filling the silence in the motherhood discussion
I am on information overload. Between my email, my phone, the Internet, the news, the constant chatter, chatter, chatter of 21st century life, I feel as if my head is going to explode.
Oh, how I would love to unplug and sit in silence for a week. But the truth is, I don’t know if I could do it.
It’s Whiny Wednesday. What would love to unplug from for a week?
It’s Valentine’s Week (because no commercially-driven holiday ever lasts for just a day anymore) and my inner Cranky Old Lady and I are having words again. As you can probably tell just from my opening sentence, she is already getting the better of me.
My Cranky Old Lady doesn’t like Valentine’s Day. It’s too commercialized, too many expectations on people to impress and throw around good money on overpriced roses and dinners. It snubs people who don’t have a special Valentine in their lives, and it points a rude finger at their singledom. What’s more, it’s yet another holiday, originally intended for adult lovers, that’s been hijacked by kids and their cute “I love you Mommy” Valentine’s cards. Nope, my inner Cranky Old Lady abhors Valentine’s Day.
But I kinda like it. Oh, yes, it’s all those things my Cranky Old Lady says it is, but I don’t want to hate it. My Cranky Old Lady has taken over too many holidays from me over the past years and I’m ready to take them back.
In her defense, I know she did me a favor by keeping me away from the Hallmark holidays and protecting my tender interior. She talked me out of Halloween, Christmas, even July 4th, to keep me from the hurt I was feeling about not having children for those holidays. She did the right thing by me, and I appreciate that, but I’m ready to come out and play again.
Part of the silver lining of not having children is that I’m not bound to anyone else’s expectations of how holidays should be celebrated. If I want to celebrate Valentine’s Day, I can. If I don’t want to, I don’t have to. And this year I choose to lock up my Cranky Old Lady and embrace the silliness and blatant commercialism of the day. Who knows, I might even break my Crank Old Lady rule and wear something red!
Do you have an inner Cranky Old Lady? When do you let her out and when do you put up a fight?
If you’re a Twitter user, you’ll probably know about Follow Friday. Follow Friday is a chance to give a shout out to tweeps you follow and spread the word about what others are doing.
I always seem to forget about Follow Friday, so this week I thought I’d bring it to the blog and share the happenings of some of my fellow bloggies.
On The Road Less Travelled, loribeth hits on a topic I’ve been trying to articulate lately—the obsession we have with the life we didn’t get to live and how easily that story can come to define us.
Jody Day at Gateway Women is taking that same topic and shaking it up with her upcoming book, “Rocking the Life Unexpected: 12-Weeks to Your Plan for a Meaningful & Fulfilling Life without Children.” She’s crowd funding to get the book published, so if you’d like to help her, you can find out more here.
Over at Silent Sorority, Pamela is celebrating her six-year Blogaversary and reminiscing about the Bad Old Days when the blogosphere was all but silent on the topic of living childfree after infertility.
La Belette Rouge has a word or two to say, most eloquently, on the topic of bitterness.
And at No Kidding in NZ, Mali makes a case that not having kids keeps you young.
Please check out these blogs, if you haven’t already. And in case you are a Twitterer, you can find Life Without Baby tweeting and twittering at @lifewithoutbaby.
By Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle
Je m’appelle Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle et je suis une femme infertile de 36 ans. Je réside au Québec, province du Canada à majorité francophone.
Depuis quelques mois, j’ai entrepris une démarche personnelle de deuil dans le but d’accepter mon infertilité.
Si vous êtes un jour confronté comme moi à l’impossibilité d’avoir des enfants de manière naturelle, vous constaterez qu’il existe à ce jour très peu de ressources littéraires et virtuelles en français. Sans compter la quasi absence de groupes de soutien.
Heureusement, quelques cliniques de fertilité québécoises offrent de l’aide psychologique afin de soutenir leur patientes et patients. Qu’en est-il ailleurs dans le monde ?
Donc, à qui peuvent s’adresser les femmes ayant décidé simplement de tirer un trait sur la maternité pour diverses raisons ( médicales ou personnelles).
Comment ces femmes peuvent-elles arriver à faire le deuil de la maternité sans être isolées? Comment peuvent –elles échanger avec d’autres femmes vivant la même situation ? Et que dire des hommes ?
Voilà pourquoi j’ai créé un blog en français pour partager avec vous les ressources, livres, sites, groupes d’entraide, interviews que j’ai pu trouver sur la toile pour m’aider dans ma démarche.
J’espère que ces ressources serviront à aider d’autres personnes désireuses d’arriver à vivre une existence satisfaisante sans enfant.
Au plaisir d’échanger avec vous!
Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle
My name is Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle. I’m a 36 year-old infertile woman and I live in Quebec, a province of Canada where the majority of the population speaks French.
A couple of months ago, I decided to undertake a process of grieving to accept my infertility.
If, like me, you have to face your own infertility, you will soon discover that there are very few resources (books or web sites) in French. Support groups addressing these issues are also very rare, especially away from the big cities.
Thankfully, in Quebec, a few fertility clinics offer psychological support to their patients. But what about the situation in the rest of the world?
Where can women who decide to come to terms with their absence of maternity (for medical or personal reasons) turn to?
How is it possible to accept your infertility when you feel so different and isolated form other women? How is it possible to exchange thoughts and information with other women who feel the same as you do? And what about the situation for men facing infertility?
That is why I decided to create a French blog to share the resources, the books , the web sites, the support groups, and the interviews that I have found on the net or elsewhere.
I hope that this information will help other people like me who want to learn how to live a great life without having kids.
Catherine-Emmanuelle Delisle lives in the region of Montréal in Québec, Canada. She shares her stories and resources at “Être femme sans enfant.”
I’ve been on a Facebook vacation since the beginning of the year. There were a number of factors that played into my decision, including the amount of mindless time I was frittering away, a sudden surge in baby news, and an alarming surge in banal twaddle from people I wasn’t interested in hearing about.
I also realized that I was walking around talking to myself in third person status updates: Lisa Manterfield is doing dishes and wondering why she moved into a house with no a dishwasher. Lisa Manterfield is in a bad mood today and wishes today was Whiny Wednesday.
I don’t know when I’ll be back from my FB vacation, but I can’t say I’m missing it at all.
As it turns out, it IS Whiny Wednesday. What do you wish you could take a vacation from this week?
Last week I wrote about learning to ask for help and I’ve been thinking a lot about that topic since. Why is it so difficult for so many of us to ask for help?
Mali made a great point in her comment:
“I used to think asking for help was a weakness. Now I realize that asking for help is often the hardest thing, and requires real strength and honesty and courage.”
It does take a lot of courage to ask for help, especially from people we care about or who know us as strong, independent women. I also think that often we know we need help, we just have no idea what we need and who to ask for it.
When I need help, I’m fortunate enough to have some true friends and understanding family members I can turn to. My friend C is a wizard at research. If I need informational support, I go to her. My friend K is an ace networker, so if I need to find someone who’s shared my experience, she would know someone who knows someone. If I need someone to be pragmatic, I call M. If I need someone to call me out on my BS, I plan lunch with SC. If I need a friend who’ll say nothing, but just give me a hug, J or C will do that, and if I need someone to commiserate on the injustices of life, SR is my go-to girl.
Mr. Fab is a fixer. If I tell him a problem, he’ll instantly go to work on a solution. But sometimes it’s not what I need. Sometimes I just want to talk and know that someone has heard me. Sometimes I just want someone to listen and say. “Aw, that sucks!”
For several years I would ask him for help and then get frustrated when he didn’t offer the kind of help I really wanted. Finally, I figured out that I needed to be specific. “I don’t need you to fix this; I just need to talk about it,” I told him. Even as I saw him register my request, I could sense that not trying to fix my problem went against his instinct. But when he saw that simply listening helped me to talk my way to my own solution, we both ended up getting what we needed.
Now, when I need to ask for someone’s help, I also try to be specific about exactly the kind of help I need, whether that’s feedback, a solution, or just someone to hand me Kleenex while I pour my heart out.
What have you learned about asking for help?
Finding support and learning to ask for help are just two of the topics covered in the new Road Map to Healing course. I’m sharing a little love right now and offering this course at a special “new program” rate until Valentine’s Day. If you’re looking for help in coming-to-terms with a “life without baby,” please consider joining me.
Last week I wrote about learning to ask for help and several of you commented that you’d had the good sense to seek professional help when you needed it.
One of the things I’m aiming to do on this site is to provide information about resources and support, and this is where I need your help.
On the Learn page you’ll see a section call Therapist Directory. You’ll also see a big blank space and “Coming Soon!” I need your help filling in those blanks.
Have you worked with a therapist or counselor who really understood the special issues of dealing with unplanned childlessness or infertility?
Do you know of support groups in your area that help women come-to-terms with being unable to have children?
Do you have a resource for grief support?
If you have kind of resource that might benefit others, please share it here. You can add it to the comments on this post, or if you’d prefer, you can contact me privately through the Contact page.
When you’re facing a life without children, sometimes it’s impossible to know where to turn. We can all help one another by sharing whatever resources we find.
By The One Hand Man
Let me preface this post by stating that thousands of men are affected by infertility, in a variety of ways. I am a true believer in laughter being the best medicine, and whilst I do not dismiss my fertility issues as being unimportant, I have come to terms with it, and accepted it for what it is. It has never been healthy to take things too seriously.
I suspect many men will share this view, so don’t pity us or feel sorry for us, support us by laughing along, and sharing this with others – It’s okay, you have my permission.
This top ten list was put together in its entirety with little or no research, it is a by-product of my imagination, with a dash of experience thrown in to explain the big words; I am not arrogant enough to tell you the biggest causes of male infertility, so don’t tell me I am wrong – do your own list.
10 – Exposure to radiation. This one is a double-edged sword. Fellas who have been exposed to radiation treatment have been so, probably to combat cancer. This of course, is not the case for Radiation Man from Superman 4. He may well be able to fly and shoot fire from his eyes. But that is the only shooting he will be doing. That might be why he is so angry, his ill-fated sperm are so illuminated by radiation poisoning, it looks like superman has put some glow sticks down his pants.
9 – Stress. The irony is not lost on me here. The stress of not being able to get your wife pregnant is the very cause of it. It’s okay though, some cretin will tell you to ‘just try and relax’ Thanks Captain Obvious, very helpful.
8 – Alcohol. Now I just don’t believe this. All those teenage pregnancies across the western world didn’t happen because their PlayStation broke. The horny little oiks got liquored up and pounced on the nearest willing participant. Cynical and bitter I may be, but tell me I am wrong.
7 – Cigarettes. Sperm motility and morphology are affected by smoking apparently, this means they are slow and ugly. Your little sperm may think they are looking cool, but just remember, half way up the urethra; they have to stop for a breather.
6 – Fat. If you are a bit tubby, tread carefully – obesity can have an effect on your hormones, so if you find yourself crying at Love Actually, like I do, get yourself down the clinic….. oh…..
Half way through the list now and you can see that a healthy lifestyle is key here, so if you are a fat alcoholic, who smokes 40 a day, you may as well just cut your sack off.
5 – Very frequent intercourse. Your guess is as good as mine as to what this means, but if you can find the time to do it 18 times a day, I say, go for it.
4 – Laptops. Proof that technology is moving forward at a pace that our own testicles cannot cope with. Experts will tell you it is the heat from the laptop radiating your bits, but I think it is that your junk simply cannot put up with you using the laptop to scour the internet for grot – here we go again boys.
3 – Too much exercise. Again, certain hormones get over stimulated with excessive intense exercise. When the doctor asked me if I exercised too much, he was met with barrel laughter from both my wife and myself.
2 – Trauma. I cannot remember a specific time my brother kicked me in the nuts, so the finger of blame cannot be pointed at him. I have played plenty of sports during my childhood though – just think: one unfortunate ball in the groin may have your mates bent double in laughter, but you could well pay for it later.
1 – Bad Luck. Yes this is a cop out; topping my list is that of lady luck, but I believe it to be true. Whether you believe in fate or not, I am convinced that pure fortune has played its part in my fertility. I may sound bitter and twisted at times, but I can assure you I am not. I have many things to be grateful for, and if infertility is the challenge I have to face throughout my life, I know the hand I have been dealt, is without doubt, a winning one.
I would implore any men having fertility problems to do whatever you can to improve your fertility; if you smoke – stop, if you are fat, try losing a bit of timber, cut down on the booze and definitely don’t get kicked in the balls, but don’t, under any circumstances, let infertility consume you, I am pretty sure that is not what we are here for.
The One Hand Man: Married in 07, sperm test in 08, IVF in 09, another sperm test in 10, adoption started in 11 – still going through the adoption process. Not had any recent sperm tests. Read more at: www.theonehandman.co.uk
My whine today is that I wish I’d chosen to blog under a pseudonym so that I could really whine about the people in my life who are just pissing me off today. As it is, I can’t be certain that they aren’t reading this blog (and just in case, you know who you are!) and I don’t especially want to start a feud, so I’m going to suck it up and keep my mouth shut.
So, dear readers, I’m counting on you to whine on my behalf today.
By Kathleen Guthrie Woods
Martha Beck is a therapist, life coach, best-selling author, and columnist for Oprah’s O magazine. Every month she offers real advice for addressing prickly issues, and frequently it feels like she’s been observing my life for material.
In an article titled “Off the Beating Path” (February 2013), she writes about how to “draw up a whole new road map” when you’ve experienced a bumpy ride. Not just those gentle speed bumps (what we can “speed humps” in San Francisco), but bone-jarring, axle-cracking, questioning-why-you-would-continue “rumble strips.” Although the subjects whose stories she shares differ, I felt like she was writing to us: women who had beautiful plans for our lives, plan that were crushed by disappointment and heart-break, who are trying to figure out how to continue with some element of grace.
I don’t want to paraphrase the article because she is so much more articulate than I am, so I encourage you to pick up a copy at the market or newsstand or read it online here. What she does is give examples from her own and clients’ lives, share steps for navigating rumble strips, and offer perspective on how these experience may actually benefit us in the long run. Her advice isn’t sugar-coated, it isn’t simplistic. The line that most resonates with me reads “I wasn’t trying to minimize Dorothy’s pain or plaster a creepy happy face over her legitimate sorrow. I only wanted her to alter her beliefs enough to catch a glimpse of a different road.” Yes! Even as I continue to struggle with coming to terms with my challenges, I can open my mind to that possibility.
Martha Beck has children, so I can’t call her a chero (a hero who is childfree), but I do think she understands who we are and what we’re going through. It’s because of her compassion, her wisdom, and her willingness to share so that we all can thrive that I think she rocks.
Kathleen Guthrie Woods is a Northern California–based freelance writer. She is mostly at peace with her childfree status.
~ "a raw, transparent account of the gut-wrenching journey of infertility."
~ "a welcome sanity check for women left to wonder how society became so fixated on motherhood."
