Dreaming Anew

Maria Hill

World Childless Week Ambassador

Being childless can mean that we get a front row seat on the pettiness and meanness in the world, just for being ourselves and being different. It can be difficult to want to connect with other people when that is the case and it is not wrong to pull back from interaction with other humans because of the dispiriting judgments that we frequently encounter.

This is not just a social issue; it is a work issue as well. Over the years, the pronatal family narrative and social demands that go with it have invaded the workplace, making it harder and harder for childless people to catch a break from parents congratulating themselves and discussing child rearing ad nauseam - and it can be quite nauseating!

Workplace pronatalism is a strange and relatively new phenomenon. I did not encounter the pronatal megaphone when I worked at IBM early in my career. Although it was a very family oriented company, family topics were rarely discussed during work hours. They were treated as ancillary to work and certainly not the dominant topic. Women were colleagues, not mothers with jobs.

Today, if you are childless, it is difficult not to feel shut out both socially and at work given the constant pronatal and family messaging. This is especially true since family is an easy go-to topic to obtain the attention-seeking that modern marketing and self-promotion require.

The Limits Of The Patriarchal Idea

We are taught to dream of family. Having a lovely family is a wonderful dream, of course. However, it has been exploited to such a degree that we now have too many people on the planet and we are going to have to chill with reproduction. As a result, many people are reconsidering the mandate of family. The costs of having children and the dangerous times we live in are serious issues that need to be considered before creating a new life on the planet.

Nonetheless, not being able to have a family when that was your dream is a difficult situation to accept. Whether you had a traditional dream or not, it is hard to escape the pervasiveness of a family-centered human world. It is not fun being an involuntary outsider. I have never enjoyed it myself.

We are, however, at a turning point in the world that will impact our self-perception and our standing in the world. The current ways of organizing life are not working any more. We are entering a time that will emancipate women from the false patriarchal ideal of mother.

The turmoil we are seeing right now is not a collapse of the Western world as some paint it. It is true that aspects of the Western way of life will necessarily change. However, what is changing is deeper. For thousands of years, hierarchies have been how we organized human society.

We have developed stories about ourselves and life based on a competitive and hierarchical view of “how life is.” That view that hierarchy is natural, normal, and all there is, is now being questioned. The US, where I live, is demonstrating not only the corruption in authoritarian hierarchies but also their incompetence. Therefore, it is my opinion, that we are in the process of exposing the deficiencies of hierarchies in order to reimagine life so that it is fairer and more practical.

Childless women know about hierarchy since our childlessness makes us one down or even two down in the social pecking order. Who has not felt the triumphant superiority of mothers demanding favoritism because of birthing a child?

The issue of hierarchy is deeper than female pecking orders. The current turmoil in the world is an attempt by patriarchal masculinity to reassert its dominance, which has been challenged by the shift to more egalitarian ways of living and relating. It is time for the patriarchy to bow out. Our world needs wisdom not muscle to manage the complexity that supports our current human civilizations. There are many reasons why patriarchal hierarchy is not working and will not work. As a result, the door has opened to invite a new way of imagining human life.

As challenging as life is right now, the so-called patriarchal, pronatal, and class/economic “norms” are on their way out and we get to write a different story.

Invite A New Dream

If there is a silver lining to being childless, especially not by choice, is that we get to see the flaws in the way our current cultures value people, especially women. That awareness on top of the challenging grieving process of being CNBC can be overwhelming. You are not just grieving the loss of a family, you are also losing a place in society, one that you had every reason to believe would be yours. So the grieving process is multilayered.

Although we are facing unprecedented challenges and many feel despair at our inability to solve our problems, I personally believe that we are also at a time of reinventing what it means to be human. I think we are changing our story, which has been about war and survival, to one about health, well-being, and thriving.

A few questions worth considering are:

  • How do you connect with these new themes and priorities about life?

  • How might the changes we are going through invite some new possibilities for you?

    In what way does the time of change make it easier for you to celebrate your own way of contributing to the world?

These questions are not about embracing toxic positivity as a survival strategy. They are about how to align your gifts, interests, and the times we live in to make life as satisfying and rewarding as possible.

Anyone who goes through the CNBC grieving process owes themselves the most enjoyable and rewarding life possible. Hopefully these challenging time will be a way for you to gift yourself a lovely and satisfying life.