Until recently I never even realised I had a ‘Childlessness Story’. I’ve never been pregnant, or tried to get pregnant, intentionally, unintentionally or surreptitiously. I’ve never had a termination, or experienced cycles of fertility treatment or experienced a miscarriage. I’ve never explored freezing my eggs, sperm donation, surrogacy or adoption. To quote the well-known song, my life is always stuck in second gear! Or put another way, I’ve been busy having adventures around the world, progressing my professional and academic career, nurturing friendships and basically looking after myself through a series of fresh starts. In my 20’s, ambivalent me veered towards the ‘child-free’ end of the spectrum, and I tucked away my flapping apron strings and explained my lack of a child in these terms. Easy!
And then what I wanted changed and those apron strings emerged in force. My close friends became mothers when I was around 31 and single, again. Later, when I was 34, I was in a new, serious, relationship. Together we fantasized about our future family – happy and successful – Oh! How I wanted to make that happen! Yup! It’ll be great!! This is the man I’m meant to be with!! I imagined our daughter and how we would be together. Finally, my time has come! I AM going to have a chance to have kids! And bonus – I’ll silence my critics and be socially acceptable at weddings again, plus I’ll probably be a grandmother and happy and loved in old age. You can have what you want after all! I could purposefully deploy the apron strings! Life? Sorted!!
And then POP! The bubble burst. He (rightly and respectfully) declared parenthood wasn’t for him and I (rightly and respectfully) dropped him like a hot potato – burnt and in pain. I no longer found myself veering towards the ‘childfree’ end of the spectrum and this was probably the moment my childlessness story began. It felt like I had blown my one and final chance. I was 34, embarking on a 3 year Msc whilst working full time, and I could do maths. Besides, I felt different. Whilst it was relatively acceptable to be sad about breaking up (not my first rodeo), I felt totally incapable of and somewhat foolish, talking about the loss of my fabulous future filled with love and children. So, I did what I do, and got on with it, went to work, studied at the weekend and eventually the crying stopped. But I have always been aware of something lurking there. I felt different to my friends,on a different path. I felt different to myself. I was tough on myself. Let me pin down some of these experiences and see if you can relate:
The constant management of stigma, pro-natalist prejudice and discrimination: so many stories to tell! The world, it seems, was not made for me, and it’s meant developing great skill in compromising, forgiving, and diplomacy. Constant adaption to systems and attitudes where my situation is an aberration.
Being mistakenly identified as ‘Child- free’ and grouped together with people who never wanted children and they got what they expected. Gggrrrrrrrrrr! I didn’t choose it, and it’s not how I expected life to be. I’m a perfectly sociable person with fabulous caring friends, yet often I felt like I somehow didn’t fit in.
Existentially speaking, my experience of life ‘at the sharp end’ is exclusively at the end of the lifespan, through grief and loss, and not at the very start, through creation and nurturing. As a nurse I witnessed death, but never birth. Of course, I do have a vicarious and empathic understanding. I watch tv, listen to my friends. I like children and work professionally with them, so I have some insight. But no experience as a creator of new life, which is filed by most under ‘The Most Important and Brilliant Thing Ever’ but in my world, is filed under ‘Things That Happen To Other People’. Does this ‘misfiling’ impact on how I understand life? Maybe.
Experiencing grief over something that had never been real in the first place, so how can it be legitimate grief? The loss of my imagined daughter could not be equated with a real loss. Stop blubbing and get on with it, I told myself.
The over compensation: I put the ‘childfree’ hat back on (though it was more like a showgirl’s headdress!) even though I often felt sad and pessimistic, thinking that if I had the freedom to do marvellous and crazy things, it would be a waste if I didn’t. This made for an interesting mid-life crisis (which I don’t regret) and leads the uninitiated into thinking I chose childlessness, when I didn’t.
I have never been described as ‘expecting’ when, ironically, my whole adult life (I’m talking decades here, I am 50 soon!) has been about unfulfilled expectation, hope and bargaining. These years of expectation don’t end in public celebration and recognition, but a silent and stigmatised expiry date. Fertility is finite. There is a point where the expectation must come to an end. And then what?! How does that story go? Where are my role models? Who can I follow on this path? Is it wrong to feel relief mixed with the sadness at the end of all that? There’s no emoji for that. We never see circumstantial childlessness in the media: ‘A gripping page turner about a couple with a fulfilling and meaningful life ’, ‘A heart warming movie about a woman who, through no fault of her own, ends up not having kids but leads a happy life even though it’s not what she once wanted’ ‘The 20 most hilarious/poignant tweets about childlessness this week’ read no one ever.
Dying alone and being eaten by your pet cats when your emergency contact box is blank because there was no one obvious to nominate: It’s a horrible stereotype, but planning for, and financing an independent, fulfilling old age is something I felt I needed to be savvy about. It takes up headspace. There are tasks to undertake.
Remaining forever flexible for friends and relatives as I tend to be the one that goes to them if we want to see each other. Moreover, doing this willingly for years with little recognition, reciprocation or being met half way, because I valued the relationship more than the fairness of the situation. I suspect the very notion of friendship has more significance to my life than it does to theirs. They are more important to me than I am to them. Even though they love and care for me, the kids and family life will (and should!) be their priority and I am happy to support them in that. It’s a practical thing.The child-raising village in action, uncredited. It is how I sort the wheat from the chaff – how am I included in their family life and how do they integrate into my life? I used to think this would be just a phase and friends would become available again once the children grew up, our lives would converge and be the same again, but I realise now parenting is permanent. And so is childlessness. It is not just Empty Nest syndrome on a long-term basis – it’s much more complex than that.
So, I lived these experiences for years before discovering they were not unique to me. I stumbled on Jody Day’s book ‘Living the Life Unexpected’ when I was looking for material about menopause that actually related to my life (*eye roll*). And then BOOM! A book that was written for me – no compromising, adapting or extrapolating required. And it resonated. It turns out my lived experiences had a name, an identity, a culture, even. My story has a genre! That the grief I felt was not only legitimate, but this too had a respectable name! This is what changed. Now, I feel I am entitled to have sad feelings and entitled to have mixed feelings. I am even entitled to shimmy in my ‘child free’ showgirl headdress, apron strings akimbo, occasionally. I am also entitled to fantasize about my future once more, whilst building a happy and fulfilling one in real life. It turns out that these experiences form ‘My Childlessness Story’ and I’m entitled to tell it, even though it’s a work in progress. The next chapter, maybe the best chapter, is yet to come.
Maz Marsham
Photo by Meiying Ng on Unsplash