Life Without Baby

filling the silence in the motherhood discussion

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?

Why Childlessness Does Not Make Me Less of a Woman

Women having fun at Golden Gate Bridge

By Lisa Manterfield

“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.

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.

It Got Me Thinking…About Working with (Other People’s) Kids

By Kathleen Guthrie Woods

In an interview I did recently, a woman shared with me what she went through when she faced 40, single and childfree. “I had to reassess my situation and consider the fact that perhaps it wasn’t in the cards for me to have a child after all,” she said. At the time, she decided to switch careers and return to school to get her teaching credential. “I figured, well, that would be my connection to children and the next generation, and I was okay with that.”

I’m here to tell you I had a physical reaction to her comment. I mean, bully for her, but I would so not have been okay with that trade-off. Even after years of healing, I still can’t imagine feeling “okay” spending my days with other people’s children while grieving for the children I could never have.

But as we know from reading the stories on this site, every woman has her own unique experience of grieving, and every woman has her own unique journey to healing. I think it’s remarkable that here, at Life Without Baby, we openly share our experiences and learn about options we hadn’t thought of for ourselves.

Join a Conversation

With that in mind, I took a tour around the Forum Discussions on our LWB Community page. Have you checked this out yet? What a remarkable source of information, inspiration, support, and compassion.

On this topic, you’ll find “Learning to be around children again” in which LWBers offer suggestions from volunteering in schools and instigating relationships with kids of friends. (One woman, a skilled figure skater, offered to teach her non-skating friend’s kids how to ice skate—love that!) In “You may think I’m crazy,” another woman shared how volunteering in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU), holding and comforting babies, helped comfort her through her grief.

On the flip side, a Discussion titled “No interest in volunteering…thoughts?” asked “Does anyone just NOT want kids in their life?” That’s a conversation you’ll want to visit if you are fed up with people who keep telling you you’ll feel better if you’ll just focus your energy on nurturing other people’s kids.

There’s no right or wrong way to go about your healing, only what feels right to you. And to help you on your journey, I encourage you to scroll through the Discussions and contribute your thoughts—and take in the love and advice from other commenters. If you don’t find a conversation that speaks to what you need, start one!

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

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. 

It Got Me Thinking…About Learning to Ask for What I Want

The adults in my family participate in a gift exchange for Christmas, so that instead of giving each person something small, I spend my modest budget on one nice item for just one person. We’ve been doing this for years, with success.

I noticed something this past year as I put together my wish list for my secret giver. My list included a hodgepodge of items: a cookbook, stationery, a gift card to a local running store. These are all things I would like, of course, but I realized that this particular list was less about what I really wanted and more about accommodating the possible giver. My sister-in-law, cook extraordinaire, would enjoy browsing Sur La Table when she shopped for the cookbook. My mom, the queen of social graces, would slip in sticks of sealing wax to go with a box of fine linen paper. My brother, Mr. Fitness, would be pumped to get me something that supported my goal to run a 5K later this year.

This reminded me of something Lisa said to me about how we need to get better about asking our friends and family for help. This is so important as we work through our phases of grief over being childless, and it can be so hard to do. For example, when I haven’t been clear about what I need, I’ve had friends say things like, “You want kids, take mine—ha ha!” (So not helping. And I’d be happy to take them, by the way.) One couple thought it would be easier on me if I wasn’t invited to any gatherings that included children, which, as their family grew, quickly became almost all gatherings. (So I just felt more isolated.)

I, of course, wasn’t much help. When asked, I’d say things like, “Oh, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” Rubbish. I thought I was letting them off the hook, but really, I needed to be more aware that they genuinely wanted to help in meaningful ways.

So maybe I can do better. The next time someone asks me how she can best support me on this crazy journey, my thoughtful and real response might include:

“I don’t want to talk about it. Just give me a big hug when you see me.”

“Let me come to your daughter’s dance recital, and don’t take it personally when I leave without saying good-bye (because I’ve been crying).”

“Take me to a funny movie so we can laugh really hard for a change.”

“Be patient with me. The real, happy me is evolving, and I’ll be ready to re-enter the world soon.”

By the way, in addition to the wrapped gift-exchange package, I got what I truly wanted for Christmas: face time with people I hold dear and time off from work, i.e., a bit of peace on Earth.

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

The Importance of Asking for Help

By Lisa Manterfield
“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.

Near the end of last year, 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’m 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?

Our Stories: Darla

As told to Kathleen Guthrie Woods

“I’m so glad that I found Life Without Baby,” Darla wrote when she sent in her story for this column. “I have felt so alone in my pain for far too long, and it’s good to know that there are others like me and we have a place to share our stories.”

Yes! That’s why we do this, so that we can heal ourselves through the sharing of our experiences and support each other as we grieve our losses and find inspiration for moving forward with new life plans.

Darla was diagnosed in her mid-thirties with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), the cause of her infertility. Now 53, she is still working through the grief of being childfree, although she feels she’s reached a turning point.

After you read about Darla, I hope you’ll add your words of commiseration and encouragement in the Comments. Then, won’t you please share your story with us? Information on how to submit your answers to the “Our Stories” questionnaire appear below.

LWB: Describe your dream of motherhood.

Darla: When I was sixteen I embroidered two little baby shirts (I still have them). I knew at that young age that I wanted to be a mother. I made no career plans, didn’t plan for higher education, I just wanted to be somebody’s Mom.

 

LWB: Where are you on your journey now? (for example: still in denial, angry, hoping for a miracle, depressed, crawling toward acceptance, embracing Plan B)

Darla: ALL OF THE ABOVE!!!!!!!

 

LWB: What was the turning point for you?

Darla: The turning point is now. I have suffered from insomnia and anxiety for many years, and I think there is a connection with the grief I’ve been suppressing for so long. It’s time to seek help, connect with others who know what I’m feeling, and move on and find joy in other adventures.

 

LWB: What’s the hardest part for you about not having children?

Darla: Christmastime is hard for me. When I hear the lyric “Every mother’s child is gonna spy…,” it brings tears to my eyes because I will never know that joy. I have no one to pass my traditions on to. No one will be heir to the things I love.

 

LWB: What’s the best advice you’ve received?

Darla: Your loss is very real. Seek help and let yourself grieve.

 

LWB: What’s one thing you want other people to know about your being childfree?

Darla: If you have children, don’t tell me how wonderful it is and how much I’m missing; I’m well aware of what I’m missing. Also, don’t tell me you understand my pain—you can’t know. My mother actually told me that she understands what it feels like to be childless. Really? She has three children. I know she is just trying to empathize, but she can’t know the pain I feel.

 

LWB: What do you look forward to now?

Darla: I’m hoping to travel. There is so much I still want to see, so many new places to discover. There’s more time behind than ahead, and I want to make the best of it.

 

LWB: What is your hope for yourself this coming year?

Darla: I’ve waited too long to grieve my loss. I hope to heal the pain and move on. It’s time.

 

Where are you on your journey? Are your wounds raw? Have you made some progress toward accepting a life without children? We can all benefit from hearing about your experiences, plus we’d like to support you. Please visit the Our Stories page to get more information and the questionnaire, and consider sharing your story with women who truly understand what you’re going through.

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

This Year, Aim for Progress Rather Than Perfection

Well, here we are in 2017, 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 last year, 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.

Whiny Wednesday: The Last Whine of 2016

Even though we’re taking this week off, I couldn’t leave you without a last whine for 2016.

It has been a pretty wild year, hasn’t it? I am certainly hoping that 2017 shows some big improvements.

But, before we close out this year, here is your last opportunity to rant this year. It’s an open forum (within reason), so feel free to get things off your chest so we can start fresh next year.

Happy whining!