Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

Letting Go of the Life You Wanted

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;

we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

~ Anatole France

I saw this quote in a book about writing, but it struck a chord with me. It relates to so many things in life, including making peace with a life with out children.

One of the hardest stretches of my journey was the space between realizing that our options for building a family were running out, and the point where we made the decision to stop trying. I knew there were options still open, but they were beyond the scope of what Mr. Fab and I were willing to do. At some point we had to make a decision that we would not have children and that we would find a way to be okay with that. It was one of the hardest (and perhaps longest) decisions I’ve ever had to make.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in this kind of situation in other areas of life, too. You know that you have to take a new direction, that ultimately it will be the right decision, but as France says, in order to do that, we have to leave a part of ourselves behind. Sometime the hardest part is listening to ourselves and not being afraid to make the wrong choice.

My first career was in engineering. I’ve made several career changes since then, trying to find the place in the world where I’d be happy. I’ve found it in writing, but it took me a long time to get here.

Many people can’t understand why, after all those years of college and graduate school, I would abandon a perfectly good and respectable career. I’ll be the first to admit that if I’d just stuck to engineering, I would probably have been more “successful” and definitely would be making more money, maybe own a home and live comfortably, but I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I might have been successful by the conventional definition, but the cost of sticking to a career that didn’t make me happy, just because it’s what was expected of me, didn’t make any sense. But it wasn’t easy to let go of that life and take a risk of finding happiness in another life.

Part of finding happiness is letting go of that which doesn’t make us happy. Although I believed that having children would make me happy, I was miserably unhappy running in circles trying to produce a baby that my body had no interest in creating. I could have gone on trying forever, but the cost to my mental and physical wellbeing would have been enormous. Letting go of that part of my life enabled me to find peace with my new life, even if it’s a life I wasn’t sure I wanted.

What Do You Wish You’d Known About Life Without Children?

I try not to drag regrets around with me. It doesn’t help to dwell on how things might have turned out differently when it’s too late to do anything about it. But sometimes, there are things I wish I’d known before I’d hung my heart on the idea of having children.

I wish I’d know how common fertility issues are.

I wish I’d known what questions to ask at the very start of our journey.

I wish I’d known where to find real support.

I wish I’d known how valuable that support, once I found it, would be.

I wish I’d had a wise mentor to help me see logic when my poor emotionally-addled brain couldn’t make sense of anything.

I wish we had talked more about how long we’d try, how far we’d go, and what we would do if it didn’t happen for us.

And I wish I’d known that we would be okay as a family of two.

What do you wish you’d known before the start of your journey?

Letting Go of the Life You Wanted

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;

we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

~ Anatole France

I saw this quote in a book about writing, but it struck a chord with me. It relates to so many things in life, including making peace with a life with out children.

One of the hardest stretches of my journey was the space between realizing that our options for building a family were running out, and the point where we made the decision to stop trying. I knew there were options still open, but they were beyond the scope of what Mr. Fab and I were willing to do. At some point we had to make a decision that we would not have children and that we would find a way to be okay with that. It was one of the hardest (and perhaps longest) decisions I’ve ever had to make.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in this kind of situation in other areas of life, too. You know that you have to take a new direction, that ultimately it will be the right decision, but as France says, in order to do that, we have to leave a part of ourselves behind. Sometime the hardest part is listening to ourselves and not being afraid to make the wrong choice.

My first career was in engineering. I’ve made several career changes since then, trying to find the place in the world where I’d be happy. I’ve found it in writing, but it took me a long time to get here.

Many people can’t understand why, after all those years of college and graduate school, I would abandon a perfectly good and respectable career. I’ll be the first to admit that if I’d just stuck to engineering, I would probably have been more “successful” and definitely would be making more money, maybe own a home and live comfortably, but I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I might have been successful by the conventional definition, but the cost of sticking to a career that didn’t make me happy, just because it’s what was expected of me, didn’t make any sense. But it wasn’t easy to let go of that life and take a risk of finding happiness in another life.

Part of finding happiness is letting go of that which doesn’t make us happy. Although I believed that having children would make me happy, I was miserably unhappy running in circles trying to produce a baby that my body had no interest in creating. I could have gone on trying forever, but the cost to my mental and physical wellbeing would have been enormous. Letting go of that part of my life enabled me to find peace with my new life, even if it’s a life I wasn’t sure I wanted.

It Got Me Thinking…About Beloved Books

There’s one shelf in my office where I keep my most favorite books, the ones that touched my heart and sparked my imagination, the ones I’d saved because I knew I’d want to read them again some day.

In January I pulled them all out, thinking this would be a good year to revisit them. While I eagerly anticipated re-reading brilliant novels, genre-challenging classics, and inspiring biographies, there was one category that pinched an especially sensitive nerve: the beloved books from my childhood.

Charlotte’s Web, the Little House in the Prairie series, the adventures of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, all the Harry Potter books. I had saved those books, moved them from apartment to apartment, with the intention—and the hopes—of one day reading them to and with my own children. Alas….

Offers of some to nieces and nephews were declined, typically because they had already outgrown the stories. I had to think hard about what I was going to do with these treasures of mine.

Read them. Ah-hah. That’s what I chose to do. Read them to myself, for myself. And so I dug in.

At this point I still have the Mark Twain books in my to read stack, but all the others have been enjoyed, devoured, and—to my surprise—released. I discovered I needed to love them one last time before I could consider where they might go next.

A couple of those books have been gifted to the daughters of a friend (which made me so happy to do). Others will be donated to the library, where I trust they will thrill some young reader. None of them are going back on my shelf.

I just caught my breath. A year ago I could not have imagined saying that I had, without an emotional breakdown, let them go.

This got me thinking about the whole grieving process. Over the years of wrestling with my losses, I have come to believe that in order to fully let go and move on, I must first acknowledge my grief, then dance openly with it, then bless it and allow it to move out of my heart. Easy? Heck no. Necessary? I think so.

There are so many items we hold dear that represent what we wanted, and what we’ve lost. What is it for you? A family heirloom, hand-me-down baby clothes, the baseball glove/dance shoes/board games saved from your own childhood? Are you ready to open up your hope chest, pull out your treasures, and perhaps let them go? A perfectly fine answer is “No.” But when the time comes that you are ready, know that many of us here at Life Without Baby have been through the process, and we came out intact.

Good luck. And please be gentle with yourself.

What Accepting Childlessness Means to Me

Guest Post, by Jane P (UK)

I first had a desire to accept—to let go of my plans for motherhood—when marriage issues and signs of depression followed six failed IVF cycles. My husband could not continue fertility treatment and I could not stop. I would not contemplate accepting infertility, as it meant a life without baby. After 17 years of marriage, the word “divorce” came up.

I asked my husband to help me accept.  He agreed to come to a counselling session with me at our local GP. There, the Counsellor asked, “What would a world look like to you if you could accept?” A simple question and my response was along these lines:

The bickering and arguments would stop. We would laugh again, we would plan again—not just plan, but look forward to things. (I felt that I had been going through the motions of life.)  I wouldn’t feel pain or anger every time I walked through the town or in the office, turned on the TV or heard a casual baby/child related comment from colleagues, friends. (Everything was a trigger. Every minute of every day I was consumed with a massive sadness that wouldn’t shift. I countered this thought for years with, “Next time we try it will be different.” It never was.)

So, I was left thinking about my reply to the question from the Counsellor. I needed to accept so that I could stop feeling the pain, I would stop arguing with my husband.  We would feel love again, enjoy life again…

I started to seek help. This came from LWB and through continuing to speak to the Counsellor. We found a way back to each other and through a final IVF treatment with donor eggs that ended with emergency surgery for an ectopic pregnancy. For the first two years I was tormented with wanting to try again, wanting to stop, but I’d promised myself and my husband that this was the end of the line.

Four years on, we stopped pursuing any more treatment.  I am now officially too old at 50!  So, why do I still wake up frequently and stare at the ceiling every day before forcing myself out of bed? Still ask the same questions, still feel the same sadness at the “motherhood” and baby conversations I overhear, still want to run away when a colleague makes an announcement, or leave my desk before her presentation on leaving day?

Initially, I thought acceptance would mean no more pain, looking forward to life again. Well, my marriage is back on track. I definitely look forward to things and plan fun events and holidays.  I seek to relish every day in small ways—my latte treat at 11:00, having my hair done, buying a new lipstick here and there.

The triggers are still there, though. They don’t have me running away anymore, and I counter the feelings with acknowledging the loss and rationalising that motherhood is full of difficult days as well as joyous ones. But, I still feel the pain, and recently I wondered if I have truly accepted.

The word “acceptance” conjures up a feeling that “it’s OK that I didn’t get to experience motherhood and hold my baby”.  But it’s not OK. You can’t stop the pain and it’s unrealistic to not feel the loss in some way.

So, maybe I don’t have to completely accept. Perhaps this is now what acceptance means to me:

Allowing myself to live again, letting in joy, loving my husband.  Not expecting to not feel sadness when I see pregnant women, small babies or toddlers. 

It means, loving myself, valuing myself, grabbing the life I have and enjoying it again with as much passion as possible!  

What does acceptance mean to you?

 

Note from Lisa:

Jane P (UK) has been a long-time member of the Life Without Baby community. We really appreciate her writing this heartfelt guest post.

What Do You Wish You’d Known About Life Without Children?

By Lisa Manterfield

I try not to drag regrets around with me. It doesn’t help to dwell on how things might have turned out differently when it’s too late to do anything about it. But sometimes, there are things I wish I’d known before I’d hung my heart on the idea of having children.

I wish I’d know how common fertility issues are.

I wish I’d known what questions to ask at the very start of our journey.

I wish I’d known where to find real support.

I wish I’d known how valuable that support, once I found it, would be.

I wish I’d had a wise mentor to help me see logic when my poor emotionally-addled brain couldn’t make sense of anything.

I wish we had talked more about how long we’d try, how far we’d go, and what we would do if it didn’t happen for us.

And I wish I’d known that we would be okay as a family of two.

What do you wish you’d known before the start of your journey?

Letting Go of the Life You Wanted

“All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy, for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves;

we must die to one life before we can enter another.”

~ Anatole France

I saw this quote in a book about writing, but it struck a chord with me. It relates to so many things in life, including making peace with a life with out children.

One of the hardest stretches of my journey was the space between realizing that our options for building a family were running out, and the point where we made the decision to stop trying. I knew there were options still open, but they were beyond the scope of what Mr. Fab and I were willing to do. At some point we had to make a decision that we would not have children and that we would find a way to be okay with that. It was one of the hardest (and perhaps longest) decisions I’ve ever had to make.

I’m sure you’ve found yourself in this kind of situation in other areas of life, too. You know that you have to take a new direction, that ultimately it will be the right decision, but as France says, in order to do that, we have to leave a part of ourselves behind. Sometime the hardest part is listening to ourselves and not being afraid to make the wrong choice.

My first career was in engineering. I’ve made several career changes since then, trying to find the place in the world where I’d be happy. I’ve found it in writing, but it took me a long time to get here.

Many people can’t understand why, after all those years of college and graduate school, I would abandon a perfectly good and respectable career. I’ll be the first to admit that if I’d just stuck to engineering, I would probably have been more “successful” and definitely would be making more money, maybe own a home and live comfortably, but I know I wouldn’t have been happy. I might have been successful by the conventional definition, but the cost of sticking to a career that didn’t make me happy, just because it’s what was expected of me, didn’t make any sense. But it wasn’t easy to let go of that life and take a risk of finding happiness in another life.

Part of finding happiness is letting go of that which doesn’t make us happy. Although I believed that having children would make me happy, I was miserably unhappy running in circles trying to produce a baby that my body had no interest in creating. I could have gone on trying forever, but the cost to my mental and physical wellbeing would have been enormous. Letting go of that part of my life enabled me to find peace with my new life, even if it’s a life I wasn’t sure I wanted.

 

What Do You Wish You’d Known About Life Without Children?

By Lisa Manterfield

I try not to drag regrets around with me. It doesn’t help to dwell on how things might have turned out differently when it’s too late to do anything about it. But sometimes, there are things I wish I’d known before I’d hung my heart on the idea of having children.

I wish I’d know how common fertility issues are.

I wish I’d known what questions to ask at the very start of our journey.

I wish I’d known where to find real support.

I wish I’d known how valuable that support, once I found it, would be.

I wish I’d had a wise mentor to help me see logic when my poor emotionally-addled brain couldn’t make sense of anything.

I wish we had talked more about how long we’d try, how far we’d go, and what we would do if it didn’t happen for us.

And I wish I’d known that we would be okay as a family of two.

What do you wish you’d known before the start of your journey?

Decluttering Baby Stuff

releaseIn her blog Baptism By Fire, Wolfers wrote a wonderful post about our emotional attachment to clutter, and how she wasn’t yet ready to let go of her baby-related items.

It’s been a couple of years already since I reached the point of being ready to let go of my baby clutter, so I was surprised by the emotions that stirred up when I read her post.

As I never actually became pregnant, I accumulated only a few baby items. It took me several years before I had the courage to say goodbye to them, but when I did let them go, it was sad, but not difficult. I was ready.

The things that brought on the strongest wave of emotions were all the books I’d bought over the years as I’d tried to uncover the magic formula to my fertility. I had books on Chinese medicine, diet, mindfulness, you name it, and I can remember feeling so angry when I put them in the donation box. I felt as if I’d been taken for a ride by these authors who had promised me a miracle. I felt duped and cheated—and really, really mad.

They’re out of my life now and largely out of my mind, but even though they’re gone, they’ve still left a mark where they used to be. And sometimes that mark gets sore again.

What have you held onto and what have you been able to let go?

Fertility Planit Show Report

Fertility PlanitLast weekend, I was at the Fertility Planit Show, speaking on a panel about Letting Go. I wrote about my trepidation in a post last month and so many of you were incredibly supportive that I thought I ought to report in on my experience.

As anticipated, it was very strange for me to be at the show. I walked around the exhibition hall glancing sideways at the booths for everything from adoption agencies to cryogenic storage facilities to banks offering IVF loans. I spotted a few organizations whose paths I’d crossed on my own journey, including one of my former doctors, who apparently had no recognition of me (probably because he’d spent little time looking at my face, if you know what I mean.) I’ll admit that my pulse quickened and my chest tightened as I walked around. I didn’t feel any pull to get back into the fertility game or any tempting new possibilities, but I could feel some of those old, anxious, emotions creeping back in.

The panel itself was great. About 50-100 people sat in the room and I’m told another 22,000 watched online! Attendees asked lots of questions and I was glad I had answers to many of them.

The hardest part for me was looking out at people in the audience who I knew were coming to the end of their infertility ropes. I could feel they were in so much pain and it was incredibly courageous of them to come and listen to this panel on a topic I know they didn’t really want to face. Part of me wanted to climb down off the stage and just hug them and the other part wanted to kick the world in the kneecaps and scream that these perfectly nice people didn’t deserve this. But I didn’t do either of those things. I sat on the stage, told my story, and answered as many questions as I could.

The upshot of the whole experience is that I’m very glad I accepted the invitation to speak. It was ultimately very rewarding to speak from a place of peace and healing.

As an added bonus, I got to meet two incredible women, Melanie Notkin and Tracy Cleantis, who I’ve known for some time through the blogosphere. I also made connections with some wonderfully compassionate therapists, who specialize in this area. More about this aspect coming soon.

The show is coming back to LA next year and you can bet I’m adding plenty of suggestions to my speaker survey of more ways to bring this crucial topic out into the open.

If you’d like to see the panel discussion, it’s available to download on the Fertility Planit site or you can view below.

Video streaming by Ustream

Thank you all again for being so supportive and encouraging on this new step in my journey.

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