filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
Have you ever been in a conversation with a group of women, only to watch the talk turn to motherhood and feel yourself fading into the background?
That’s the topic of this week’s Whiny Wednesday:
Being excluded from conversations because you don’t have children
Happy Whining!
Our private community now boasts close to 3,000 members and I’m extremely proud of the support and camaraderie we offer one another.
Periodically, someone leaves and I wish her a silent farewell and good luck. Members don’t often fill in the note about why they’re leaving, but when they do, it’s usually along the lines of “Yippee! I’m pregnant. See you later, sucka!”
Ok, it’s never like that, but you get the idea. Women generally leave Life Without Baby to pursue life with baby, and I have to admit that it always stings a little.
Recently, though, one member left and gave this wonderful reason:
“I am moving on from my identity as a childless woman.”
I wanted to throw her a party. She’s not leaving because she’s no longer a childless woman; she’s leaving because she no longer wants to carry around that label and all the stigma and resentment that can come along with it. She’s moving on, I assume, to embrace her life as a woman, with all its facets.
We play many roles in our lives and carry an assortment of identities. Sometimes those identities no longer suit us and we have to let them go. And while I’m sorry to lose a member, I truly wish her nothing but a wonderful life.
It was five years ago this week (geez, time flies), when I was lying on an examining table in a bright white room and my curiosity got the better of me. If I lifted my head off the pillow a couple of inches, and turned to the right, I could just make out the big black void that appeared on the screen of the doctor’s monitor.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That’s your uterus,” the doctor replied. Only that’s not what I heard. In my head I heard “That’s your big empty useless uterus.”
Dang.
I really thought I was in a good place, that I was okay being the middle-aged childfree woman. I had steeled myself for a waiting room full of pregnant bellies (it was just me—whew!), I had prepared myself to oh-so-casually answer questions about my own pregnancies (none) and family plans (again, none). I was even hopeful that the exam would show the presence of a cyst (indeed, it did), which would explain some painful symptoms I had been experiencing earlier that year, thus giving my doctor the impetus to explore treatment options. All good.
But all the pretty thoughts seeped out of me as I was lying there, prone, and seeing The Void, and thinking the only thing my beautiful uterus was good for now—perhaps was ever good for—was producing freakish growths.
I am happy to report that subsequent surgery removed the benign cyst and I have been (knock on wood) in good health since. I am also happy to report that, over these last five years, I have made more progress on my journey to accepting my life without children.
Sometimes, though, I still feel the invisible scars. They live deep inside me, where they won’t appear on the most technologically advanced scans, and they occasionally twinge. I still feel The Void, the voids, and on those days, the best self-love medicine I can give myself is saying out loud: I’m still here.
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
A while ago Kath sent me this article about Dolly Parton and her views on childlessness and other people’s children. She talks about how she’s made room in her life for her nieces and nephews, how their children came to call her “Aunty Granny”, and how she’s now “Gee-Gee” (for great-granny.)
“I often think, it just wasn’t meant for me to have kids,” she says, “so everybody’s kids can be mine.”
I love her for that attitude.
So, why did this lovely article warrant a Whiny Wednesday spot?
Because in the sidebar of People magazine, in a section titled, “You May Like…” where I’d expect to find articles about other cheroes (heroes who happen to be child-free) like Miss Dolly, instead I’m offered stories about the ever-expanding Duggar clan and even more “things you didn’t know” about celebrities and their offspring.*
Even when we do get to hear about someone without children, there’s no escaping the fact that, ultimately, families rule.
It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s under your skin this week?
*Note: when I checked this week, the recommended articles had changed, but be aware that People always has lots of celebrity baby stories.
When you’re in the deepest, darkest depths of grief, the idea of ever finding joy again can feel unreachable. How can you work through the sadness? How can you ever tap into the old you? How can you make your life meaningful again?
In this interview, I talk to Lesley Pyne about her new book, Finding Joy Beyond Childlessness: Inspiring Stories to Guided You To a Fulfilling Life. We talk about:
Lesley spent the first 50-plus years of her life putting everything she didn’t want to feel in a box, including her grief following multiple failed fertility treatments and the loss of both parents. In the process of writing this book she dug deeply into the subjects she writes about including, grief, letting go, connecting you to your body, self- acceptance and writing. She writes openly about her challenges and how she has emerged as a different person, able to say confidently, “I absolutely love my life, the adventures I’m having and I’m excited about what will happen next.”
Lesley’s new book is “Finding Joy Beyond Childlessness: Inspiring Stories To Guide You To A Fulfilling Life.” It’s out in paperback and kindle now. And you can catch up with Lesley and find out more about her work at www.LesleyPyne.co.uk
www.twitter.com/LesleyPyneCoach
www.facebook.com/LesleyPyneCoach
https://www.instagram.com/LesleyPyneCoach/
www.linkedin.com/pub/lesley-pyne/52/311/732
A while ago, I asked you to suggest Whiny Wednesday topic ideas. Boy, did you deliver! Here’s one that a lot of you mentioned struggling with:
Running into old friends who now have children
Whine away!
Mother’s Day is pretty much the worst day of the year for those of us who didn’t get to be moms. But what about Father’s Day and the men in our lives? Do they feel the loss of fatherhood in the same way we feel it for motherhood?
Some of you have expressed frustration with partners who don’t want to talk about the loss and grief we women go through, or who seem to have accepted a life without children much quicker than we have. I know I saw a difference in the way Mr. Fab and I dealt with grief (or appeared to not deal with it at all) so I thought I’d do a little research on the topic of men and grief to see what I could learn.
Turns out that, when it comes to grief, men really are from Mars, as opposed to our home planet of Venus. They’ve often been taught to keep their emotions in check and brush grief under the rug in the hopes that it will just go away (which, of course, it doesn’t.) As a result, we tend to interpret their reluctance to grieve openly as a lack of feeling. But that doesn’t mean they don’t feel the loss just as keenly as we do.
Here’s what I learned about how men grieve:
In other words, just because your partner isn’t hanging out with other men in online support groups, sharing stories, and lending an empathetic ear to other men, it doesn’t mean he isn’t grieving the loss of fatherhood in his own way.
I’d be interested to hear how your partner has dealt with his grief. And if you’re a grieving man reading this, we’d love to hear your point-of-view.
A while ago, I asked you to share topic ideas for Whiny Wednesday. Quite a few of you were glad to oblige. Thanks for the great ideas. If you’d like to suggest a topic, please leave it in the comments below.
This week’s Whiny Wednesday topic is this:
Other People’s Pity
As always, you’re free to vent on your own topic, too.
By Lisa Manterfield
Do you remember the game Chutes and Ladders? In the UK we called it “Snakes and Ladders” and I loved it. I had a nursery rhyme version with Jack and Jill happily climbing the hill on one ladder, and then tumbling down at the next snake (or chute). Humpty Dumpty, Rock-a-Bye-Baby, Little Bo Peep and her poor lost sheep were all there with their assorted joys and disasters.
In case any one is reading and has no clue what I’m talking abut, Chutes and Ladders is a board game. There are 100 squares on the board and you roll a dice and move along, trying to be the first person to reach 100. If you land on a ladder you get to follow the ladder up and jump ahead on the game. If, however, you land on a chute (or snake) you slide back down the board to a lower number. There’s no strategy involved in the game at all, and it’s pure luck as to whether you joyfully climb the ladder or careen back down a chute.
It struck me that life is a lot like chutes and ladders, especially when you’re playing the “coming-to-terms with infertility” game.
Case in point: A while ago, Mr. Fab and I had a great weekend. It was the first one in a while that we’d spent together just relaxing and enjoying one another’s company. We slept late, took a long walk, planned a vacation, and took a long afternoon nap. It’s on weekends like these that I realize all the positive things that have come out of us not having children.
But on Saturday night we had dinner with some friends at their home. They and the other friends who were invited have adult children, so the evening was spent talking about all kinds of other things not relating to the perils of parenthood. But in their hallway were photos of their children as toddlers, sitting in the garden, laughing those infectious toddler laughs, and for a few minutes I found myself just staring at the pictures and thinking about all that I’ve missed with not having children. My happiness hopped on a chute and slid back down a few squares.
I think that my life is always going to be this way, that I’ll keep making progress and moving gradually towards that place of being 100 percent at peace with being childfree, but there are always going to be chutes thrown in my way: the cousin’s pregnancy announcement, the friends celebrating milestones with their children, those moments when I rethink the whole thing and wonder, “What if we got back on the train? What if that risky and expensive treatment worked? What if we adopted?”
But, for every chute that comes along, there’s a ladder that will take me back up. So, the trick to maintaining sanity and finding peace is to keep living for the ladders.
Whiny Wednesday has become such a favorite on the blog and I know that many of you look forward to the chance to have a good rant about what’s on your mind.
For those of you who are new to Life Without Baby or maybe not sure what this Whiny Wednesday thing is all about, I thought an brief explanation might be in order.
Whiny Wednesday came about because many of us felt we were going through our respective journeys alone and that our friends and family often didn’t understand how much we were hurting. Many readers said felt they felt they had to put on a brave face around other people and that the things they wanted to talk about sometimes felt like “whining.”
So, Whiny Wednesday was created as the place where, once a week, you can come and vent about whatever’s on your mind, especially the things you feel you can’t say in-person around others. Most weeks I post a topic for discussion, but the comments are always open for griping about whatever happens to be on your mind.
So, now you know what it’s all about, feel free the have a really good whine 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."
