Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Moving on from Infertility

People come and go from this site all the time. Some people observe for a long time before quietly slipping into the conversation. Some actively engage when they need help and stick around to help others. Others come for a while and slip away unannounced when they’ve got what they needed. I’m glad for all these people.

I don’t always hear the reason why someone decides to move on, and that’s okay. When someone leaves, I wish her a silent farewell and good luck.

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 reader, I truly wish her nothing but a wonderful life.

And so this feels like a good segue into something I need to do, which is to say good bye and slip into my own new identity.

Back in March, I wrote that I would be posting a last post and leaving the site up for people to find the posts they need. Then the pandemic hit and it felt like the wrong time to leave. But now it’s time for me to throw my own moving on party.

I have loved running this site for the past decade. I’m honored to have had you in my own support circle. I’m grateful that I even got to meet some of you in person over the years, or at least got to know you virtually. Now I need to step into my own identity.

I am a childless woman and I am at peace with that now. I am an author of novels with big plans for my career. I am the wife of a recently-retired man whose company I want to enjoy. I am a gardener, a cat lover, a daughter, a runner, a foodie, a reader. I am many things and these other identities need my attention.

I hope you’ll continue to find solace and belonging among the many (almost 1,700!) posts on this site. I hope you’ll seek out the books I wrote to help you work through this journey. I hope you’ll stay in touch through my other channels (see below). But most of all, I hope you’ll find your own way to peace and acceptance of this life that none of us chose. 

Until we meet again, stay safe, be well, and remember: You are not alone.

***

If you’d like to stay connected you can find me at LisaManterfield.com and on my social media: Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. I hope to meet you again there. -x-

Owning Your Childlessness

I like to tell this story about a conversation I once had with a group of people I had recently met. I remember one of the women was telling a story and tossed out that she was unable to have children.

Then she went right on with her story.

She didn’t pause for people to give her sympathetic looks, she didn’t elaborate on why she couldn’t have children, and she didn’t explain that she’d wanted to have them or tried to. She said it matter-of-factly, as if she’d been telling us she didn’t care for the taste of liver and onions.

I was in awe.

Later that day, we were talking about confidence and she told me that it has taken her a long time (she’s in her 50s) to own who she is. “You just can’t entertain that voice that tells you that you’re less than or not good enough,” she said.

How many of us hear that voice and how many us pay attention to what it tells us?

What if we stopped apologizing for who we are? I think we could be very powerful.

Do you have a voice that tells you you’re less than? Do you listen to it? How do you shut it up and own who you are?

Whiny Wednesday: It’s Your Turn Next

A friend sent this picture to me and it made me laugh out loud.Then it got me wondering how this could work for those women (and it’s usually women) at baby showers and family gatherings who unwittingly assume that yours will be the next belly to be celebrated and adored. I haven’t come up with an appropriate equivalent yet, but I’m working on it.

It’s Whiny Wednesday, your chance to let off steam among friends. Feel free to vent at will.

Talking About the Grief of Childlessness

I’ve been writing and talking a lot about grief—here on the blog, in my fiction, in my personal life, in the novels I’m reading, and in the Life Without Baby book. Even when I got chatting to a stranger on a plane, the conversation turned to the topic of grief.

Over paper cups of tea, this woman—who had lost her brother to suicide—and I talked about how grief stays with us long after we’re “over it”, how the shape of grief changes with time, how it can change us, and how everyone carries around their own personal grief.

My only regret in the discussion is that it didn’t begin sooner on our journey, because I would have liked to hear more about what she had to say on the subject. But eventually we parted ways, she to her office and I to catch another flight, and I didn’t have the opportunity to ask her more about her grief.

So, I’d like to ask you instead.

  • How has your grief changed over time?
  • How has your loss changed you?
  • In what ways has your grief crept out, even when you’ve tried to keep it under wraps?

As a society, we don’t give the topic of grief enough attention. We’re uncomfortable with grieving people, no matter what type of loss they’ve suffered, but it’s especially true when the loss isn’t understood.

So let’s start the conversation now. Let’s talk about this grief. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

Whiny Wednesday: “I Never Knew Love Until…”


This hot-button whine was sent in from one of our readers.

When you read an interview of some celebrity or hear someone say:

“I never knew what love was until I had a child.”

So…is she saying that because I’m childless I’m not capable or “real” love or that I will be denied the experience of the highest expression of love?

Whether this makes your blood boil or cuts you to the core, whine away, sisters!

And if you have another great whine you need to get off your chest this week, here’s the place to let it rip.

Whiny Wednesday: Covid-19 Without Children


This is such a difficult and emotional time for everyone, and I’m not sure there is anyone who isn’t facing some sort of challenge right now. So I wanted to provide a space to talk about the challenges we’re facing as we’re on lockdown, facing the loneliness of social distancing, or perhaps once again feeling marginalized because we don’t have children.

What challenges are you facing in this era of Covid-19?

Letting Go of the Life You Wanted

“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

In these strange and scary times, this quote in a book about writing struck a chord with me. It relates to so many things in life, including making peace with a life without 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.

Just a reminder that, as Life Without Baby moves into the next stage of its life, the community forum will be closing down on April 8. If you’ve met people you’d like to stay in touch with, now is the time to exchange information.

Whiny Wednesday: Childless People Have Money to Burn


A TIME magazine cover story awhile ago, “The Childfree Life,” came with an image of an attractive (and color-coordinated) couple lounging on a tropical, white sand beach, seemingly without a care in the world, resplendent in their designer sunglasses. That image prompted this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic:

The assumption that if you don’t have kids you have money to burn

 Whine away, my friends.

Why Childlessness Does Not Make Me Less of a Woman

Women having fun at Golden Gate Bridge

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”

~Anaïs Nin

There’s an idea going around that not having children somehow makes us “less of a woman.” I don’t subscribe to this idea.

As this quote by author Anaïs Nin states, I am many, many women, and “mother” is only one element of me.

I am a writer, friend, wife, cat mama, reader, thinker, curser, fighter, nature-lover, spider catcher, traveler, cook, gardener, daughter.

All these women are fluid. They ebb and flow in me as needed. And when one of them isn’t able to fulfill her purpose, the others quickly rally to fill the gap, so I am always whole.

I am never less of a woman.