Story Power

Our Stories: Brandi

December 8, 2017

As told to Kathleen Guthrie Woods

I can always use a little bit of outside light as we head into the holidays and what for many of us who are childless-not-by-choice is a cold and dark season of the soul. Brandi gave me that light of hope when she shared her story with me. Forty years old and happily married for 16, Brandi endured over 10 years of the infertility nightmare. When her husband told her he couldn’t do it any more, she made the choice to build a new Plan B life with him, one that was childless.

After “a long climb out of the pit of despair”, she is able to state (and here’s where she knocks my socks off): “I have accepted that I am a childless woman, but I do not identify as childfree.” Since her decision, she has filled her life with children, other people’s children, and has found what she calls the “bright side of infertility”.

Read her story below, then learn more about Brandi and her journey at her own website and blog, Not So Mommy.

LWB: Describe your dream of motherhood.

Brandi: I always thought I’d be just a good ol’ fashioned mom, with two kids, a husband, a dog, and a cat, living in my traditional house. Even as a little girl, I toted my Cabbage Patch Kid around in a carrier on my chest. I didn’t dream of my wedding day, but I did dream about having a husband and kids.

LWB: Are you childfree by choice, chance, or circumstance?

Brandi: I am childless by chance. (Actually, I usually say I am childless-not-by-choice.) My husband and I suffer from severe infertility. I have endometriosis, and after seven failed IUIs [intrauterine insemination fertility treatments] and 10 years TTC [trying to conceive], my husband decided he didn’t want to keep trying. So, at the end of 2013, I began trying to accept my childless life.

LWB: Where are you on your journey now?

Brandi: I have accepted that I am a childless woman, but I do not identify as “childfree”. I have kids in my life (nieces, nephews, and an exchange daughter who has become family, plus our fur baby).

I started writing a blog, Not So Mommy, because I want to help others who are struggling in their childless journeys. I try very hard to focus on the good, so I write about the positive side of being infertile, childless, a dog mom, an aunt, a host mom, a wife, etc., and redefine what “momhood” means to me. When I was in the pit of despair and at my darkest moments, I never thought that I would come out of my infertility journey able to say that I am okay with being childless. But my life has turned out pretty well! I want others to know that there is hope, there is a light at the end of the struggle. I hope to continue to inspire others to embrace their authentic selves and live their imperfectly perfect lives.

LWB: What was the turning point for you?

Brandi: December 26, 2013. That was the day my husband told me he didn’t want to keep trying to have a baby, and he didn’t want to adopt either. He said he just wanted to enjoy our life like it was. Because I love my husband and could not imagine my life without him, I decided that I had to accept our childless life. So, I went into 2014 with the resolution to do just that. It was not an easy road, and I definitely had struggles (sometimes still do), but it was freeing to let go of one dream (having a baby) so that I could open myself up to other possibilities.

LWB: What’s the best part about not having children?

Brandi: The freedom to travel, the freedom to have spur-of-the-moment dates with my husband, the freedom to spoil our nieces and nephews because we don’t have to pay for college or braces or everyday expenses.

LWB: How do you answer “Do you have kids?”

Brandi: I’ve always been honest about my infertility. I never hid it even when we were going through our struggle and treatments, so, when people ask, I tell them that we can’t have children. I go on to explain that we have nieces, nephews, a fur baby, and have hosted an exchange student who has become family. We usually end up talking about dogs or they ask about our hosting experience. I hope it allows people to realize there are different ways to have children besides getting pregnant or adopting.

LWB: What is the best advice you’d offer someone else like you?

Brandi: Allow yourself to be open to a different dream. My husband and I never considered hosting a foreign exchange student until we met a student and her host mom at a cooking class. Deciding to host a student turned out to be the BEST thing that ever happened in our life! God answered our prayers, but His answer looked different than we expected.

Won’t you share your story with us? The act of answering the questions itself can be very healing, plus we’d like to support you by telling you “You are not alone.” Please visit the Our Stories page to get more information and the questionnaire.

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is mostly at peace with her childlessness.

I’m Taking Leap of Faith…and I’m Nervous

July 23, 2016

There’s a school of thought that says: When you start to feel afraid of taking a leap or making a change, that’s when you know you’re making the right decision. I’m choosing to subscribe to this school of thought this week, because I’m starting to feel nervous about an upcoming leap of faith.

A couple of months ago I had a brilliant idea. You know the kind I mean. It came to me in an instant and I immediately wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. I began thinking about this idea all the time and planning out how it would work. And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like a really great idea. So, I told a couple of people and they thought it was a good idea. So I told a couple more. And before I knew it, I was committed.

Then, this week, things started to get real. The pieces of my plan began clicking into place, money changed hands, and I passed the point of no return, or at least the point of no return without humiliation. Suddenly, I was really nervous.

All the reasons why this was the best idea I’ve ever had suddenly got a little fuzzy at the edges. I woke up in the night with a list of all the things that could go wrong, all the reasons why this was a stupid idea, and I knew I had to make a decision. I could:

A) Call the whole thing off, cut my losses, and go back to my old safe, but ineffective, way of doing things.

B) Put it off a couple more weeks, give myself some time to firm up a few more details and mitigate some of the potential disasters.

C) Pinch my nose, close my eyes, and leap in feet first, hoping that I’d figured out quickly how to swim.

I’ll admit that all these options looked good, but finally, I made a decision. The only way I would ever truly know if this was the best idea since sliced bread was to commit and go for it.

So, here goes…

Next week, Wednesday July 27, I will launch a new serialized novel, A Strange Companion. I will publish a new chapter of the novel every single week until I get to “The End”, sometime in early 2017.

I’ve never done anything like this before and honestly, it goes against all my beliefs about how to go about publishing a book. I’m afraid it won’t be good enough. I’m afraid people won’t like it. I’m afraid I’ll get to Chapter 5 or 10 or 20 and realize I started in the wrong place or that there’s an important character or set-up that really needed to appear in Chapter 7.

Regardless, I’m doing it. I’ve had enough of fate deciding what I will or won’t be in this life. My future lies in writing fiction and I’m taking matters into my own hands.

If you happen to be a fiction lover and want to come along on this adventure with me, you can find out a bit more about the project at LisaManterfield.com. If you don’t happen to read fiction, then all I ask is for your good wishes and sharp shove out the door.

Story Power: A Campfire Story for Your Younger Self

July 16, 2016

By Lisa Manterfield

Since we humans first began gathering into social and familial groups, we’ve used stories to create a sense of community. Early hunter-gatherers shared tales to pass along information, traditions, and important lessons.

In this fascinating Life Science article, Campfire Tales Served as Early Human Social Media, researchers noticed a big difference between daytime and nighttime campfire stories told among a tribe of Kalahari Bushmen. While the daytime conversations were made up of only 6 percent stories, the rest being complaints, gossip, hunting plans, and jokes, once the tribe gathered around the nighttime campfires, 81 percent of conversations were stories.

The stories passed along information about tribal customs and ceremonies, as well as warnings of dangers, such as the story of three bushmen killed in a fire. The tribe also used stories to pass information to younger generations.

Modern Stories

Even today, we find our way around in the world and understand who we are through handed down stories. I heard stories about my aunt who emigrated to Australia by boat in the 1940s, which helped me understand why I seemed to be the only person in my family to move far from home. I recently learned that my habit of dragging my husband on long, under-prepared hikes comes not from my dad, as I’d always believed, but from my mum, who had the same habit.

As a child, I learned about the dangers of electrocution, of hot cooking oil, of crossing the street, not from formal lessons, but from stories told by others. More recently, my social media feed has bombarded me with a million things to worry about, everything from terrorist attacks to falling off a cliff while playing Pokémon Go.

From this community, I’ve learned from other people’s stories that I was not alone in my experiences, and gained ideas about how to cope with challenges. And writing my own story has helped me to understand myself too, to give perspective to experiences I didn’t fully understand as they we happening.

As you think about the stories you might tell, what important wisdom would you pass along if you had the chance to sit around the campfire with your younger self?

Story Power: Why Writers Must Ask “Why?”

June 25, 2016

Photo by Rebecca Lacko

Two weeks ago I got to visit the beautiful Pacific Northwest to teach a workshop about book promotion. I met the most generous and supportive group of writers at BARN (Bainbridge Artisan Regional Network) and we dug into how to find readers for fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

One of the most important questions to ask as a writer is “Why?”

Why should a reader care about my work?

Why should she invest her valuable time?

And why the heck am I writing this story in the first place?

It’s not reasonable for an writer to expect to inspire someone to pick up her book if she doesn’t know what inspired her to write it in the first place. How can you assure someone they won’t regret reading it when you have no idea why they might get something valuable from it?

So, the first exercise we did in the workshop was to answer the question: Why are you doing the work you do?

Photo by Rebecca Lacko

I watched brows furrow around the room as the members of the group considered the question. Then, one-by-one, I watched realization hit. When people shared their reasons—everything from giving a voice to baby boomers to inspiring children to explore outdoors—you could hear the passion about their topics in their voices.

Whenever I read a book I love, I always want to know what inspired the author to write it. Don’t you?

So if you’re thinking about writing your story, or any story for that matter, start by asking “why?”. Why am I compelled to share this? What do I want to say and why would a reader care? Understanding your personal “why” will make starting to write an awful lot easier.

***

For now, I’ll leave you with some pictures that have inspired me to put the Pacific Northwest on my list of places to visit again soon.

Mandatory lunch at Elliott’s

View of Seattle from the Bainbridge Ferry

The result of buying too many books at Eagle Harbor Book Co.

A slice of paradise

Using Prompts to Start Telling Your Story

May 21, 2016

In the corner of my bedroom is a large bag of journals. At first glance you’d mistake me for one of those people who fills book after book with profound thoughts, but that’s not who I am. Each journal has a handful of entries for each time I decided to dedicate myself to journaling. I’d write for a few days, then skip, then quit. Even as I worked my way through infertility and knew that journaling would help me, I never managed to keep it up for long enough to dig down into the good stuff. Turns out I’m not much of a navel gazer.

Under the desk in my office is another pile of journals. Every page of these books is filled with my writing. So what’s the difference?

The stories in the second stack of journals were almost all generated from writing prompts. These prompts might have been lines pulled from books, prompts given to me in a class, or verbal or visual prompts that set me off in a particular direction.

The thing about prompts is that they force you into the writing. There’s no room to ponder what to write. They take away the pressure of trying to find something profound or important to write about. You just pick a prompt and jump right in.

If you’re thinking about writing your story but don’t know where to start, consider trying some prompts to launch you into writing.

I like first-line prompts because they force you into a starting point. Take a look at the prompts below and find one that speaks to you. Begin writing with that line and see where it takes you.

If you tend to ponder or find yourself trying to come up with the perfect story, don’t overthink. Set a timer for five or ten minutes, pick a prompt that resonates with you, and dive in.

Here are a few first-line prompts to get you started:

This was a matter of life and death

It takes more than inspiration to become great

Don’t put on a brave face

There is something wrong in this house

I take a deep breath when I read this

Weekdays revolved on a sameness wheel

We have something bigger in common

Let me know in the comments how you did and if anything interesting came up for you.

My Perfect Imperfect Life

May 14, 2016

By Lisa Manterfield

Courtesy Hasbro Games

In my weekly writer’s group, we start off with an exercise from a choice of prompts. When I saw “I’m tired of pretending my life isn’t perfect”, I almost took the prompt.

It’s not hard to write about the part of my life that is so obviously imperfect: the fact that I wasn’t able to have children. I could (and do) write about that broken bit. But if I took my life apart, I’d find lots of areas that aren’t perfect. Isn’t every life like that? Everyone has challenges, and life would probably be dull without them. But part of the thrill of living is overcoming life’s challenges. Without the obstacles there’s no glory of victory.

My life is flawed in many ways, as all lives are, but it’s also a good and happy life, and on the whole it’s pretty close to perfect. And it’s hard work to keep clinging to the idea that it isn’t. It’s tiring to keep feeling bad about the parts of my life that didn’t work out as planned.

I didn’t get to have children, and it’s true that, for a long period of time, it made my life feel empty and deeply flawed. But that changed over time. I worked to overcome that flaw, to seek and take advantage of the silver linings, to work through my sadness—by writing, in my case—by gathering this community and sharing our stories. My marriage made it through infertility. That’s a victory in itself. And while there are still many challenges in my life, few of them are related to my childlessness anymore.

So, yes, I am a flawed human, with challenges to face, but I no longer wish to pretend my life isn’t perfect, just as it is, warts and all.

If you’re in the mood to do some writing of your own, pull out your journal and take the prompt: I’m tired of pretending my life isn’t perfect.

(And by the way, I didn’t take the prompt because there was another that sparked an idea. I’m glad I took that one instead, because that exercise turned into short story that was published here.)

Book Review: The End of Miracles

May 7, 2016

In the six years since I started this site, I don’t think I’ve ever done a book review for a novel. I’ve been reluctant to read any books covering the topic of infertility because I feared they might trigger some deep-seated emotions and undo all the work I’ve done. I’ve been especially reluctant to read fiction as I’ve always been afraid of the inevitable happy ending.

But recently I’ve had several requests to review novels on the topic of infertility, so I decided it was time to take the plunge. I know many of you are avid readers, so I hope you’ll enjoy the upcoming reviews.

In her debut novel, The End of Miracles (She Writes Press, 2016), author Monica Starkman, M.D., delves into her extensive professional research to explore the emotional devastation of miscarriage and stillbirth.

After fruitless years battling infertility, Margo Kerber is devastated when her seemingly miraculous pregnancy ends in a late-term miscarriage. Convinced she is pregnant again, Margo finds temporary relief from her grief. But when her fantasy clashes with reality and Margo’s pregnancy is discovered to be false, she slips into a deep depression that clouds both her grasp of reality and her judgment. When she spots a briefly unattended infant, she is compelled to commit an unthinkable crime.

From the opening of the book, I felt as if I were in the hands of someone writing with authority about the psychological aspects of infertility and how numbing grief can be. I found myself recognizing many of the “crazy” thoughts I had on my own journey, which Starkman courageously commits to paper.

I asked Starkman about her work in psychology and about her decision to tell this story:

Life Without Baby: What prompted you to write this book?

Monica Starkman: I had wanted to write a novel for a long time, in part to give something back to the world of literature as thanks for all the joy I’ve gained from reading. Nothing had piqued my interest enough to make the effort until I was asked to consult on and treat two women with false pregnancies. I realized that here was a topic: the strong desire and need to be pregnant, and the powerful repercussions of the frustration of that desire. That was intriguing and important enough for me to devote the time and determination that writing a novel required.

LWB: In your work as a psychiatrist, have you seen changes in the level of understanding about the emotional impact of infertility and unexpected childlessness?

MS: I can’t say that I have. I think that for even the woman/couple affected, the intensity of the emotions elicited by infertility and miscarriage still come as a complete surprise. And those not so affected are just beginning to realize this as well. For this reason, I recently wrote articles for MariaShriver.com and for PsychologyToday.com about miscarriage, false pregnancy, and infertility. I hope The End of Miracles will also bring such understanding to its readers.

LWB: In the book, Margo’s psychiatrist discusses the mind-body connection as regards to reproductive health. Could you talk a little more about this?

MS: Stress affects the brain, which can then affect the body by changing hormone levels and immune function, which can also impact reproductive function. However, for the survival of the species, Mother Nature protects reproduction as much as possible to withstand these effects. The mind-body relationship is bidirectional: the body also affects the mind. And as those affected with infertility know all too well, its negative effects on mental well-being are quite powerful.

LWB: As a writer and psychiatrist, you’re involved with both the sharing and receiving of stories. Why do you feel it’s important for us to share our stories?

MS: Being able to express strong feelings, by talking or writing about them, does help process them, relieves some of the internal pressure, and helps to come to terms with and master those feelings. Sharing stories helps others better understand how those affected feel and encourages compassion. In return, social support from empathetic others is a very important contributing factor on the path to healing.

LWB: What else do you hope to achieve with The End of Miracles?

MS: I want to give readers an accurate insider’s portrayal of psychiatry and psychiatrists. I hope to promote the idea that people with severe psychiatric illnesses, such as serious depression, aren’t so very different from the rest of us, and that despite their unraveling, there can be a path for healing.

Monica Starkman, M.D., is associate professor of psychiatry emerita and scientific researcher at the University of Michigan Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry. As a recognized expert on the effects of stress hormones on mood and brain structure, Monica has been published by dozens of academic journals and several news outlets including The New Republic, Vogue and MariaShriver.com.

The Power of Story

April 30, 2016

Welcome to Story Power. In this new column, I’m excited to explore with you the powerful effects that stories have on our lives.

Telling stories is an integral part of what it means to be human. Since the dawn of man, we’ve told stories to pass along survival information, to educate and inform, to discover ourselves, and to entertain. Every day we tell hundreds of stories as we navigate our way through the day.

In the six years since I started Life Without Baby, I’ve told my own story of infertility and shared the stories of others. I’ve learned from other people and come to better understand my own experience. I’ve used that collective knowledge to tell a bigger story about what it’s like to survive unexpected childlessness and to create a new narrative for a life without children.

At the same time, I’ve been telling other stories, made-up stories of fictional people and situations. What I’ve learned is that, even in writing about something I’ve never experienced personally (such as surviving a deadly virus as a teenager—my novel-in-progress) so much of my own story finds its way onto the page as I explore themes that are relevant to my own life.

What I hope to do here in Story Power is help you understand your own experience through the power of story. We’ll explore how story helps us make sense of our lives and how we can use story to inform, educate, and inspire ourselves and others. I’ll share tips and exercises to help you tell your own story, and share other people’s stories (both true and fictional) as inspiration. Along the way, I’ll let you in on some of my own story telling progress and what I’m learning as I move into this new stage of my life.

This Story Power blog feels like the next logical step for me on my journey, as I move beyond my identity as an infertility blogger and back toward my original destination as a novelist. Even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, you can come along with me and capture your own story through journaling, audio recording, structured writing, or any other art form. I’ll be playing around with some of these, too.

This project is something of an experiment, so I’d love to hear what you think, what (if anything) excites you about this, and what you’d like to learn or hear about. Please leave me a comment below, and if you’d like to be notified of new posts, there’s a subscribe option in the sidebar.

I look forward to sharing this new chapter with you.