Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

How Did You Know it Was Time to Stop Pursuing Motherhood?

Woman waiting for sunrise

By Lisa Manterfield

Last week I had the pleasure of doing a podcast interview with Cathy at Slow Swimmers and Fried Eggs. We had an excellent conversation and covered the gamut of topics from the shock of realizing we were infertile to the unexpected benefits of living childfree. One of the questions she asked about my “lightbulb” moment, that one event or conversation or realization that told me I had to stop pursuing my quest for motherhood.

There were several moments that I wrote about in detail in I’m Taking My Eggs and Going Home. These were moments when I knew, deep down, that I had to stop treatment and had to find a way to move on without children.

The first was when I was sitting at a bus stop on my way home from my third doctor appointment of the week. I realized that getting pregnant had become a full-time job and that it was consuming every aspect of my life. Case in point, I don’t even remember why I was taking the bus (two buses, actually) to my appointments, but I do remember that this had become my habit. I can picture myself now, staring out the bus window, almost in a trance, so wrapped up my world of infertility, I was barely aware of my actions. I knew then I had lost touch with reality and myself.

Another point came not long after Mr. Fab realized that adoption wasn’t going to be a viable option for us. This really should have been the stopping point, but before long I found myself in the infertility section of the bookstore, browsing a book by a doctor who had performed fertility miracles through Chinese Medicine. I bought the book, even though we’d already traveled far down that road. When I mentioned it to Mr. Fab, he said all the right, supportive things, but I saw his face drop for a moment. I knew that he was wrung out, that he had reached the end of his journey, and that I should have been at the end of mine, too. But by the end of that week, I had an appointment with the miracle doctor and I was back on the bus, both literally and figuratively.

One of my last lightbulb moments came when Mr. Fab’s first grandchild was born. That passing of the motherhood torch to the next generation served to tell me that it was time for my journey to end. I had done all I could, motherhood wasn’t going to happen for me, and I had to let it go.

In between these events, and even after I was sure I would not be a mother, there were many moments of doubt, of second-guessing, of what-ifs. But for every step backwards, I took two steps forward toward recovery, and then three, and then four, until the backward slips became fewer and eventually stopped.

I imagine each of you has a similar story of realization and doubts. What were your “lightbulb” moments and how did you finally know it was time to stop?

My podcast interview with Cathy will be out in April. I’ll look forward to sharing it with you here.

Leaving Behind the Old Life

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;

we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

~ Anatole France

I saw this quote recently in a book about writing, but it struck a chord with me. It relates to so many things in life, including making peace with a life with out children.

One of the hardest stretches of my journey was the space between realizing that our options for building a family were running out, and the point where we made the decision to stop trying. I knew there were options still open, but they were beyond the scope of what Mr. Fab and I were willing to do. At some point we had to make a decision that we would not have children and that we would find a way to be okay with that. It was one of the hardest (and perhaps longest) decisions I’ve ever had to make.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in this kind of situation in other areas of life, too. You know that you have to take a new direction, that ultimately it will be the right decision, but as France says, in order to do that, we have to leave a part of ourselves behind. Sometime the hardest part is listening to ourselves and not being afraid to make the wrong choice.

My first career was in engineering. I’ve made several career changes since then, trying to find the place in the world where I’d be happy. I’ve found it in writing, but it took me a long time to get here.

Many people can’t understand why, after all those years of college and graduate school, I would abandon a perfectly good and respectable career. I’ll be the first to admit that if I’d just stuck to engineering, I would probably have been more “successful” and definitely would be making more money, maybe own a home and live comfortably, but I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I might have been successful by the conventional definition, but the cost of sticking to a career that didn’t make me happy, just because it’s what was expected of me, didn’t make any sense. But it wasn’t easy to let go of that life and take a risk of finding happiness in another life.

Part of finding happiness is letting go of that which doesn’t make us happy. Although I believed that having children would make me happy, I was miserably unhappy running in circles trying to produce a baby that my body had no interest in creating. I could have gone on trying forever, but the cost to my mental and physical wellbeing would have been enormous. Letting go of that part of my life enabled me to find peace with my new life, even if it’s a life I wasn’t sure I wanted.

 

P.S. Letting go of the dream and the imagined life with children is the first topic we cover in the Finding Peace program. There are still some places available in the new session, which begins tomorrow. You can find all the details here.

Everything happens for a reason

I read this article in the New York Times this week. It’s the story of a neuroscientist whose daughter was born with Down Syndrome. Dr. Costa did what any of us would have done facing a diagnosis of a loved one; he threw himself into research. The difference is he is now close to finding an effective treatment for Down Syndrome.

In a quote pulled from the article, Dr. Costa said, “Things happen for a reason…” implying that he would have not moved into this field of research at all had he not had a personal reason.

Now the whole “things happen for a reason” thing usually rubs me the wrong way. It’s right up there with “it’s all in God’s plan.” My own personal belief system doesn’t go along with the idea that my life has been mapped out for me, and that being unable to have children is all part of some grand scheme for me to do something else instead. Just as I don’t believe that Dr. Costa’s daughter was born with Down Syndrome so that he could be the one to find a cure.

However…

My life is different because I don’t have children. Opportunities will come along and I’ll be able to take them because I don’t have the responsibility of parenthood. And, while it’s unlikely that I’ll be the one to find a cure for infertility because of my own diagnosis, I do believe that, like Dr. Costa, I will someday look back on my life and see that something good happened to me because I was infertile.

Just don’t know what that is yet, but I’m looking.

 

 

P.S. On a personal note, my friend Sarah is a vocal Down Syndrome advocate for her beautiful three-year-old son, Gideon. She’s currently promoting a fundraising drive for Down Syndrome Research and Treatment. Information here, if you’re interested.