Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

My Perfect Imperfect Life

Courtesy Hasbro Games

Courtesy Hasbro Games

I’ve been taking a fantastic creative writing class at UCLA Extension. Each week, we start off with a writing exercise from a choice of prompts, and last week, one of the prompts was, “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.

(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 instead.)

Guest Post: Who to Blame, if Not My Body

By Paula Coston

Young couple sitting on jettyAs a 59-year-old, I’m still often asked why I never had children, and still find it hard to explain to people who ask. If my reason had been purely biological issues – infertility, endometriosis, chronic health problems – I might be more able to silence the questions.

Apart from physiology, there are plenty of reasons for our childlessness, including:

  • Being single; or losing, or not meeting or having, a suitable partner.
  • Having a partner who doesn’t want children.
  • Being with an infertile partner.
  • After becoming an adoptive mother or stepmother, find out that that ‘doesn’t seem enough’.
  • Not feeling able to afford a family, or to leave a job.
  • Being gay.
  • Early term loss, miscarriage, abortion, still birth, cot death, early infant death.
  • Not realising in time how quickly our fertility reduces from the age of 35 and beyond.
  • Caring for a disabled, sick, elderly or otherwise vulnerable family member during our fertile years.
  • The influence of our own upbringing: for instance abusive parenting, or our own family’s religious, moral or class attitudes.

These factors aren’t mutually exclusive. I never consciously put off having a family for my career, but somehow it took over for a while. I was dating various people, then, within the space of a few years, I turned around and my siblings and most of my friends were having children, and time went on, and I just never found the suitable partner I longed for. I tried to adopt as a single, but after three years of trying, that didn’t work out, so for the sake of my ongoing sanity I gave up.

If any of the reasons above apply to you, they probably do in a different combination. And they in turn may have interacted with biological factors: women who suddenly see they have limited options, for example singles, may take measures such as IVF, and still arrive at no happy outcome.

Such reasons – which may shift and change over time – are delicate personal matters. Yet if you’re like me, you somehow feel that you still have to self-justify. We are often made to feel guilty for being childless, somehow wrong-footed. But it’s not as simple as making the wrong choices in life at the wrong times. It may not be our bodies’ fault, but it’s not as simple as being ours either: social influences and pressures and constraints, and the parts played by our loved ones, must also share the blame.

It would help if we had a term to answer our interrogators. The only phrases available to us so far are vague and unfamiliar and unwieldy: ‘childlessness by happenstance’ ‘social infertility’, ‘social factor childlessness’. If you have a more inspired suggestion, please do let me know.

 

Paula Coston is a 59-year-old administrator in an English university. She writes on childlessness, singledom, the older woman and more at http://boywoman.wordpress.com and for The Huffington Post. Her novel – the first in English about a modern woman childless by circumstance – comes out in April/May, entitled On the Far Side, There’s a Boy.

It Got Me Thinking…About Good Girls

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

Facing a Problem“But I did everything right!”

My sweet friend Connie* was in the midst of a serious health crisis, and I was doing my best to be supportive when she blurted this out. I wanted to tell her that everything would be okay, that she’d find the silver lining in her experiences, that that which did not kill her would make her stronger. But the reality was that what she was facing might very well kill her, and the unfairness of it all was breaking my heart.

For, you see, Connie is a “good girl.” She is a dutiful and loving daughter, sister, and friend. She is loyal to her employer and she is honest on her tax returns. She doesn’t drink too much or eat too much, and she’s never smoked any substance, legal or otherwise. She has followed her doctors’ instructions to a T, but she wasn’t responding to the prescribed treatment and she was facing a scary and uncertain future.

Our exchange reminded me of so many conversations I’ve had with women who are childfree not by choice. They waited to be financially able to support a family, only to discover their reproductive years had passed them by. They waited to meet Mr. Right—who would also be Daddy Right—then encountered inexplicable fertility challenges. They planned and dreamed and planned some more, then were denied the privileges and blessings of having children. These were good girls who would have been good, loving mothers, but they got gypped.

Twenty or so years ago, I asked my mother to share with me the best life advice she’d ever received. She thought for a moment, then replied: “Life is not fair.” I had expected something more encouraging, along the lines of “Good girls win!” But she went on to explain that good things happen to bad people, and bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, and if you can accept the randomness of life, perhaps you’ll better appreciate when good things do come your way.

I get this on an intellectual level, and I’ve certainly experienced it throughout my life. Still, I wish reality had a little less bite. I wish the good women I know who want to be mothers could have their miracle babies. I hope Connie’s doctors come up with a miracle cure that allows Connie to make a full recovery. I wish good girls (like me) would get all the good things in life they deserve. It seems only fair.

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.

*Not her real name. As of this posting, her condition has improved, but she’s not yet out of the woods.

Whiny Wednesday

Whiny_WednesdayAloha!

It’s Whiny Wednesday, the day for grumbling and griping about whatever’s on your mind.

I, however, am in Hawaii with my mum, so I have absolutely nothing to whine about.

But please, don’t let my Aloha spirit wreck your Whiny Wednesday.

Whine on, my friends.

No Kidding Nancy

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

No Kidding cover“A couple of lousy choices in men (damn the nineties) and some reproductive system woes later,” and Nancy Van Iderstine found herself “Not Pregnant at the Ob-Gyn.” Her story is part of a collection of funny, sad, and eye-opening essays titled No Kidding: Women Writers on Bypassing Motherhood edited by Henriette Mantel. (Available in Kindle and paperback on Amazon.)

I was introduced to Nancy by a mutual friend maybe 10 years ago: “You’re both great writers, you both work in entertainment!” But it wasn’t until this book came out that I learned we were also both childfree-not-by-choice. I wanted to hear more about her journey, and she agreed to chat.

LWB: Did you always want children?

NVI: Yes, but I personally did not endure a lot of external pressure to have kids. I was active in life, and when I was younger, I thought: “Everything is still going to happen.”

LWB: When did you know for sure you weren’t going to have kids?

NVI: About 12 years ago I was in a difficult relationship, and it was clear I could not bring a child into it.  [She later ruled out adoption due to the “demands of (her) work and involvement in various social, environmental, and animal causes”.] But part of me didn’t fully give up until I had a hysterectomy seven years ago. That brought with it early menopause and the related physical, mental, emotional, and financial challenges.

LWB: How did you face this?

NVI: I had a meltdown, and I went into mourning.

LWB: Are you still mourning?

NVI: I still go ga-ga over strangers’ babies; I am drawn to babies like magic. I see in them this awe of life, and it is exhilarating to be around them. It used to rip my heart out, but now I have cats and I treat them like babies.

LWB: How do you respond to the accusation that we are selfish because we don’t have children?

NVI: Women are put in the hot seat more than men over the baby issue. We’re told anything we experience in life is nothing compared to having kids. I was talking with a relative of mine, a woman who is of the 1950s generation. I was telling her how heartbroken I was over issues in a relationship, and she came back with “Imagine doing all that and having children.” It totally removed all the legitimacy of my concerns, as if my concerns only mattered if I was a mommy. I started to cry and said to her, “Do you have any idea how much I wanted kids?” It hasn’t worked out for me, but that doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to feel pain and express it. Because I’m not a mother? Sure, overall, friends who have kids are less self-absorbed because circumstances pull them out of themselves. But people in animal rescue exhaust themselves doing good work too.

LWB: What do you wish you could have told your younger self?

NVI: “Please trust your intuition” and “Please stop selling yourself short.” I ignored my inner voice. I wish I had allowed myself to be confident; I would have made fewer mistakes. There’s a lot to be said for feeling empowered.

LWB: How did you come to be part of this book?

NVI: I spent a year back east helping my mom and I bumped into Henriette. We had grown up near each other in Vermont. She told me she was working on a project and asked “Would you like to submit something?” She knew I was an actor/writer, had seen and enjoyed my one-woman show, and she knew my history, including my hysterectomy.

LWB: What was the experience like?

NVI: I sensed most of the contributors were comediennes and I wondered if there might not be enough of a mournful side. I wanted to present the sorrowful side, and then I second-guessed myself: Do I want to be the unfunny one? Do I sound whiney? I felt like I was lamenting it—my tale of woe, my bad dating, my lost uterus—but I’ve found my story is much more universal than I’d thought and I was okay with it. I don’t know many hyster-sisters, and I feel good about giving them a voice. One woman came up to me at a reading and said “I was so moved” even though she was a mom. She also went through the process of a hysterectomy. I became aware that this is why you do it. I feel like in everything I do, I want people to take something away, to feel, happy or sad.

LWB: What has the reaction to the book been like?

NVI: Hugely positive. I’m kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop! Overall, readers are intrigued by it, and they’ve embraced it. The only backlash I fear is that I often write for people who have kids. They may have the perception that I don’t like kids, since they don’t know my background. I’m surprised the book was so well received because women deciding what to do with their lives pushes buttons.

LWB: Do you have any advice for our readers?

NVI: I think there’s a reason we are drawn to what we do. Whatever our choices, we are right (if you’re not a criminal). Whenever I returned to somewhat puritanical New England, I apologized for all of my life decisions—until about two years ago. It never really helped me. We have been apologizing to ourselves, justifying ourselves. Do we have to answer every critic? We really don’t. We’re three-dimensional. We need to stop apologizing and just give something to the world.

 

No Kidding: Women Writers On Bypassing Parenthood features 37 essays from amazing, funny women, including Margaret Cho, Wendy Liebman, and Nora Dunn.

In addition to her contribution to No Kidding, Nancy Van Iderstine wrote Twentieth Century Fox: The First 75 Years, edited State Of Mind (the first book in Sven Davison’s Godhead Trilogy), and authored Vegan & Gluten-free Recipes To LIVE For: Comfort Food That Comforts! A performer with a gift for character voices, Nancy stars as Mama Chu in Little Big Panda, and she remains one of a small group of women who have played monsters in the Power Rangers franchise. See what Nancy’s up to at http://nancyvaniderstine.virb.com/.

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.

Guest Post: No Apologies

By Justine Brooks Froelker, LPC, CDWF-Candidate

Young Businesswoman Standing with Two Young Business ExecutivesBattling through IVF and learning to accept a childfree life means we are faced, sometimes daily, with uncomfortable social situations and questions about our motherhood status and how we got here. It also means the wounds of infertility, especially in the beginning when things are completely raw, continue to be open, gaping wounds. And at times, it can feel like society callously pours salt into us over and over.

Infertility, IVF, pregnancy loss and childfree acceptance are some of the most shamed words in our lexicon. The blogging universe has helped move us past this shame in many ways; however we have a long way to go in my opinion. My blog, Ever Upward, is my story; completely honest, completely open and without much shame…anymore at least.

Owning my story, completely and out loud, for the world to read has changed my life. My healing journey continues to improve and I am making connections with so many people all over the world. However, I completely understand and get that this is not how most of us going through infertility and childfree acceptance feel. However, I would like to offer a permission for all of us.

No apologies.

If you aren’t ready for that baby shower, politely decline. If your friend only talks about her brand new baby or her kids, respectfully ask her about something else in her life or bravely ask her to stop. Or simply greatly limit your time with her. Only you know what you are ready for with wherever you are in your journey. Give yourself permission to ask for what you want and need and to set boundaries. And do it without apology, especially to yourself.

As I write, I am headed home from my certification training with The Daring Way™ based on the research of Brené Brown. Through my work in the last 5 days I have learned more about my shame surrounding my IVF journey. Of course the misunderstandings and judgments that society and others have surrounding infertility can make shame envelope me so quickly that I completely shrink. But, through my work I also learned that at times I shut myself down in telling my full story because I know it is difficult for others to hear. Not only do they not want to discuss shamed infertility but they also don’t want to have to feel how sad my story is. Or how much they wish I could be a mother because they know I’d be a great mother. I find that I quiet myself and don’t share because I shield myself from feeling shame by people pleasing and caretaking, not wanting someone I care about to feel any pain, let alone my pain.

But, I also silence myself because I really don’t want their fucking sympathy.

I hopefully yearn for their empathy, and one day their understanding.

In the light filled spirit that has washed over me after learning the curriculum of The Daring Way™ I am filled with courage and hope. I will no longer shy away from my story, ever. I will practice my shame resilience. I will stop making apologies to society, to my friends and family, but most of all to myself.

So without any apology:

I am Justine.

I tried IVF two times with a gestational surrogate, and for us two times is enough and one more time than we really could afford both financially and emotionally.

I can’t have kids.

I tried very hard to be a mother.

I paid a lot of money to be a mother.

And, I put my body (and my surrogate’s body) through hormonal hell to have a baby.

But they were never my babies to love here on earth.

I know that adoption isn’t for me.

And so I work, sometimes every minute of every day, to accept my childfree life and to let go of my childlessness.

And I will no longer silence myself because my story is sad or scary for anyone, as I will no longer allow shame to steal my true self.

Because, this is my ever upward.

No apologies.

 

Justine Brooks Froelker is a Licensed Professional Counselor and a Certified Daring Way™ Facilitator-Candidate (based on the research of Brené Brown) with a private practice in St. Louis, Missouri (www.jbftherapyandcoaching.com). In February 2011, her husband and she began their journey in the world of IVF. 2 rounds of IVF with a gestational surrogate, 2 transfers, 3 babies never to be born and learning to accept a childfree life later, Ever Upward is conceived. 

It Got Me Thinking…About Valentine’s Schmalentines

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

Girl ThinkingLisa and I had a scheduling meeting earlier this year and she reminded me that my column would fall on Valentine’s Day.

“I hate Valentine’s Day” came out of my mouth before I could stop myself.

Hearts, flowers, chocolates…pfft! Even though I am now enjoying a loving relationship with a generous partner, there’s still a part of me that carries sensory memories of lonely, miserable holidays, some while I was single and some while I was in less-than-happy relationships. It’s another one of those events (the prom, New Year’s Eve) that never seems to live up to the hype and, well, I hate it.

So. In the spirit of serious attitude adjusting, I decided to find something fun about this bittersweet day. Here’s some of the random Valentine trivia I discovered:

  • In the late 1800s, Richard Cadbury, of Britain’s famous Cadbury chocolates family, created the first Valentine’s Day candy box.
  • In the Victorian era, signing a card was considered bad luck. (First secret admirers, or first stalkers?)
  • 64% of American men do not make plans in advance for Valentine’s Day. (Shocking, I know.)
  • The name “Valentine” comes from the Latin word valor, which means “worthy.”
  • In Wales, there’s a tradition—currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity—of giving intricately hand-carved wooden “love spoons.” (See amazing examples here.)
  • (Here’s my favorite) When Abraham Lincoln was running for president of the United States, a man named Valentine Tapley said he would never shave again if Lincoln won. Lincoln won. Tapley stopped shaving in November 1860, and when he passed away in 1910, his beard measured 12 and a half feet! Here’s a picture!
Valentine Tapley

Valentine Tapley

For more trivia, check out sites here, here, and here.

Whether you choose to celebrate—or ignore—today’s holiday, I wish you love and chocolate. Kiss kiss!

 

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.

Cooking for Two

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Here’s how I know I was supposed to have kids:

I am totally unable to cook for only two people.

Even though I was one person for a long time and my family has been two for over a decade, I still cook for a family of five. There are always leftovers in my fridge and I often turn the remnants of one meal into something different.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in a family of five and learned to cook for five that I can’t seem to downsize my portions. Or maybe there’s just a part of me that’s pure old-fashioned mother and wants to feed everyone. “Eat, eat! How are you going to grow big if you don’t eat?”

Well, Mr. Fab and I are growing big on my cooking, and now that my mother is visiting, I’ll be fattening her up to.

Do you have a maternal instinct that you can’t seem to shake off?

It Got Me Thinking…About the Diaper Debate

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

Girl ThinkingA friend posted this article (you don’t need to read it) on Facebook about the huge environmental impact of using disposable diapers. Stats indicate that the average baby will use 6,500-10,000 diapers, and in the United States that translates to 7.6 billion pounds of nonbiodegradable garbage a year!

The point of the article is to encourage parents to use cloth diapers, and the photo below was included…

diapers-300x196

…and it got me thinking…shouldn’t there be a third display, the one representing childfree people that is sparkling clean and empty?

Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is wrapping up her memoir about being a temporary single mommy and how it helped her come to terms with being childfree.