By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
We are heading into the unrelenting holiday season, when families get together, old friends reunite, and our losses seem to smack us in the face. It sometimes feels as though all the stages of grief are coursing through our bodies and souls all at once! As I try to prepare myself for another not-so-merry-go-round, I find myself revisiting an older post, a “classic” that has resonated with LWBers over the past few years. I offer it with a reminder to be true to what you’re feeling and to be gentle with yourself.
My long-time friend, Teri*, and I had spent the morning reminiscing about our college days, catching up on work and vacation plans, and updating each other on sorority sisters we’d friended on Facebook. I was in my kitchen, putting together a salad for lunch, when she finally acknowledged the elephant in the room: The fact that we’re both childfree. She knew I was working toward accepting a childfree life, and I was aware she’d endured several unsuccessful fertility procedures, but we’d managed to talk around it until…
“Do you ever feel…?” and she paused for a moment, seeking the right word.
“…cheated.” I’d never articulated this before, but it was exactly what I felt, and the admission surprised us both.
She looked straight into my eyes with full recognition, then burst into heart-wrenching sobs.
I sought words of comfort as I held her, but nothing could compensate for the emptiness we both were experiencing. Teri would have been an amazing mother. She and her husband are a wonderful couple, part of a loving community of family and friends that would have embraced a child. But you know the story: She and her husband have run through their savings and battered their hearts in attempts to get pregnant, in the process depleting the stores that might have helped them adopt. There will be no children for them.
Even though I’ve made great strides in my journey, there are moments when I have a few choice cuss words for God—or whoever it is who makes the big decisions about our fates. I think about the man who beheaded his teenage daughter because he didn’t approve of her lifestyle, the foster parents who starved and neglected the children in their care, and the woman who left her toddler alone in a filthy apartment so she could go clubbing. These people get to have children but not me? Not Teri?! You bet I feel cheated!
“Life isn’t fair,” my mother once told me, and I continue to wrestle with how to make peace with this. Sometimes I force myself into positive thinking, the whole “acting as-if” process. Instead of focusing on the lack, I focus on the gifts, such as my health, my friends, my dogs. Even reading that now, I scoff at the triteness, but I persist. I have to start somewhere to point my heart in the direction of healing, and I suppose I can count myself lucky that I have these blessings when others have been cheated out of good health, supportive relationships, and loyal companions.
Still, I ache for my dear, sweet friend and the unfairness she’s been dealt in life. I don’t want to trivialize her pain, I don’t want to deliver some callous platitude. As we quieted our hearts and wiped away tears, what I said to her was, simply, “I am so sorry.”
*Her name and details have been changed to protect her privacy.
Kathleen is mostly at peace with her family of two + dog.
That’s what I don’t understand either. The parents that kill and torture their children, those monsters get to have children and I and other good people who would love, cherish and be grateful for their children do not? Why? I don’t understand it. I will never understand it. This thanksgiving I’m going to have a good time. I will visit with my goddaughter, watch my nephew eat too much of my pie and play with the baby. But I do feel cheated. My illness has taken the life I should have had away from me and while I’m learning to dream new dreams, right now I have no idea what those dreams would look like. I admit I feel pretty adrift these days. Happy thanksgiving everyone and I hope you manage to find a way to enjoy it whatever that way is,
Your friend is just so lucky to have you.
Very much so cheated but the reality (tho cliché) is life is just not fair. I feel cheated in being single and never finding love, cheated in my health, and cheated in being childless. I hate that I can’t be one of those women,who meet a guy once and boom I’m pregnant. I often say how did I get chose for this life. Its a pain that no matter how I try it never leaves. I was dealt an unfair hand that’s truth.