Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

How We Heal Our Emotional Scars

Woman walking alone on beach

By Lisa Manterfield

I have a large scar on my left knee. It has black lines of grit in it, and smooth patches of scar tissue that catch the light on an otherwise rough patch of skin.

My scar is 30 years old and I don’t think about it very often anymore. It doesn’t hurt, even when I poke it, and the wound that caused it healed long ago.

But if I think back to the day I got my scar, all the memories and the pain come flooding back. I remember the bike accident. I remember riding through the trees on a gorgeous sunny day, laughing with my friends and flirting with a boy I liked. I remember trying to get his attention and catching my front wheel on his back tire. I don’t recall sailing through the air, but I must have done, because I do remember skidding along the trail, trading bits of knee for bits of trail.

I remember sitting in the bath at home and crying as my mum tried to clean the wound. And I remember my older brother—a bit of an expert on injuries and scars—gently coaxing me to scrub out the grit or be left with a terrible scar.

I also have a vague recollection of a discussion among adults (not my parents) about plastic surgery and what a shame it would be if a “pretty girl” was disfigured by an ugly scar.

It all happened so long ago, but dredging up these memories can bring back all that pain, my embarrassment, the tenderness of my brother, the feeling that my scar would make me “less than” I could have been. I can feel all of it again as if it had happened in more recent memory.

I feel this way about my infertility and childlessness, too. Most days, I don’t think about it anymore. But lately I’ve been writing about grief and loss, and some of those awful feelings of sadness, anger, and deep, deep loss have been coming back to me.

It’s taught me that the healing process for emotional scars is much the same as for physical scars.

You have to suffer some terrible pain to clean the wound. You have to struggle through the initial all-consuming grief. You have to ask for support from people who might not know how to give it. You have to walk again, even if every step is agony. You’ll meet people who will see you as damaged and less than you could have been, because you no longer fit into their ideal of perfect.

But over time the healing begins. You’ll knock your healing wound a few times and break it open again. In one particularly unfortunate incident, you’ll fall on the same wound and end up with a double scar. But you’ll remember how much you loved riding a bike and you’ll take it up again. And you’ll meet new people, who don’t care whether you have one ugly knee, because they’re more interested in some other facet of who you are. And you’ll realize that being a “pretty girl” wasn’t what you were destined to be anyway, and you’re happy being an outdoorsy girl who’s accumulated a multitude of scars since then.

And when you’re shaving your legs (which is trickier because of the scar) you might sometimes recall how you got the scar and the pain you went through. But most days, you won’t even think about.

Having a big scar on my knee means I never got the opportunity to be a leg model, but I got to be so many other things instead, things that have made my life journey quite interesting. My infertility scar is much newer than my knee scar, but I can already see it healing in a way I couldn’t have imagined when it was new and raw. I am starting to wonder about what new destiny it’s leading me to.

For more about hiding and revealing our scars, check out this guest post from Quasi-Momma. 

Our Stories: Infertility Around the World

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

I’m fudging things a little bit today, as the writer of the article linked below, Amy McTighe, is not (to my knowledge) a member of our Life Without Baby community. She is, however, one of us.

“War and Infertility: How Losing a Pregnancy in Iraq Changed My Approach to Miscarriage” by Amy McTighe

I invite you to read her story. We can relate to many of her struggles with infertility, while at the same time have our eyes opened to how being childless-not-by-choice is dealt with in different cultures, different generations.

Because Lisa hails from the UK and I am in the USA, we tend to focus on how things work in our cultures. But there’s so much more we need to learn about and understand. We each have a story to tell, and I’d again like to encourage you all to share yours. Check out the Our Stories link for how to do this.

In response to Amy’s last line, today I hope she—and you—can begin to release any self-blame you are carrying. Today I hope you experience some new beauty in your world.

Kathleen Guthrie Woods continues to look for guidance toward healing in her own story, The Mother of All Dilemmas. Coming soon!

 

Why You Need to Fix Your Self-Talk

orange tulips in sunshine

By Lisa Manterfield

I’ve been spending more time than usual alone lately and it’s not good for my head. I’m beginning to talk to myself and some of those conversations aren’t good.

When I’m busy working, my brain and I get along just fine, but in the evenings, when I’m padding around the kitchen making dinner, doing dishes, or folding laundry, the conversations start.

You know the ones I mean. I pick up an issue that’s been bothering me, something someone said that stung, or some other injustice or conflict that’s gone unresolved. Then I set about solving the problem, confronting the offender, and getting into a big fight in my head. (Please tell me I’m not the only person that does this.)

Usually I gravitate towards the worst case scenario. I end up working myself into a lather over something that hasn’t happened, and may never happen.

Finally, I have to remind myself that my body can’t tell the difference between real conflict and imagined, and so it’s busy pumping all those stress hormones out into my blood stream, which isn’t doing my health any good. That’s usually enough to stop the arguments – at least for a while.

I used to do this a lot when I was busy beating myself up over infertility, trying to figure out why it happened – or more to the point, what I had done to make it happen to me. I’d think of all the choices I’d made along the way and imagine if I’d started earlier and had children with someone who wasn’t right for me, instead of waiting so long for Mr. Fab. Does any of this sound familiar?

Once you get that negative self-talk going, it’s easy to convince yourself of all kinds of things that aren’t true. And is that really going to help the healing process? Probably not. More likely it’s just going to create more stress and give you wrinkles.

So today, as you’re going about your business, listen to what you’re telling yourself. We all have plenty of real conflict in our lives; let’s not add to it by creating more in our heads.

Here’s a good article that explains more about the science of self-talk.

How Time Moves Differently When You Don’t Have Children

By Lisa Manterfield

I do hope this isn’t simply a factor of aging, but lately I seem to have lost my ability to keep track of time. I was always so good at remembering things like how many years ago we visited such-and-such a place, or where we spent Christmas four years ago. But the last several years of my life have suddenly blurred into one big event. I can no longer accurately mark time.

Over lunch with a friend recently, we talked about her daughter and both expressed shock that she is already 16. How the years fly! We talked about another friend who has since moved away and how vividly we remember going to see her new baby so many years ago. I realized that I have no idea how old this little boy is now. I guessed he was probably somewhere around 10 or 12, but my friend knew exactly. “He’s two years younger than my daughter. He’ll be 14 in March.” I felt guilty that I didn’t remember that.

Walking home after lunch, it dawned on me that my time amnesia might have a lot to do with not having children. My friend is reminded on a daily basis of how old her children are. She marks the passing of time with birthday parties, school grades, and childhood milestones. She knows how long ago something happened, because she knows how old her kids were, or what grade they were in at the time. She knows how old our friend’s son is because she remembers where she was on her motherhood path when our friend was pregnant. I don’t have that marker and so I have to try to fill in the gaps with other events, or news headlines to mark time in my memory. But unless something significant happened, I don’t have those milestones to grasp onto.

Without children to mark time and propel my life forward, I can see how easy it could be to drift through the years. Children create milestones and new direction and, while I’m not in any danger of falling into a rut yet, I can see how easily my life could lose direction.

Maybe I’ve just hit by a patch of melancholy again, so does anyone else see this? Do any of you feel as if your life is drifting by?

Whiny Wednesday: The Dreaded OB/GYN Office


As I settle into the New Year, I’m thinking about my upcoming (and some overdue) health check-ups—teeth, eyes, and, of course, the annual visit to my OB/GYN. The latter prompted this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic:

OB/GYN office walls plastered with baby photos

Given that this is so often the first of many stops on the fertility trail, and given that so many of us don’t have children, but wanted them, doesn’t this seem a tad insensitive?

It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s under your skin this week?

The Importance of Asking for Help


“Ancora imparo. [I am still learning.]”

― Michelangelo, at age 87 in 1562

I am still learning. And thank goodness, too. If all I had to go on for the rest of my life was all I know now, I think I’d be in a lot of trouble down the road. That’s the beauty of age, experience, and wisdom, I suppose. It takes life experience to gain knowledge, and life experience only comes with checking off the years.

A couple of years ago, I learned an important lesson that I wish I’d learned much sooner. I learned to ask for help.

A while back, I was working through where I wanted to take this site, while trying to keep my freelance writing jobs going, and thinking about the novel I was supposed to be writing. I was trying to write blog posts, maintain the website, fix tech issues, run a workshop, and keep a marriage ticking along. Finally, I threw up my hands and said what equated to, “I can’t do this all by myself, so I’m not going to do any of it.” I really was ready to throw in the towel.

Fortunately I have a wise group of peers and an amazing mentor who talked me through my angst and convinced me to ask for help. I found an assistant to help with the blog and found a web designer to take care of the site properly. Their help freed me up to do the work I really wanted to do, which is writing posts and developing this community. What’s more, the other work got done quicker and better than if I’d struggled along as usual trying to figure it all out for myself.

The experience gave me pause and caused me to look back at my past and take a close look at myself. Turns out I have never been a person who asks for help. It’s not so much pride that stops me from asking, but more a sense of toughness. “I can do this on my own. I don’t need help.” Now I’m writing it here, it sounds an awful lot like stubbornness, but there you go.

I was also tough (or stubborn) when I was going through the grinder of infertility and later, when I was trying to figure out how to ever make peace with my situation. I never asked for help, even though I needed it. In part I believed it was pointless to ask for help because no one else could really understand what I was going through. I also didn’t want to upset people I knew and cared about, and I didn’t want to put myself in the position of comforting them.

In hindsight, I wish I’d asked for help. I wish I’d taking the chance of confiding in a friend. I wish I’d thought to look for a support group or hired the professional help of a therapist. I would have arrived at my place of peace a lot sooner than I did. But hindsight is 20/20 as they say, and I hadn’t yet learned the value of asking for help.

How about you? Have you asked for help? If so, where have you found it?

Whiny Wednesday: “Not having kids is selfish”

I love the Internet for the breadth and depth of information it provides, and for the opportunity to read so many varying opinions on one subject. But sometimes I just have to walk away.

Case in point, I was doing research for a post and came across the following comment on an article:

“I take care of my parents. My children will take care of me. You want to force my children to take care of you too, meanwhile you arrogantly and selfishly live a much richer life style. Frankly, every GINK I’ve met was an arrogant, self-righteous, elitist. You should apologize for not adding to the future of our race.”

So after I ranted to myself about not expecting anyone else’s kids to take care of me, how our race of almost 7 billion people doesn’t need much adding to, and how narrow-minded this woman was to tar us all with the same “arrogant, self-righteous, elitist” brush, I stomped off and took a long, hot shower.

This woman was clearly on a mission (she posted about half a dozen comments to the same article) and I can’t believe I let her anger get under my skin.

It’s Whiny Wednesday. What’s under your skin today?

This Year, Aim for Progress Rather Than Perfection

Well, here we are in 2018, and I think it’s safe to say that most of us are ready to see the back of last year. Between political craziness, the loss of too many creative icons, and a general feeling of uneasiness in the world, I’m ready for a fresh start.

I do love the New Year for the potential it brings in terms of a clean slate and the chance to make big changes. And yet, in the past, I’ve ended up putting pressure on myself to fix all the things that are wrong with me. My goals have included losing weight, exercising more, doing a better job of keeping in touch with people, and on and on—a long list of things I’m doing wrong.

But a couple of years ago, I started to change my outlook. Instead of treating myself like something broken that needed fixing, I began looking for my potential and making progress with the things I’m doing right. I wrote a post about it a while back, Looking for Potential. Do take a look as I think you’ll find it a kinder, gentler way of approaching the New Year.

So, as we go into this year, I want to encourage you to be kind to yourself, too. Instead of trying to fix a laundry list of shortcomings, perhaps you could look for where you’ve made progress over the last year and focus your energy there.

For example, let’s say you have a friend who you’ve avoided because her children are the same ages yours would have been and you can’t bear to see her. Maybe you ran into her last year and realized you’ve missed her company. Could you set a goal to reach out to her, give her a call or send a quick email note, maybe broach the topic of getting together?

Or perhaps you’ve been reading this blog for a while or working your way through my, or someone else’s, book and you’ve hit a spot where you feel stuck. Maybe a goal would be to find a therapist, counsellor, or support group and get some additional help.

This healing process takes time. Oh, man, does it take time! But progress is made by inching forward a little at a time. So, don’t try to take giant steps forward. Instead, be kind to yourself and take the tiniest, most doable step possible, something you can actually accomplish and feel good about.

How could you inch forward on your journey this year? What’s the smallest, no-sweat step you could take? Let us know in the comments, and if you need a little encouragement to take it, just ask.

For now, I wish for you a genuinely happy new year.