I was a thirty something childless person, then a forty something childless person and now I am a fifty something childless person. In each decade, my feelings have changed. My needs have changed. My position to those with children has changed. My plans for the future have changed. As I change and age, so my feelings do.

I still fear some aspects of my sixties and beyond – what it will be like when my friends become grandparents, how will I make sure I’m looked after if I can’t look after myself – but the fear has lost most of its sting now, and I use it as a stimulus and an opportunity to plan. I can do this because I have been here before. I know what it is to grieve, and I know I need to do it. I grieved when my friends had children – not because I didn’t want them to know that joy but because I knew I never would. I’ve done it once, so I know I can do it again.

In my thirties, I was desperate to become a parent, looked into everything, considered everything, tried everything. In my forties, I processed and lived with the reality that it was never going to happen and I pivoted the counselling career I had to work almost entirely with childless people. Now I am in my fifties. What are my priorities? What are my needs? What are my experiences?

One thing I’ve noticed, is that it’s not me, not the current me, that I grieve for now. I grieve for a younger version of myself. My current self doesn’t – couldn’t have a baby or a young child. My current self is happy with my life as it is. It’s my past self I grieve for, my past self I long for this experience for, not me now.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that I spend more time looking forward and planning for the future. I’ve changed my career again, and for the final time. I have quit my school teaching job and become a celebrant, something I will do alongside my counselling career. It’s giving me great joy to be able to offer personalised empathic funerals, weddings and namings (for teenagers and adults only, especially queer and trans people) and I want to develop grief ceremonies for childless people to say goodbye to the parent aspect of themselves, to the children they longed for and couldn’t have.

As I grow older, more and more I feel the desire to simplify. To simplify my life. To simplify my feelings. To simplify the way I use my time, to do less and to do things more deeply. To see fewer people but to spend time with people more deeply. To imagine diving down into a cool sea and to fully accept and learn to love what I find there.

This is my life now and there is nothing to be gained by fighting against it, and everything to be gained by offering my life, loving acceptance. To sit with what is. To offer myself and others compassion and love. Too often, I have fought what life had to offer me, railed against it, created stories about it and it was right, back then, to do those things. Now, I aim to just see it and love it as it is.

I’m not saying that’s going to be easy. But it is how things are.

I also want to be clear. I am not presenting my own journey as a map for yours, as an expectation. It’s where I have been and it is where I am now. It’s one way through, and there are many ways through. All I would advise you is to find your own path and to follow it, even if it feels that it is invisible at times. Get help if you need it. Help is out there – in support groups, on retreats, in ceremonies, from counsellors and coaches.

But I am saying that things can change if we allow it, if we can let go when the time comes to do so, if we can recognise change when it is happening and welcome more change in, if we can live with fluidity and difference and love and acceptance. And if we can keep talking, throughout our life-cycle as a childless person - and as a person.

Photo by Teslariu Mihai on Unsplash

Meriel Whale