filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
Most people in my life were supportive when I told them about my decision to end my quest for motherhood. But a couple didn’t want me to quit. They kept offering unsolicited advice and stories of other people’s miracles, when what I really needed from them was a kind and understanding word.
So this week’s whine topic is:
People who won’t let you quit
Happy whining!
I had the pleasure of speaking with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer this morning about what it means to be childless-not-by-choice. I really appreciated the space he created for this conversation and I was touched by the courage of the callers who spoke openly and publicly about their own stories. It was a beautiful 20 minutes and it reminded me that none of us is alone on this journey.
You can hear the segment here:
Also, I understand that there were several more callers to the show that didn’t make it on air. If you’ve found your way here, please get in touch, either through the comments or the contact page. I also encourage you to visit the community pages, as that’s a safe, password-protected place to talk to other people and get support.
Thanks to everyone who helped make this conversation happen, and to you, for your support and encouragement.
Just wanted to let you know that I’ll be speaking with Brian Lehrer on WNYC tomorrow (Thursday April 2) on the topic of being childless-not-by-choice. This is a companion piece to the segment he did earlier this week with Meghan Daum on choosing to be childfree.
My segment airs around 10:50am EST. You can also tune in online here, and he’ll be taking calls for the show. I’ll also post the recording once it’s available.
~ Lisa
I’m currently enjoying a journey into menopause. Yeah, it’s a hoot. All the symptoms of PMS, plus fuzzy head, weight gain, night sweats, the works.
I’ve been prescribed HRT and I’ve been reaching out to older friends for advice, because there’s a lot about this I don’t know. Most of my friends have gladly offered support, however one woman (a friend of a friend) looked at me and said, “Menopause? You’re too young for that.”
I assured her I was not, and left the conversation, but really, is that a helpful thing to say? Yes, I know I’m too young for menopause. Add it to the list of things my body’s given up before its time. And then ask me how I feel about the possibility the rest of me might be aging faster than it should too. Does this ever end?
As you may have guessed, it’s Whiny Wednesday. I feel better for my venting. Hope you feel better for yours.
P.S. This in NO April Fool’s joke, believe me.
As told to Kathleen Guthrie Woods
Kara, 34, was one of those little girls who mothered her baby dolls and younger siblings. “I always knew I was going to be a mom with a lot of kids,” she says, but circumstances led her down a different path. These days she experiences the all-too-familiar cocktail of grief, guilt, and anger, with hints of acceptance, as she and her husband pursue their Plan B. Here’s what she has to share about her journey.
LWB: Are you childfree by choice, chance, or circumstance?
Kara: Childfree by circumstance. After trying for 10 months, my OB/GYN thought it was because my cycle wasn’t regular. After we “fixed” me and I still wasn’t pregnant, my husband was tested. His sperm count came back zero and he was diagnosed with no vas deferens [a congenital condition in which the tubes that carry sperm fail to fully develop].
After doing our own research, we talked our primary care doctor into having my husband tested for Cystic Fibrosis (CF). He was diagnosed with CF, but in what is called a “mild” case. Mild cases are where the mucus builds up somewhere other than the lungs, usually either the sinuses (my husband’s case) or digestive tract. Because of his having CF, I had to be tested before a fertility clinic would see us. I don’t have CF, but I have 5T Polymorphism. For me that means nothing, that is just how my DNA is “strung” together. But 5T doesn’t “play” well with CF, and we would have a 50% chance of having a child with a classic CF case (in the lungs). That was something we didn’t want to do to a child just to be parents. We stopped the journey after only four years, and we already knew adoption wasn’t a calling we felt was for us.
LWB: Where are you on your journey now?
Kara: I still go through the stages of grief, usually skipping denial and spending more time than I should in the angry stage. We’ve moved on to Plan B, but sometimes I feel guilty being there.
LWB: What was the turning point for you?
Kara: After meeting with the fertility doctor and seeing how all they wanted was my money and not caring how the process was difficult for my husband, we just stopped cold. They didn’t care that my husband was the one with the issues. We could get donor sperm and that would make a baby. I didn’t want any baby, I wanted my husband’s baby. After much prayer and talking, we decided it was healthier to stop.
LWB: What’s the hardest part for you about not having children?
Kara: Seeing others mistreat their children. Or parents complaining about their kids for selfish reasons.
LWB: What’s the best part about not having children?
Kara: Being able to do Plan B: travel around the world. Sometimes, when I’m in the angry grief stage and a mom complains to me about my travels, the best part is saying, “You got to multiply and replenish the earth…I get to travel the earth.” (Sometimes being the big B word is mentally healthy for me.)
LWB: How do you answer “Do you have kids?”
Kara: It usually starts with a quick no. How sarcastic my answer is depends on who is asking and what stage of grief I am in that day.
LWB: How has LWB helped you on your journey?
Kara: It gives me a place to read about and to vent to others who know how it feels to go through life without children.
If you’ve been feeling that you’re all alone on this journey, I encourage you to read other members’ stories here. There is a lot of wisdom and support in the stories themselves and in the comments. Then, when you’re ready, I hope you’ll share your story with us. Like Kara, you’ll find a safe place to “vent to others who know how it feels to go through life without children.” Go to the Our Stories page to get more information and the questionnaire.
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
Bitter. Desperate. Pathetic, sad, and lonely. That’s Hollywood’s typical childfree woman.
But don’t worry, in the end she’ll get her man and, of course, she’ll get her baby.
This week’s topic:
The way the media portrays childless women
Happy whining, my friends!
By Lisa Manterfield
March is a funny old month for me. It’s filled with all kinds of anniversaries, both happy and sad.
March is the month I lost my dad (sad) and, later, my stepdad (also sad).
March is also the month I married Mr. Fab (happy). We celebrate 11 years this year (very happy).
March is the month Mr. Fab’s granddaughter was born (happy and sad) and quickly became the month we decided to stop the quest for a child of our own (very, very sad).
It’s also the month I wrote my very first post on this blog (sad at the time, but very happy now).
So you can see, checking off the days on the March calendar can be a bit of an emotional ride.
What I notice, though, is that with each passing year, I’m less sad about the sad anniversaries and more happy about the happy ones. Even though “time heals all wounds” can ring hollow in a time of sadness, I’ve come to learn that it’s actually true.
Five years ago, when I wrote my first post, I couldn’t imagine that life could be happy without children. Oh sure, I knew I’d “get over it” eventually, but I never expected to move beyond the sadness.
What I’ve learned from all my sad anniversaries is that the sadness gets smaller every year, just a little at first, sometimes so little that you barely notice, until one day you can talk about the thing you’ve lost without choking on the sadness.
The sadness doesn’t completely go away, but most days it’s so small I barely notice it.
What’s next?
Anniversaries of all kinds are a good time to step back, reevaluate, and look back at how far we’ve come.
When I look back at some of my early posts on this blog, I see a woman who was angry and lost, but also skirting the deeper emotional truths about what she was going through. And she was still hiding in shame.
Later, I found a way to write more openly about how I felt, and eventually I was able to gain insight into the effects of my loss and how I might have better handled my grief.
These days, I’ll admit that I don’t have much new to say. I’m still learning, of course, but much I’ve what I’ve learned on my journey has been channeled into the ebook series, which I hope will continue to help other women stepping onto this path.
Those of you who’ve been long-time readers (and thank you for your support over the years) will no doubt understand how something that once consumed every waking moment can become something you think about only once in a while.
I also know that new readers are experiencing this for the first time, and I want to maintain this community, because I know it’s one of the few places to find true support and to be able to voice what our friends and family often don’t understand.
Over the coming year, I plan to rerun some of the more helpful posts from the past five years, as well as new ones as they come up. There’ll be posts from Kathleen and me, and of course, I wouldn’t dare take away Whiny Wednesday. If you’ve been a reader for a while, it’s a good way to see how far you’ve come over the years. If you’re a new reader, I hope you’ll find these posts resonate with you.
And what will I be doing with all my spare time if I’m not writing new posts? I’ll be working on the final book in the series, due out in June. I’m also working like crazy on a new novel that I hope to be able to tell you more about soon.
And there are presents!
As this is a celebration, of course there are presents. Several people have asked me if the ebook series will be available in format other than for e-readers. The ultimate goal is to put all four ebooks together as a print book later this year, but in the meantime, I’ve created downloadable PDFs of the books.
In honor of our five years together, you can grab yourself a free copy of the first book in the series. It will be available until the end of March, and can you get your copy by using this special link.
The other two books are also now available in this format here:
Workbook 2: Getting Through the Grief of Childlessness
Workbook 3: Dealing With the Day-to-Day Challenges
Workbook 4: Thriving in a New Happily Ever After (Out June 2014. Available for pre-order)
So, all that’s left is to say thank you for your ongoing support, for showing up here and reminding me that I’m not alone, and for continuing to support and help one another on this journey. I’m very honored to share this space with you.
~Lisa
By Lisa Manterfield
Recently, a reader said she’d had an idea to write a letter to the child she never had, and she asked if I thought it was crazy.
Here’s what I told her (edited slightly to maintain her anonymity):
“Writing a letter isn’t crazy at all. One of the things that makes our grief so unique is that there is seldom a finite end to the journey. There’s almost always some option still open, and the loss is more of a gradual moving away from the dream, rather than a sudden end. It makes it really hard to acknowledge the end and grieve that loss.
“Doing something tangible, such as writing a letter, creates a kind of marker that says, ‘this is the end.’ And the other ladies [in the group] are absolutely right about not holding in your grief. If you need to find a time to be alone, close the door to your room, and just let it all out, do it. It’s exhausting, but it’s amazing how much grief you can purge with a good cry.”
I told her I would write a post on this topic so that you could share your experiences with creating an end to something that has none. So here it is.
In order to start moving on with your healing process, did you need to create an ending with something symbolic and meaningful to you? Please share any “crazy” ideas that helped you find a stopping place and begin coming to terms with your life without children.
By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
So often when we talk about the benefits of being childfree, people bring up traveling. “You’re so lucky you don’t have the responsibilities of having to raise kids, so you can travel anytime.” “You’re so lucky you don’t have to pay for private school and sports and music lessons, so you have all that extra money to travel.”
Well, yes, and not really. While it’s true that my husband and I can take advantage of the off-seasons (vs. visiting the sites with the crowds of families who are off during school holidays), we are both committed to our careers. Taking time off isn’t a sure thing when we need to meet commitments to clients and colleagues. Also, we aren’t super-rich. We live a modest life, certainly one with many advantages, but if we had kids, we wouldn’t be spending our spare cash, we’d probably just have more debt.
That being said, if we really wanted to travel—or pursue any big dream—we could make it work. It’s just the two of us, and if we decided to chuck everything, buy a couple of backpacks, and hit the road, we could.
I’ve been inspired by a series of articles I stumbled upon on the BBC’s website, under the heading of “How I Quit My Job to Travel.” This article is written by a married couple who has been traveling together for eight years, and this article is by a single gal who ditched her “great job” in a “good career” to embark on her adventures. In each, they share the choices, compromises, and opportunities they embraced to turn their dreams into real life.
As I continue to wrestle with what I lost by not getting to be a mommy, I am nudging myself to seek what I might gain. Articles like the ones linked above offer encouragement and creative ideas on how we can open new avenues for ourselves, whether that’s learning a new skill, acquiring season tickets to the opera, building stronger connections in the community, or traveling to exotic locales.
What do you dream about? Can you take one small step today toward making it happen?
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
Be honest. Have you ever turned down an invitation to a social event because you’re afraid someone will ask if you have children?
That’s the topic for this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Avoiding meeting new people in case they ask, “Do you have kids?”
As always, the comments are wide open for other whines you might have this week.
~ "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."
