please share your hurts, your reflections, your questions, your experiences. I wish I could have told my younger self, “You matter. You have something to contribute. You are appreciated and loved just as you are.” If you need to hear that, your LWB sisters are here to remind you that it’s true.

 

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is telling more of the story about her journey in The Mother of All Dilemmas. As she shares her quest to become a single mother (and ultimately embraces a life without children), she explores why society still appears to base a woman’s worth on how many children she has. Watch for updates on the book’s release here at LifeWithoutBaby.com.

Whiny Wednesday: Caring for Aging Parents

I’ve seen this week’s topic come up a lot in the blog comments, so I know that many of you have experienced this. It’s the topic of caring for aging parents, and whether the responsibility is shared fairly when you don’t have children.

What’s been your experience with this?

When You No Longer Belong in a “Family Friendly” Place

By Lisa Manterfield

A couple of years ago, a favorite local restaurant closed its doors, not because business was bad, but because the owner decided to reimagine the concept to make it more family friendly. My sweet little French bistro is no more.

What make this change particularly painful (and ironic) is that this gem, with its Parisian-style sidewalk patio, is where I sat when I wrote the first post for Life Without Baby.

Image

One Friday afternoon, more than seven years ago now, I took my laptop, snagged a table in the sun, ordered myself a glass of bubbly and a half-dozen oysters and began documenting my life without the children I’d dreamed of. Since then, Kathleen and I have celebrated completing drafts of our books there (see photo) and, one evening, I met with one of my earliest readers of the blog to share a glass of wine and stories of our journeys. So, this place holds a special place in my heart.

Aside from the sentimental loss, the restaurant was also one of the few quiet adult places to eat in that area. Along with one or two other holdouts, it’s surrounded by family pizza joints and family burger bars. And now it’s going to be another family-focused restaurant—an “eatery” instead of a “bistro.”

The owner told the local paper that the new place “will cater to a larger segment of the population” and that he plans to “make it more of a place where everyone feels they belong.”

I found it ironic that this longtime patron, who once felt so at home there that she chose it as the place to write about not have children, would no longer feel she belonged. In a society where being childless often make us feel like outcasts, it hurt to be shut out of yet another place.

But perhaps it’s not time for us to despair yet. The follow-up to this story is that the family-friendly restaurant never did open its doors. The space sat empty for two or three years, so perhaps the owner’s assumptions about “everyone” was wrong after all. A new place is coming soon, a very family-unfriendly craft beer bar. I may have to mosey on over and enjoy a nice quiet brew. Perhaps I’ll take my laptop and write about it. Wouldn’t that be a nice full-circle ending?

Our Stories: Theresa

As told to Kathleen Guthrie Woods

When I read through Theresa’s answers to the Our Stories questionnaire, I cried at my desk. This is what despair sounds like, I thought. And I totally get it, because I remember all too well what it feels like.

My first instinct was to tell her “You’re going to be okay!”, but there’s no guarantee, and that response is not fair to her. Theresa’s pain is raw and real, and this is where she is today.

At the same time, I believe she will get through it. She’s already demonstrating that she’s brave enough (although she may not yet realize how brave she is) to go to that deep, dark, ugly place of grieving, a stage that many of us know must be experienced before we can begin to move on. And I know from reading so many other stories from this wonderfully safe and supportive community that there is a next stage…and a next.

As you read this, if you see yourself in Theresa’s story, I want you to know, You are not alone. If you see a former self in her story, I hope you’ll reach out to Theresa in the Comments to tell her where you are today and offer some hope or encouragement, if you can, or sisterly understanding, if you can’t.

In any case, please be gentle with yourself today.

 

LWB: Describe your dream of motherhood.

Theresa: Shattered.

LWB: Are you childfree by choice, chance, or circumstance?

Theresa: Not by choice. I waited, wanting everything to be right. Was told by a gynecologist that it’d be “difficult” for me to conceive naturally. At 39, and never having gotten pregnant naturally, I decided I needed to come to terms with it and thought I had. Nope. At 44, I found myself pregnant. A miracle!!! Doctors were shocked. I was speechless and over the moon. Testing and questionnaires done, on the prenatal vitamins…but at the ultrasound appointment two weeks later, they saw nothing. The doctors took blood and informed me I would miscarry and the baby was no longer viable.

I don’t understand! Then the doctor started probing into my medical history: Had I ever been pregnant or miscarried? NO. Had I ever received a transfusion? NO. Yet here I am with O- blood and anti-Jk(a) antibodies already somehow “sensitized”.

I couldn’t even miscarry properly; I was issued the morning after pill to “flush it out”. “It”?? You mean my dreams? Yes, those.

My ob-gyn says my partner is Rh+ and my already-sensitized blood turned on my dream and terminated the baby. The doctor says I should never even attempt to get pregnant anymore because the rate of miscarriage increases with each, and IF I was “somehow able to carry to term, the baby would either be born with blue baby syndrome, severe deficit, or stillborn.”

It has been two years of heavy medications for anxiety/depression and PTSD, and I’m no closer to coming to terms with this than day one.

LWB: How do you answer “Do you have kids?”

Theresa: I quickly change the subject before the surface is scratched and I begin to tear up without control.

LWB: Where are you on your journey now?

Theresa: Broken.

LWB: What’s the hardest part for you about not having children?

Theresa: Living.

LWB: What is your hope for yourself this coming year?

Theresa: Somehow finding some acceptance.

 

Won’t you share your story with us? The act of answering the questions itself can be very healing, plus we’d like to support you by telling you “You are not alone.” Please visit the Our Stories page to get more information and the questionnaire.

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is mostly at peace with her childlessness.

Whiny Wednesday: Pressure to Get Over Loss

With any kind of grief, there comes a point where those around you expect you to be over it. For many of us, that point comes just as the full impact of loss is hitting us and we are far from okay.  So here’s this week’s topic:

The pressure to “get over” your loss

Have you felt that pressure from those around you?

 

How to be Childless and Happy in 10,000 Easy Steps

By Lisa Manterfield

There are two questions I get asked frequently: How did you come to terms with not having children, and how long did it take?

The answer is something akin to “how long is a piece of string and how many knots can you tie in it?”

Believe me when I tell you that if I could write down ten easy steps to making peace with being childfree-not-by-choice, I’d do it, but the answer isn’t that simple. Yes, there were many things that happened along the way that helped me make some peace, but it took closer to 10,000 steps than ten.

Writing down my story was hugely cathartic, venting about the injustices on this blog helped, too. Realizing I wasn’t alone in this and that people like you were out there wanting to talk through the minefield has helped immeasurably. Drawing a line in the sand and saying, “This is where that chapter of my life ends and this is where I start healing” also helped. And frankly, telling myself a big fat lie that I was better off not being a mother actually helped me to realize that in many ways I was. Setting new goals, appreciating the benefits of not having kids, and allowing myself to feel bitter and badly treated when I needed to. All these things helped.

I don’t think there’s a formula for working your way through this, and it’s definitely a journey of making forward process and dealing with inevitable setbacks.

As for how long the process takes? How long is that piece of string? It’s been three years for me and I consider myself largely at peace with my situation. I have closed the door on the idea that I will have children someday and most days I’m good with it. Everyday it gets a little better and a little easier. Some days there will be reminders of what I’ve lost and sometimes a flicker of a thought of “what if…”

The truth is, in many ways, I expect this piece of string to go on forever. The experience of infertility has changed me. It is one of the most significant and life-changing events of my life, and I don’t think the repercussions of that will ever stop reverberating. It doesn’t mean I won’t find harmony and even happiness in this new life – I already have – but I don’t expect this journey of coming-to-terms to ever fully end.

 

This post is an oldie, originally posted on April 26, 2012, but I think it’s worth a rerun. You can see what others had to say in the original comments here.

Our Stories: Zoe

As told to Kathleen Guthrie Woods

Zoe’s turning point came during “an excessive attack of the googles,” when she came across a woman on a fertility board with the same stats. Upon closer inspection, Zoe realized the woman had posted seven years earlier, and had endured nine IVF failures since. “I did not want to be that woman,” she decided then and there.

But deciding to stop unsuccessful treatments and making peace with a life without babies are different things. Zoe quotes John Cleese: “I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.” In her own words, Zoe says, “Clinging onto hope was not something I was prepared to do indefinitely. I wanted to walk away with my sanity intact.”

Here’s her story.

LWB: Describe your dream of motherhood.

Zoe: I always said I’d have a toddler by the time I was 30. My dad used to joke that would mean I’d have to give birth at 28, so get pregnant at 27, be in a relationship by 26, and that I was saying this whilst aged 26, and it “obviously isn’t going to be that moron in the baseball cap you brought round last week, so you better start looking”.

I dreamt of filling a child’s life with music (both myself and my partner are musicians), books, wellies, dogs, silly humour, and doodles. I’d also always been positive about adopting. My parents fostered many kids before we came along, so that was part of my dream too.

LWB: Are you childfree by choice, chance, or circumstance?

Zoe: Circumstance. I always went out with guys who weren’t ready, and I respected them. I was in a long-term relationship from 26, stopped taking the pill at 30. He responded by forcing me to take the morning-after pill when he forgot to use a condom. That devastated me. Then two weeks shy of my 33rd birthday, he just left, saying he didn’t love me, wasn’t ready for kids and wanted to “free me up”. He is now a father of one with the girl he got with three weeks after leaving me.

I got with my future husband pretty quickly after that—we’d been friends for years. He’d had an undescended testicle till aged 12, and two years in, we confirmed he had very low sperm count and IVF ICSI was our only option. Six months later, when I was just 36, we found out I had Diminished Ovarian Reserve (the ovaries of a 45 year old) and wouldn’t respond to IVF. Double whammy. He can’t have kids without IVF, I can’t get pregnant with it. We did it anyway. It failed drastically.

We don’t want double donor. I have my own very clear feelings about that, and it feels good to actively make a decision together against it. I would adopt, but my partner won’t, and I have chosen a life with him.

LWB: Where are you on your journey now? (for example: still in denial, angry, hoping for a miracle, depressed, crawling toward acceptance, embracing Plan B)

Zoe: Never in denial, as I always thought we’d have a problem and have been pretty realistic the whole way through. I moved from anger (at my ex-partner, who I now realize took the only fertile years of my life) into depression. Currently trying to convince myself of Plan B. Every day I take a huge amount of physical and emotional effort, convincing myself that this is okay, I am okay, a life without children will be okay. Every morning all the hard work I did the day before, getting to a place of acceptance, has vanished, and I have to start convincing myself all over again.

LWB: What’s the hardest part about not having children?

Zoe: The constant exclusion from life’s milestones. I never wanted to live like a 20-something forever. I wanted a family life and all that entailed.

Also I’m particularly upset about the fact there will be no one there to bother about what I leave behind. My legacy, I suppose. I have hundreds of recordings of me singing and playing songs, scrapbooks of band tours I’ve been on, photos of achievements I’ve made, venues I’ve played, and no one to listen to them or read them or look at them when I’m gone. I was looking forward to the exciting “this is what mummy used to do before she had you” conversations.

LWB: What’s one thing you want other people (moms, younger women, men, grandmothers, teachers, strangers) to know about your being childfree?

Zoe: That it wasn’t planned. That it wasn’t my fault. That it’s not a normal thing to go through at 36, and that I am broken with grief and would be grateful for their understanding on that.

Rather than what I want other women to know though, I want to speak to men in their 30s. I want them to know that their decisions to love their girlfriends/wives, but yet dismiss their requests to start a family because they are not ready, until they are 40 in some cases, is not something women should have to bear. We are not being mental or unnecessarily naggy. We are legitimately worried that it will be too late. Men should bear some of this responsibility, they should meet us half way.

LWB: What’s your Plan B?

Zoe: Being an aunt to my one and only niece/nephew, who was conceived at the point I found out I couldn’t have children naturally and was born a few weeks after I found out I can never have children at all.

Getting married, with the knowledge I have already been through one of the hardest things you can go through with a partner, and starting off with the understanding that it will be a marriage without kids. But I am so glad I know this from the outset and am still choosing to do it. That feels empowering to me.

 

What is your Plan B? Or are your wounds so raw that you can’t even imagine a happy future? We can all benefit from hearing about your experiences, plus we’d like to support you. Please visit the Our Stories page to get more information and the questionnaire, and consider sharing your story with women who truly understand what you’re going through.

Did you know Kathleen Guthrie Woods is getting ready to tell her own story? The Mother of All Dilemmas follows her journey of pursuing being a single mother then embracing a life without children, and explores the reasons our society still presumes to calculate a woman’s worth based on whether or not she’s a mother. Keep an eye on LifeWithoutBaby.com for announcements about the book’s release.

Whiny Wednesday: Missing Out on Parenting Milestones

Graduation season is upon us and social media has been abuzz with snapshots of proud parents and their offspring. So it seems like a good time for this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic:

Feeling left out when friends and relatives celebrate the milestones of being parents and grandparents.


As always, your other whines are always welcome.

The Intangible Losses of Infertility

By Lisa Manterfield

“I’m sorry for your loss.”

This simple phrase is the one thing I wish someone had said to me. It would have meant that someone—one person—acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.

Where Western Culture Gets It Wrong

In Western culture in particular, most people don’t know how to behave when someone loses a loved one. They follow accepted protocols such as sending cards or flowers. Some may call to offer help or just show up on the doorstep with the ubiquitous tuna casserole. A few will know to give people space when they’re mourning, expect unexpected behavior, and be ready for tears or anger. Still, most people struggle with how to handle those in pain.

Our society also has an unwritten hierarchy of loss. Someone who’s lost a spouse, a child, or a parent is given different allowances to someone who’s lost a boyfriend/girlfriend, a friend, or an elderly relative. Further down the ranking come pets, coworkers, and ex-lovers. Even people who’ve lost houses, jobs, and limbs are allowed a degree of understanding, sympathy, and mourning. But most people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost—in this case, motherhood and all that it encompassed. Many people won’t understand—or even acknowledge—your need to mourn at all.

Intangible Loss

In her 2010 memoir, Spoken from the Heart, former first lady Laura Bush writes about her experience with infertility. “The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence,” she writes. “…For someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like slant, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?”

The fact is that your children and your idea of motherhood did exist for you. If you had planned on having children, you undoubtedly made room in your life for them. This might have included creating life plans around the assumption that someday kids would be part of that plan. In some cases, making room for children in your life might have included making physical room, perhaps dedicating and even decorating a room in your home that would one day become a nursery, or it may have involved moving to a bigger house or a more family-friendly neighborhood. Did you pick out names for your children? Did you imagine which family members they might take after? Did you fantasize about your daughter winning a Nobel Prize for her research or your son bringing home a gold medal from the Olympics? You probably thought about the kind of mother you wanted to be. You collected data as you went through life, putting check marks through things you observed that you’d do better when you became a mother and striking red lines through the things you’d never do with your children. And you undoubtedly imagined what it would feel like to hold a child that was yours.

Here are some other losses you might be feeling:

  • your identity as a woman
  • the loss of your dream
  • the babies you’ll never get to see and touch
  • the vision of your future that you’d painted so clearly
  • experiences you could only share with your own children
  • the legacy of family traditions and heirlooms
  • the rite of passage into adulthood
  • being treated like a “real adult” by your family
  • making your parents proud grandparents
  • fitting in with friends or peers
  • your place in society

Your children and your identity as a mother existed and were very real to you. You have experienced a great loss, and the only way to begin coming to terms with that loss is to acknowledge it and mourn it.

This post is excerpted from Lisa’s book, Life Without Baby: Surviving and Thriving When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen.

It Got Me Thinking…About What I Don’t Need Kids For

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

A friend recently shared this with me on Facebook:

While I strongly disagree, I do feel compelled to share some of my thoughts on this.

  1. WTF?!
  2. You just sent this to someone you know is childless not by choice. Are you trying to make me feel less-than again?
  3. So, yeah, I don’t think it’s all about me. Ever. Never did.
  4. I didn’t need to bring a child into the world to get this. Does that make me a better or more evolved human?
  5. I’m going to go with “yes” to my last question.

Seriously, what would be an appropriate response to this? If you got it, would you simply un-friend the heartless dimwit? Let’s have some fun with this: Assuming you have no intention of sending a reply, but want to get it out of your system, what would you say? (By the way, I did not reply to her. I sat on this for a couple of months, steaming, until I figured out I could vent here.)

 

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.