I am

Courageous

Hopeful

Inspired

If I had you as a captive audience for a few brief moments, I wouldn’t be able to describe childlessness using simple language.

I wanted to be a mom from my earliest memories

My journey with infertility and being Childless Not By Choice, as all journeys are, has been rough, raw, but abundant in lessons to learn about society, the people around me, and especially myself.

I am childless not by choice, due to a long and difficult infertility journey.

I am Alana and I have been childless for 30 years.

1.    Mother- I assumed this would be my title. I wanted to be a stay-at-home mum raising our four children.

Not becoming a mother ripped apart everything I though I was going to be.

I did not simply “move on”—I learned to move forward while carrying grief.

Ten Things I Didn’t Know About Me.

I had to search for myself, pick up the shattered pieces of my dream, and recover. It has not been easy and takes strength and years.

If I were sitting in a room with people willing to listen, these are the ten things I would want them to understand about how being childless has shaped me.

I wanted to have a child my whole life. That’s a big grief!

The beginning was like waking up with an open wound every day.

I am a woman

I am the eldest child

I am childless, not childfree. I am childless not by choice because I was coerced into an abortion that I didn’t want to have back in 2010. I miscarried in 2011.

Realising that it was not me as a person that was the problem, rather a very old system of hierarchy was shaming me for being a solo childless woman

My childlessness was a trauma, from which I recovered.

I am enough

I am not alone

My grief of being childless not by choice is a life long journey

I am Canadian, but live in Germany and they call me automatically childess.

I am childless

I am motherless

Did you know that although I am built for comfort and not speed, I used to do ballet and tap dancing? I was under ten years old though at the time.

I am enough, exactly as I am in this very moment. I have nothing to prove to myself or anyone else.

We are a community from across the globe.

When I think of the 10 things you should know about me,I immediately wonder what you'll think as soon as you read them - Will you judge me?

Do I want my childlessness to define me?

Dear Santa

It’s been a while since I’ve written.  A long while. 

I love to write but I am struggling to write this.

I wanted to have kids, so badly. But now, that’s not the life I want anymore.

I collect rocks. How they look certainly matters to some extent, but even more important is how they feel in my hand, how they slip between my fingers.

If I was a parent my life would have been different.

I have been single for not quite two decades and have never been married.

It’s March 2016, you’ve just been told that there is no further progression in the adoption process.

That being childless was not a reflection of my worth, and that I have nothing to prove