filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
In honor of Thanksgiving, we’re mixing it up a bit. Instead of the usual Whiny Wednesday, I want to ask you this:
What are you grateful for?
Often when we’re in the thick of grief it’s hard to find anything positive, but my Thanksgiving wish for you is to find a patch of sunshine this week.
Next week we’ll get back to whining. 😉
By Lisa Manterfield
Photo courtesy: Clemens v. Vogelsang
It’s Thanksgiving here in the U.S. this week. For many of you, that’s going to mean spending a long day, perhaps a long weekend, with people who care about you, but perhaps don’t really understand what you’ve been through or what you’re going through still. It can make for a lot of unintentionally hurtful comments, strained emotions, and reignited grief.
This year, we have post-election fatigue to throw into the mix. No matter your political affiliations, I think it’s safe to say that most of us have been completely worn out by this year’s election horror show. I certainly reached a point where I didn’t even want to hear from the people I agreed with, never mind the opposing sides.
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been hibernating from the news and social media, needing a post-election detox. Consequently, I’m sleeping more restfully, spending more enjoyable time with Mr. Fab, and my brain is starting to function with clarity again. In sitting down to write this post, I also realize that I haven’t had any of the weird headaches I’ve been experiencing for the previous month or so.
I’m aware that this seems like I’m sticking my head in the sand, but I prefer to call it self-care, putting my own needs first for a while, so that I can regain enough mental strength to keep moving forward.
I also believe that self-care is one of the most important tools for making it through the upcoming holiday season, especially if your grief is still raw. But even if you’ve been making progress, the holidays can be a breeding ground for tactless comments, reminders of loss, and emotional triggers galore!
So, here are a few suggestions that have helped me navigate the holidays over the years:
Say no to difficult events. If you know a gathering will be problematic, make an excuse and don’t go. You may have some guilt about it, but that will pass, and you’ll end up much better off emotionally than if you go and end up upset. If you’re in the early stages of grief, take a year off from the holidays. Seriously. The holidays will be back next year, and they’ll get progressively easier to deal with.
Have an escape plan. If you do go to a gathering that might be difficult, have an escape plan. That might be as simple as borrowing the host’s dog and going for a long walk or volunteering to be the person to run to the store for last-minute ingredients. A little time alone is like a mini detox, so you can gather yourself together before facing people again.
Use this community. I promise you, you won’t be the only person looking for an understanding ear over the holidays. Use the community and connect with someone who know what you’re going through and can offer support and encouragement.
Plan some post-celebration self-care. Know in advance how you’ll take care of yourself after the event. Go home and take a long, quiet bath, or a long walk, or plan to do something with someone whose time you enjoy. If you can, schedule a post-Thanksgiving detox day.
If you need more ideas for getting through the holidays, we have several resources available. There’s an entire chapter on navigating the holidays in both Life Without Baby: Surviving and Thriving When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen and Life Without Baby Workbook 3: Dealing With the Day-to-Day Challenges, and a book full of inspiration and tips in Life Without Baby Holiday Companion. You can also get a free copy of Dealing With Social Landmines when you subscribe to the newsletter, and if you’re already a subscriber, you should have received a refresher via email. Finally, here’s the link to the community forums, where you’ll already find several holiday and family-related threads going.
Please take advantage of these resources and this community and make sure you have a happy Thanksgiving. –x-
Mr. Fab and I got rid of our TV when we first moved in together and—apart from on a handful of occasions—we haven’t missed it at all.
One of the things I definitely don’t miss is the topic of this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Kid-centric advertising
I’m sure you know what I mean—those ads selling products you might actually use, but which start out with lines like, “We know your family is important to you that’s why you use [fill in the blank product].”
It’s Whiny Wednesday and open season for any topic that’s on your mind.
By Lisa Manterfield
Next week we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I am looking forward to it. A couple of years ago, Mr. Fab and I started a new tradition of spending the day with good friends. Mr. Fab is cooking a decidedly nontraditional Thanksgiving dinner, so all I’ll have to do, aside from a few sous chef duties, is show up and have a good time.
I know for many of you, Thanksgiving might not be such a fun time. Traditionally, it’s a holiday when families gather, which might mean facing insensitive relatives and prying questions about children. It also marks the beginning of what can often be the most difficult time of the year, with social gatherings, kid-oriented activities, and constant reminders of the many ways we don’t get to celebrate the holidays.
I love that this community includes new readers and seasoned pros, so let’s help one another out this year by sharing ideas on getting through the season with our hearts intact.
What are some of the issues you know you’ll face this holiday season? What events are you dreading? What’s going to be hardest for you?
And perhaps most important of all, how to do plan to get through the season with minimum emotional damage?
For more tips, inspiration, and support, check out the Life Without Baby Holiday Companion, available now at Amazon.com and in PDF format at Gumroad.
By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
Among the offerings in Lists of Note: An Eclectic Collection Deserving of a Wider Audience compiled by Shaun Usher* is Walt Whitman’s list of terms related to grief and mourning. Here’s a sampling:
I can check off more than a few, and I suspect you can too. We are a rare community in that we have all experienced grief in some form, often silently and in isolation.
As I was reflecting on how many words there are for grief, I thought about how there are also many expressions of grief. You might lose your appetite, or binge on comfort foods. You might sob uncontrollably, go numb, or feel ready to explode from rage. Some days you’ll want to hide under the sheets and sleep away the pain, or you’ll exhaust yourself with busy work. You might even experience the full spectrum of feelings in a single day. What I hope you also know by being part of the Life Without Baby community is that grieving a loss such as ours is normal and you are not alone.
If today is a rough day for you in which you feel bereft (my contribution to the list) or otherwise “afflicted with grief”, please reach out through the Comments or the various Forums. If you need more insight and guidance, order a copy of Lisa’s book, Life Without Baby: Surviving and Thriving When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen. The sections on grieving are real, raw, and ultimately, I think, encouraging. If you need more, please ask for help. Find a therapist, minister, or close confidante, and unburden your heart. Please be open to receiving the love and support you so deserve.
*The rest of the book is fascinating, and a lot more fun, by the way. Check it out on Amazon.
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
When a reader suggested this week’s topic, I spotted myself immediately. The topic is:
Staying busy to fill the hole of being childless
Work, hobbies, school, projects, friends in need, volunteering: Have you packed your life with busyness in order to fill a gap?
It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s on your mind today?
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.
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.
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 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.
This Saturday is Bonfire Night in the U.K. As a child, it was one of my favorite nights of the year, second only to Christmas Eve.
We’d have a bonfire in the backyard, and my dad would bring home a box of fireworks to set off and a couple of packets of sparklers. We’d have baked potatoes and roast chestnuts, and my mum would make parkin and gooey, delicious bonfire toffee. It was an evening spent outdoors, clustered around the fire. It was about friends and food and a little bit of danger.
It’s one of the many things I miss about my homeland, and it’s one of the traditions I would have enjoyed sharing with my children. And that’s the topic for this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Traditions you won’t get to share with your children
Happy Bonfire Night and happy whining.
By Lisa Manterfield
Halloween is a holiday that others assume everyone is joyous about, but for many of us, it’s a holiday that surprises us with all kinds of triggers. Halloween delivers a steady stream of Other People’s Children—all impossibly cute—to our neighborhoods, Facebook pages, and workplaces. It’s hard to avoid it when it comes, quite literally, knocking at your own front door.
Around Halloween, it’s a good idea to steer clear of social media, the mall, and kid-related gatherings. If you live in a family-friendly neighborhood, you might also have to deal with a steady stream of adorable munchkins.
As always, it pays to have a plan so you don’t find yourself hiding behind the couch with the lights out, pretending not to be in, because the first set of trick-or-treaters reduced you to tears and now you’re trapped in your own home. And, by the way, this is a real-life story from a reader, not a humorous hypothetical scenario.
So, how will you handle it? Do you want to turn out the lights and pretend you’re not home? Do you need to make alternative plans so you don’t have be at home during trick or treat time? During those years I wasn’t ready to face it, I’ve turned off the front lights and hidden in a back room of my house with a book. I’ve also left home before dusk and gone to dinner and the movies. Other years, I’ve decked out the lawn, bought a cauldron of sweeties, and fully embraced other people’s children (although I’ll admit there was more of the former before I could muster the strength for the latter). If you feel you want to participate by handing out goodies, consider inviting friends over for dinner so you have a back-up for answering the door, and be ready with a Plan B in case you suddenly discover you’re not as ready as you thought.
The holidays are always going to be challenging, but being aware of the emotional triggers and having a plan in place can help you to get through them and maybe even have some fun.
By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
“Come trick-or-treating with us!”
I cried after I got off the phone with my friend Irene*. She had extended an invitation for me to join her and her two small children for some revelry on All Hallow’s Eve, and the ask brought on my waterworks. But not for the reasons you think. It wasn’t because I was once again feeling sorry for myself, heartbroken that I’ll never get to:
No. I was crying out of sheer gratitude.
You see, a while back Irene and I had a frank talk about some of the things I’ll miss most because I won’t get to be a mom. Ballet recitals, baseball games, the Tooth Fairy, Santa. And…are you sitting down?…she listened. Not only did she listen, but she heard, and a few months later she did something about it by inviting me to be part of her family, so that I get to experience some of the joys I otherwise would have been denied.
I have been waiting a looooong time to find a friend like this.
I had to decline Irene’s invitation, but I’ve already booked out next Halloween to spend with her and her kids. Oh, and the reason I declined was because I’d already accepted an invitation from another friend to come over to her house and help hand out treats to the neighborhood kids. Look at that: Someone else heard me.
For the first time in ages, I am feeling hopeful again.
*Not her real name. I don’t want to embarrass her, and she knows who she is.
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
