Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Childless-Not-by-Choice Awareness

You may have noticed a new ribbon in the sidebar of the site today. It’s the new Childless-Not-by-Choice Awareness ribbon, and I am proud to share it.

The ribbon is the brainchild of Brandi from Not So Mommy. Her goal in creating the ribbon is to raise awareness about our community and to reduce the stigma surrounding childlessness. You can read more about her mission in her post today, and about how she came to choose olive green for the ribbon.

As I told Brandi, as long as the childless-not-by-choice community remains in the shadows, we cannot begin to have conversations around the issues we face. Awareness is an important first step towards education, acceptance, and healing.

But how do we create awareness when we’re in the midst of our own grieving?

If you’ve been reading this blog or my books, you’ll know I’m a big proponent of taking care of yourself first and working through your own grief before venturing into the tricky territory of trying to educate others. But Brandi and I, and many others, are now at a point where we can talk about our childlessness and losses without having a meltdown. If you’re at, or getting to, that stage, how might you start to raise awareness?

Despite writing openly about infertility for the past decade, I’m actually quite a private person, definitely an introvert. It’s not in my nature to wear pins or t-shirts that encourage questions, or to march for awareness. My personal awareness campaign happens one person at a time. Now I’m past my grieving stage, I can:

  • Talk to people about the losses of childlessness
  • Educate them about what it really takes to “just” do IVF or “just” adopt
  • Encourage empathy and understanding to help others who are grieving
  • Keep writing about my experience and sharing it with the world.

What about you? How can you contribute to the awareness of our community in a way that feels right for you? I’d love to hear your ideas.

Whiny Wednesday: Mother’s Day Part I

A big thank you to Jane for reminding me that this Sunday is Mother’s Day in the UK.

I always do a Mother’s Day post in May in preparation for the event here in the U.S., but of course, that’s too little too late for UK readers.

So, this week’s topic Mother’s Day, Part I. If you’re getting ready for the coming weekend’s challenges, feel free to reach out here. What are you dreading? How are planning to deal with the day?

If you need some tips, here are a couple of posts that might be useful:

Preparing for Mother’s Day

Bah Humbug to Mother’s Day, but Not to Mother

The Mother’s Day Card I Wish Existed

For everyone else, it’s open forum today.

When Spring Cleaning Unearths Memories

Spring has almost sprung and, as usual, I find myself in a cleaning and decluttering frenzy.

I’ve made trips to the thrift store with bags of clothes that are too big, too small, or just plain ugly. I’ve purged my kitchen of all those “good idea” gadgets, rusted cake pans, and broken plates that I’ll get around to gluing “someday.” I’ve even parted with a box full of books, which is a big give-up for me. And I’ve been eyeing the curtains in my living room and thinking about throwing them in the washer.

I go through this every year and find it very therapeutic. But in the past, it’s also been a dangerous pursuit, fraught with emotional landmines.

One year, while rummaging through a rarely used cupboard, I came across some baby-related stuff. I’d been getting rid of all those things bit-by-bit, and I was fairly sure they were all gone. So it was a deflating moment when I unearthed some items that had slipped through the net.

This find was particularly difficult, as it was the glossy information packet we received from our first fertility clinic. It had a picture of a beautiful glowing baby on the front and was filled with encouraging stories, happy family photos, and explanations as to how the expert team would help us build the family of our dreams. Inside I found test results, ovulation charts, and notes written in my own handwriting, reminding me of where I’d been. The whole thing reeked of hope and it stirred up some of those old emotions.

To my credit, I ditched the whole thing without getting upset. I didn’t keep one scrap of paper. There was another, similar item in the cupboard, too, but now I can’t even remember what it was, because I tossed that out as well.

After that, I went to my bookshelves and pulled out the Knitting for Two book I’d been keeping. In addition to the maternity cardigan I started (that was still somewhere in the house) I’d actually used the book to knit a sweater for a friend’s baby. I only did it once, because it was so painful, and I realized that it was part of the hair shirt I chose to wear for a while, when I was forcing myself to be around other people’s babies, and to be “genuinely happy” about pregnancy announcements. This was long before I figured out my need to grieve and heal, so that I could genuinely be happy for someone else’s news. At that time, I had opted to torture myself by knitting from my baby’s book. So out it went.

My purging of baby stuff was a gradual process. At first, I couldn’t get rid of anything. After a while I threw out the assorted test kits, and the doctor info, moving slowly towards throwing out baby clothes (and even a maternity top a friend had given me.) The fertility and pregnancy books went next, and so it continued.

I’ve no doubt that there will be other landmines scattered around my house, even now, and that they’ll come to the surface some day, but now I know I can handle them. And I know I can throw them away with no (or little) love lost.

Whiny Wednesday: Pressure to be Amazing


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!

What a Difference a Decade Makes

This month marks nine years since I wrote the first post for Life Without Baby. It will be a whole decade since I acknowledged that I would not be a mother by any means.

Ten years sounds like a really long time, doesn’t it? But I have passed so many milestones on the way to getting where I am now.

First there was the decision to get off the fertility crazy train. I passed that milestone several times, each time hopping back onboard for one more try. Eventually, I passed it for the last time. I cancelled my next doctor appointment and never went back.

I passed another milestone when I stopped envying/hating/coveting every pregnant belly I saw. I have since held other people’s babies, made it through Mother’s Days without tears, and gone shopping for baby shower gifts. Each was a significant milestone.

Eventually, after a number of years, I stopped being so sad about all I’d missed out on. I started building a new life and taking advantage of the benefits of not having children.

Ten years ago, I could never have imagined I’d look at my life, see how completely different it would have been with children, and feel satisfied that things worked out well after all. I hadn’t even known that milestone would be there until I passed it one day a couple of years ago.

None of this came easily. I went through dark periods of grief, of feeling angry and resentful. I’ve felt horribly lonely and alienated from people with “normal” lives. I’ve been in turns bitter, embarrassed, defiant, even vengeful about being infertile and childless. I’ve also felt relief and even slightly smug.

And after these ten years, I feel acceptance of my life that way it is, an understanding that when the motherhood door closed for me, others opened (although I sometimes didn’t see them at first.) I like my life just the way it is.

Maybe you can see yourself at one of these milestones. Maybe you’re making peace with the hand you’ve been dealt, maybe you’re moving on with a different kind of life, too.

If you see yourself all the way at the beginning of this post, wondering how on earth you’re ever going to be okay again, hang in there. You’re not alone. I, and many other readers on this site, are here to tell you that it does get better in time. Most likely, it will take longer than you ever imagined, but from my experience, the end result will also be better than you could have possibly foreseen.

***

The other surprise outcome of my infertility is that I have written books about it. That was never part of my plan either. (I had always hoped to write fiction someday, which I have, but writing about infertility was an unexpected and rewarding detour.)

I wrote about my infertility journey and my decision to stop trying to be a mother in my first book, I’m Taking My Eggs and Going Home: How One Woman Dared to Say No the Motherhood.  Then, after blogging my way through coming-to-terms with that decision and dealing with the loss, I wrote a guidebook to help other navigate their way. That book is Life Without Baby: Surviving and Thriving When Motherhood Doesn’t Happen.

And now I’d like to ask you a small favor. If you’ve read either of these books and found them helpful, would you take a minute and leave a review on your bookseller site of choice? It need only be a couple of sentences about what you liked (or what you didn’t, if that’s the case), but it will really help others looking for this sort of book, and of course, it would be a huge help to me. You can click on the links below and they’ll take you where you need to go.

AmazonKobo
Add to Goodreads

AmazonKobo
Add to Goodreads

Do You Ever Get Over Loss?

My friend Paula turned 50 this year. It’s been more than a decade since she and her husband realized it was time to accept that they wouldn’t have children. For ten years she’s been working through the mess—the grief, the anger, the sadness, the despair, the big, big question of “what am I am going to do now that I won’t be a mother?” And because her older brother was a confirmed bachelor, Paula also felt pressure from her parents to produce a grandchild, even though they never said it out loud.

But that was a long time ago. If you ask Paula now, she’ll tell you she’s “cured.” She’ll tell you that, most days, she doesn’t think about the fact that she’s childless. She and her husband travel, they have a broad circle of friends, she’s been able to hop on career opportunities that would have been difficult with small children. She enjoys her friends’ children and she enjoys handing them back to their parents. In her candid moments, she’ll say her life worked out better than she’d expected and might not have been so great if she’d had the children she once so desperately desired.

Life is pretty good for Paula.

And then her brother fell in love, married, and shortly thereafter announced he would become a father. Paula called me in tears. She was utterly blindsided by her tearful reaction.

“I thought I was over this,” she said. “I wouldn’t swap places with my brother for anything. A newborn at 53? Nightmare.”

She told me her parents were over the moon, that her mother was telling everyone that she was going to be a grandma. “At last,” she told people, giving Paula a meaningful look.

“At last?” Paula said to her father. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

And that’s when her dad opened up. He admitted how “difficult” all this waiting and longing had been for them. He’d felt left out too, he told her.

She understood, but his confession found its way deep inside Paula, to that one small dark spot that had yet to heal, and poured salt into all those old—and now reopened—wounds. The guilt and shame that consumed her in that moment was overwhelming, and the tremendous weight of that was part of what took her by surprise. Her brother had made her aging parents happy, had given them the thing she couldn’t. The family torch had been passed and it wouldn’t be to Paula.

When I talked to Paula again a couple of weeks later, she assured me that she was going to be okay. She said a part of her was looking forward to being an aunt and that her big grown-up self was happy for her brother and her parents.

“But,” she added, “people always ask how long it takes to get over not being a mother. I always thought seven or eight years was about right, but now I think maybe the answer is ‘never.’”

Whiny Wednesday: Caught Out by Grief


You’ve probably noticed that there are triggers all around—at the mall, in the mail, on TV, in the streets. So this week’s Whiny Wednesday topic is this:

Being caught in public by surprise feelings of loss or grief

 Whine away, my friends.

Why Childlessness Does Not Make Me Less of a Woman

Women having fun at Golden Gate Bridge

“I take pleasure in my transformations. I look quiet and consistent, but few know how many women there are in me.”

~Anaïs Nin

There’s an idea going around that not having children somehow makes us “less of a woman.” I don’t subscribe to this idea.

As this quote by author Anaïs Nin states, I am many, many women, and “mother” is only one element of me.

I am a writer, friend, wife, cat mama, reader, thinker, curser, fighter, nature-lover, spider catcher, traveler, cook, gardener, daughter.

All these women are fluid. They ebb and flow in me as needed. And when one of them isn’t able to fulfill her purpose, the others quickly rally to fill the gap, so I am always whole.

I am never less of a woman.

Whiny Wednesday: Everything Happens for a Reason

We could easily compile an entire encyclopedia of unhelpful, and even hurtful, things people have said to us. I think this one stings as much as any:

“Everything Happens for a Reason”

Do you agree? Or do you have your own favorite “helpful” slight?