If you want to make someone uncomfortable, tell them that you’re childless. Tell them you wanted a child quite badly but it “just didn’t happen” and watch them squirm.
I never uttered these words with the intention of making someone uncomfortable, mind you. But sharing my story and seeing people consistently respond in this manner has been fascinating. As far as I can tell, there is little else that makes people as uncomfortable as hearing someone admit they are childless by circumstance.
They will stumble wildly for a response.
“Have you thought about adoption?” they will ask. (As if the thought never crossed our mind.)
“There’s still time,” they insist, patting our arm or squeezing our hand.
And if you dare to push back, to insist that yes, you have explored every option, yes, this is it, yes, there is no turning back, then you might get that lovely gem: “It’s all part of God’s plan.”
[Insert sound of record scratching.]
Listen, I don’t begrudge these statements. The people who say them mean well. Or think they do.
They don’t understand that we don’t give a damn about God’s plan — we had our own, thank you very much. They don’t understand that maybe we don’t believe in the same God — or perhaps we do, but in the grief of childlessness, we’ve had a parting of the ways. They don’t understand that we weren’t looking for an interpreter to help us get a message we’ve allegedly failed to receive.
The problem is, our grief is eclipsed in a moment like this by someone else’s feelings. You see, a childless woman never enters a space alone. Along with her comes a companion that people who were able to become mothers don’t want to acknowledge: the precarious uncertainty of life.
And no one — absolutely no one — wants to be reminded of that.
I’m 46. This is it. More than ever, it feels like my opportunity to become a mother is over.
I do not have a partner, and even if I did, I would be surprised if I could become pregnant at this point.
And no thank you, I’m not interested in single parenthood. I do not want to try insemination or adoption all by myself.
I’ve made my choice.
All in God’s plan, you say?
I don’t buy that. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t, but it isn’t for anyone else to say. That’s something I am working through with Her. It’s a private conversation, by the way. We didn’t invite anyone to join us.
I think what’s really going on here is that we’ve sold women a false sense of security. Get married and have babies and you will be set for life! It’s the only true road to happiness! And you’ll never be lonely again!
This, our culture says, is our happily ever after, our ride into the sunset, our perfect forever.
But the truth is, life doesn’t work out that way. Guess what? Husbands might leave. Children might get sick. People might die.
Our lives get turned upside down. It’s not a matter of if — it’s a matter of when.
As an aunt, I keep a running list of all the horrors that might harm or — God forbid — end the lives of my nieces and nephews. I maintain this list so I can keep my eye on every potential danger I’ve already assessed, while keeping a lookout for the ones I haven’t yet thought of.
If this is my natural instinct as their aunt, then I can only imagine how much that would consume the mind of a parent.
How do you survive that, day after day? Those ghostly threats always in the backs of our minds?
We survive by buying into the promises of the happy endings our culture promises.
And then a goddamn childless woman walks through the door and we are again reminded of the total capriciousness of the universe. We are reminded that we are not safe from a destiny that doesn’t always align with our desires. We are reminded that we cannot control a damn thing in this world.
Slapping a cheerful-looking bandage on a childless woman’s heart by way of assuring her that her pain is all part of God’s plan has become a ritual of superstition, much like throwing salt over the left shoulder, or knocking on wood.
It’s a comfort to the person saying it — not so much to the person on the receiving end.
Grief is a hard space to navigate — particularly from the outside. We don’t have a lot of cultural competency in that realm.
But when you take that clumsiness into a complicated space like the one in which a childless woman exists, it can make something that might be awkward in other circumstances into something downright painful.
A childless woman exists at a challenging intersection that those outside it can never truly understand. We are balancing society’s pronatalist expectations and judgments, the sexism and misogyny that labels us as “lazy” and “failing to contribute to society,” and a social hierarchy that wants us to believe that we are less mature and less whole than those who did have children. And that’s not to mention the sometimes overwhelming experience of our own deeply nuanced and constantly evolving feelings about this journey.
And while it’s true that pronatalism will always keep pushing propaganda that discourages those with children from being curious enough to want to learn about the journey of childlessness, I also think that childless women are simply scary to others. Yes, scary.
There isn’t a lot in this world that is scarier than acknowledging the uncertainty that is at play in every corner of our lives, as childlessness so blatantly illustrates. There isn’t a lot that is scarier than being reminded that no, we cannot always just “make it happen,” no matter what the “it” is. There isn’t a lot that is scarier than a woman whose life didn’t unfold according to the status quo, who didn’t get a choice about playing into the existing structures of social worth.
There’s a reason why women like us ended up living alone in the woods in the old days. People just don’t know what to do with us — or more accurately, with the feelings our presence brings up within them.
I hate to bring up an awkward question, but…what if this isn’t God’s plan? What if there isn’t a plan? What if everything is a game of poker and we got a really shitty hand, and yours is about to be dealt?
The truth is, we don’t really know. And however we decide to interpret what happened and the why behind it — well, that’s for us to figure out.
Yael Wolfe
Photo by Manuel Schinner on Unsplash