I dreamed about a baby last night. She was extra tiny — she could fit into the palm of my hand. A little girl. I kept losing her because she was so tiny. Where had I put her? I began to panic over and over in the dream.
Please don’t let me lose her. I’ve waited my whole life for a daughter.
And then…there she was. Making happy, gurgling sounds next to a pile of blankets, or on my bed, or in the bassinet. Right where I had left her.
I could feel the flood of relief each time I found her. The gratitude. And even the shock. Wait…I had a daughter? The one I had dreamed of having my whole life? It was surreal.
Then I woke up. And just like every other time I wake from a dream about a baby, I started my day with a long cry.
***
It’s the end of another year. We’re about to start a new one, which, halfway through, will bring me to my 46th birthday. Each one of these birthdays in my forties is of both great joy (being in my forties is incredible) and overwhelming grief.
You see, I waited my whole life to create a family of my own. And that never happened.
And now it is too late.
It’s too late to experience creating a family the way I had always dreamed of doing. I will never be a young mother with a doting young husband who adores his little family. I will never ferry a bratty but lovable brood back and forth across town to school, soccer, and gymnastics with all the abundant energy of a woman in her twenties. I will never witness my siblings being aunts and uncles to my children the way I’ve been to theirs.
That time has passed. I’m not in my twenties — or hell, my thirties — anymore. There isn’t a pool of young, idealistic suitors out there clamoring to find baby mamas. And my nieces and nephews are speeding through birthdays — it’s too late for the dream of happy cousins growing up together.
I don’t have a choice about yesterday’s dream. It is gone.
I could choose a modification of that today. I could choose to try IVF on my own. I could choose to adopt by myself. I could make a family happen if I really wanted to.
But I do not choose that anymore. As much as I longed to be a mother, I do not want to experience pregnancy alone in my mid-forties. I do not want to raise a child by myself, whether of my blood or adopted. As my friend, Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women says, women like us live at the strange intersection of “childless by circumstance” and “childfree by choice.” We both got to a point in our lives where we decided to stop waiting, stop trying, stop hoping.
We chose to move forward with the circumstances life handed us. And we have made peace with our decisions.
But that doesn’t mean we don’t still feel the deep grief that comes from wanting something so deeply that just didn’t happen.
***
This past year perhaps brought me closer to motherhood than I’ve ever been, through my adventures in dating. There were a couple kids here, a couple kids there. I’m embarrassed to say that I almost immediately thought of nicknames for them all, even though I had never met them.
To be very clear, these were just fantasies of my own making. I wasn’t actually going to be anybody’s mother. But this happens to have been a particularly active year of dating people who happen to be parents, and as such, I had moments when I wondered what might become of my life somewhere down the very long line.
I tried not to wonder too much, though. Since my last significant relationship ended after a fruitless experiment in patience that failed to produce the family I’d hoped for, I’ve always been very careful not to let myself indulge in fantasies. A few moments of a sweet, imagined scene can cause such heartache later… It’s rarely worth the price.
But this year, I let myself indulge. I let myself imagine braiding hair. Eating french fries together in the car. Holding dessert hostage until one more Brussels sprout was consumed. Making silly faces. Yelling “Tie your shoe!” across a playground.
I imagined. And it hurt.
It’s such an odd experience, that pain. Motherhood is not even something I actively want or am actively pursuing anymore. That part of my life feels so…over. I don’t have the energy to chase it. I don’t even have the energy to hope for it.
And yet, the grief is still there.
Because of that, I always try to be realistic with myself, to manage my hopes and expectations in ways that won’t trigger my grief. I tell myself that the odds of becoming a mother through stepparenthood are likely similar to the odds of getting pregnant at 45 without medical intervention.
Yes, I’m being dismal on purpose.
I don’t imagine that people with children are in a particular rush to partner with a childless woman. They probably want someone who already understands the challenges of parenthood and who can step in without missing a beat.
This makes perfect sense to me. And so when I date people with children, I try not to let myself think about those children. I try not to imagine what it might be like to have that daughter I always dreamed of. I try not to let myself get too close to thoughts of happy, blended families.
It’s just part of the labor of dating when you’re a 45-year-old childless woman. You know you have to go through all the usual aches and pains of love.
And you have to manage all the complications and emotions that come with standing outside a potential partner’s living room window, peering in at the life you had once dreamed of, and knowing that, at best, you’ll be standing outside that window for a very long time.
***
Grieving the loss of motherhood at this juncture in life — when you’re single in your mid-forties, going through perimenopause, and dating people who have kids — is difficult. It comes with its own very set timeline. You see, you can’t just grieve it like a normal loss, one that time will slowly ease.
You cannot fully grieve the true loss of this dream until the day you can no longer bear children. Until you actually enter menopause. This is a grief that comes in a slow-release time capsule. You might choose not to pursue a pregnancy, but so long as the biological possibility exists (no matter how faintly), the loss is not yet fully realized. It’s a loss both of the past, but one that’s coming, too, one that you can see in your future and know you must be prepared to face.
You didn’t get to be a young mother as you had hoped, you are not a mother today, and you will not be a mother — or a grandmother, for that matter — in the future.
You cannot process this grief in a designated timeframe. You know it is a long journey, a long unfolding, a force of its own that will not be subdued by any outside influence. And because of that, you have to keep so much of it in a suitcase buried deep, deep, deep in the ground.
The little griefs, like watching your friends’ kids announce their pregnancies (because you’re at that age when some of your friends’ kids are adults and starting their own families) on social media, or being separated from your beloved nephew who is like a surrogate child to you, have to be attended to every single day. Those tasks take a lot of energy in the early and even middle stages of this kind of grief.
There isn’t time to deal with the biggest, heaviest piece of that grief. That’s why it stays buried in the suitcase.
My frequent dreams about babies alert me, however, to the fact that I will, indeed, have to dig up that grief someday. Or perhaps those dreams are telling me that the suitcase won’t wait for me to do that — that it is coming to the surface all on its own.
Either way, I have no doubt that it will eventually demand my full attention. Something I can’t give it right now because some little part of me is still convinced that I’ll crack this nut. I’ll meet a nice man with viable sperm and have an accidental miracle baby at 48. Or I’ll fall crazy in love with a partner who has 2.5 perfect children (and a perfect dog) and we’ll effortlessly fall into perfect sync as a perfect family.
Or my sister will get tired of taking care of six kids and will let me keep one.
The truth is, as much as I say I’m processing this grief, I know I cannot yet achieve that. Not while some part of me is still tending to this very tiny ember of…not hope. No, I think it’s possibility.
Don’t get me wrong — this part of me is not a total idiot. She knows the winds are coming. And rain will follow. Unless she learns how to bend the laws of the universe, that ember will never grow into a flame.
But something about tending to it feels good for now. And maybe that’s the right thing to do until the winds and rains come and snuff it out.
Then she will be ready to open that suitcase and face what’s inside.
Yael Wolfe
Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash