Kathleen sent me this photo forwarded from a friend, and I thought it would make a great Whiny Wednesday topic. So, here you go:
Trusting the Path When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen
Do ever feel as if you’re in a constant battle with yourself? So often I make a decision and forge ahead on the path of my choice, only to catch myself looking longingly at another paths and wondering if I ought to have taken them instead. As soon as I make a decision I lose sight of all the things I’ll gain from choosing that path and can only see all that I’ll be losing from walking away from the other paths.
I certainly did that when I chose the “life without children” path. I knew what I would gain by opting to stop treatments and I knew what I would gain by walking away from the adoption route we were on. I knew that my sanity and my marriage would benefit from that decision, and that I’d claim back the life that was passing me by. But I could also see clearly everything I would lose from walking away from the possibility of motherhood.
I know I made the right choice, and I’m glad I kept walking on my chosen path, but it doesn’t stop me looking back once in a while to see where I might have been.
Recently I had a conversation with a friend who was making some difficult life decisions. She talked about the idea of trusting that the path you’re on will take you where you’re supposed to be.
At first glance, this reeks of “everything happens for a reason,” a philosophy that makes me bristle. Personally, I do not believe that I was denied children so that I could take a bigger, more important path instead, or that I wasn’t granted motherhood because it was more than I could handle. I have an untreatable medical condition; I cannot reproduce; end of story; $#it happens.
And yet I’m intrigued by the idea of trusting the path.
There is no doubt that not having children will take me on a very different path than motherhood; it already has. But what if I stopped fighting that? What if I stopped looking over my shoulder at all that I’ve lost and trusted that the path I’m on will take me where I’m supposed to go? Granted, I might not have much to blog about with my new peaceful self, but perhaps I could just enjoy the journey and see where it takes me.
What do you think about the idea of trusting the path?
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?
To Heal, First You Have to Mourn
A while ago, I shared this beautiful interview with poet Edward Hirsch on the topic of grief. I listened to it again recently, and reread his heartbreaking poem, Gabriel. It moved me just as much as it did the first time.
You may be wondering why an interview with a poet about the death of his son has a place here, but listen carefully to what he says about loss, mourning, and the process of healing. So much of what he has to say is what I’ve also learned about healing from loss.
“There is no right way to grieve, and you have to let people grieve in the way that they can. One of the things that happens to everyone who is grief-stricken, who has lost someone, is there comes a time when everyone else just wants you to get over it, but of course you don’t get over it. You get stronger; you try and live on; you endure; you change; but you don’t get over it. You carry it with you.”
In his 78-page elegy to his son, he writes that mourning is like carrying a bag of cement up a mountain at night. There is no clear path to follow, but when you look around you, you see everyone carrying their own bags of cement.
As a poet, Hirsch used his writing, not as a way to escape grief, but as a way to express what he couldn’t otherwise say. One of the most striking points he makes is on the topic of healing and how our society talks about the need to heal. But, he says, in order to heal, you have to be able to grieve first.
Most of us have faced a lack of understanding about the loss we’ve experienced because we didn’t get to be mothers. We have no place to express that loss, and without facing it and acknowledging it, we don’t get to grieve and we don’t get to heal.
If you’re struggling with loss, have you found a way to express your grief? Even if you’re not a writer, could putting your feelings down in words help you move through your grief? I know it has helped me through mine.
Whiny Wednesday: Pressure to be Amazing
My apologies for missing last week’s Whiny Wednesday. It wasn’t some cruel April Fool’s joke; I just forgot to hit the “Publish” button!
Often we feel pressure to do something incredible with our lives because we won’t be doing the other “incredible” thing: being mothers.
In the past it’s sparked some healthy discussion, so I thought I’d use it as this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic:
Feeling the pressure to do something else amazing instead
Let the healthy discussion begin!
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.”
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.
The Intangible Losses of Infertility
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
This simple phrase is the one thing I wish someone had said to me. It would have meant that someone—one person—acknowledged that my inability to have a child was an enormous loss for me and that I needed to grieve that loss, as if my children had existed.
As many of us are now facing a different kind of loss as we adjust to life alongside COVID-19, it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge that small griefs can trigger our dormant deeper grief, and that the feelings of loss many are experiencing right now can be compounded when we’re dealing with other losses.
So let’s talk a bit about loss and grief.
Where Western Culture Gets It Wrong
In Western culture in particular, most people don’t know how to behave when someone loses a loved one. They follow accepted protocols such as sending cards or flowers. Some may call to offer help or just show up on the doorstep with the ubiquitous tuna casserole. A few will know to give people space when they’re mourning, expect unexpected behavior, and be ready for tears or anger. Still, most people struggle with how to handle those in pain.
Our society also has an unwritten hierarchy of loss. Someone who’s lost a spouse, a child, or a parent is given different allowances to someone who’s lost a boyfriend/girlfriend, a friend, or an elderly relative. Further down the ranking come pets, coworkers, and ex-lovers. Even people who’ve lost houses, jobs, and limbs are allowed a degree of understanding, sympathy, and mourning. But most people have no idea how to react when they can’t see the thing that was lost—in this case, motherhood and all that it encompassed. Many people won’t understand—or even acknowledge—your need to mourn at all.
Intangible Loss
In her 2010 memoir, Spoken from the Heart, former first lady Laura Bush writes about her experience with infertility. “The English language lacks the words to mourn an absence,” she writes. “…For someone who was never there at all, we are wordless to capture that particular emptiness. For those who deeply want children and are denied them, those missing babies hover like slant, ephemeral shadows over their lives. Who can describe the feel of a tiny hand that is never held?”
The fact is that your children and your idea of motherhood did exist for you. If you had planned on having children, you undoubtedly made room in your life for them. This might have included creating life plans around the assumption that someday kids would be part of that plan. In some cases, making room for children in your life might have included making physical room, perhaps dedicating and even decorating a room in your home that would one day become a nursery, or it may have involved moving to a bigger house or a more family-friendly neighborhood. Did you pick out names for your children? Did you imagine which family members they might take after? Did you fantasize about your daughter winning a Nobel Prize for her research or your son bringing home a gold medal from the Olympics? You probably thought about the kind of mother you wanted to be. You collected data as you went through life, putting check marks through things you observed that you’d do better when you became a mother and striking red lines through the things you’d never do with your children. And you undoubtedly imagined what it would feel like to hold a child that was yours.
Here are some other losses you might be feeling:
- your identity as a woman
- the loss of your dream
- the babies you’ll never get to see and touch
- the vision of your future that you’d painted so clearly
- experiences you could only share with your own children
- the legacy of family traditions and heirlooms
- the rite of passage into adulthood
- being treated like a “real adult” by your family
- making your parents proud grandparents
- fitting in with friends or peers
- your place in society
Your children and your identity as a mother existed and were very real to you. You have experienced a great loss, and the only way to begin coming to terms with that loss is to acknowledge it and mourn it.
This post is excerpted from Lisa’s book, Life Without Baby: Surviving and Thriving When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen.
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 I Didn’t “Wait Too Long” to Have Children
I was asked once, by a well-intentioned person, if I thought I’d waited too long to start trying to have children. I have to admit that the thought has flitted across my mind on more than one occasion, but once I stop to think it through, I’m able to answer the question with a resounding “No!”
I remember being completely affronted (and rightly so) by a very conservative college professor who told me that the prime age for women to have children was 18. Of course, looking at a chart of fertility vs. age, I now see that he was correct, even if his suggestion that motherhood might be a more suitable choice than college was extremely misguided.
Looking back at my 18-year-old self, it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if that young woman had become a mother. Yes, I know lots of women do it, and I probably would have too, if I’d had to. But thinking about all the upheavals I’ve put myself through, I just cannot imagine that a child would have benefited from having me as an 18-year-old mother. Maybe (maybe) my supposed topnotch fertility at that age would have enabled me to conceive, but it would have been no guarantee of my suitability as a mother.
The truth is, I have absolutely no idea if I was fertile at 18. I assumed that, like many, many women, I would still be fertile at 34, and look how that turned out. There’s no way of knowing how long ago my body decided it wasn’t up to the task of reproducing, and now I’ll never know.
When I look back at the 18-34 years, they were rocky, but good. I had all kinds of experiences that I couldn’t have had if I’d had children to take care for. I went to college—twice—moved to another continent, traveled to many countries, did volunteer work, had fun but unsuitable relationships, changed careers (more than twice), and got to sample adventures not well-matched to motherhood. I certainly don’t feel as if I wasted those years. I wonder if I’d feel the same if I’d been raising children all those years.
So, no, I don’t feel as if I waited too long. I waited until I was ready, and while I waited, I was busy living my life to the fullest, and I don’t consider that wasted time at all.
Whiny Wednesday: Infertility Amnesia
A friend of mine went through infertility hell a few years ago. When we learned of one another’s journeys, we were both glad to have an empathetic shoulder to lean on.
Then she became a mother, and developed infertility amnesia.
I’m not begrudging her the celebrations, the constant Facebook posts, or the incessant parenting talk. I get it; I’m sure I’d do the same in her situation. But the final straw came last week.
A group of us gets together about once a year and we’re starting to plan for this year. We usually go out for dinner, or bowling, or drinks and dancing. Several of us in the group don’t have children and those who do are always glad for a childfree night of adult fun.
This year, the new mom suggested we change things up and do something family-oriented and include the kids. “Maybe a beach picnic or Disneyland.” I kid you not.
Thankfully one of the other parents shot the idea down, but I had to wonder how she would have felt five years ago, in the thick of her infertility hell, if someone had made this same suggestion.
She would have felt excluded and she would have been upset. Which is just how I felt when I got her email.
Today is Whiny Wednesday. Who or what has done you wrong this week?
