In an episode of “Sex and the City” from the early 2000s, Carrie Bradshaw wonders whether you can “make a mistake and miss your fate”. I have often wondered if my own misguided choices earlier in my life caused me to “miss” my chance to become a mother. It isn’t a comfortable thought. Yet as I discover online support groups such as Gateway Women and read more about the experience of being childless, including Jody Day’s book “Living the Life Unexpected”, I am learning that many of us who find ourselves CNBC will readily blame ourselves for choosing the left fork in the road instead of the right, for the choices we made so many years before we realised that we would end up without children. We feel the need to pinpoint a pivotal decision which ended up costing us the chance of becoming a parent.
Of course, for some of us, there will indeed be a defining moment which altered our future forever. A serious accident, a miscarriage or the onset of an illness can prove to be the precise moment when our dream of parenthood died. But for many of us, there isn’t a single “sliding doors moment” that changed the course of our life irrevocably. In my case, I have ended up where I am through thousands of small decisions and choices. There was no isolated “mistake” that caused me to miss my fate. Rather, there were many incremental and sometimes imperceptible steps that led me away from having a family.
I have only had three serious relationships in my life, which together define my infertility journey, but it would be impossible to pick out the moment that sealed my fate. I fell deeply in love at university and hoped that he would be the man I would marry. When I moved to France for the third year of my degree, he abruptly ended things because he didn’t want a long-distance relationship. I was completely heartbroken: the relationship had probably run its course, but it didn’t feel like that at the time.
On the rebound, I then fell for a charming French man. At 21, I was very young and naive, and I felt flattered that he had chosen me when he could have had his pick. By the time we married, I was 26, and he had already given me cause to suspect that he had been unfaithful. Yet I chose to see in him what I wanted to see, and the wedding went ahead. After three very unhappy years of marriage, during which my suspicions about his infidelity proved to be correct, we divorced, and I turned 30.
Those were my most fertile years, which I believe were spent with the wrong person. Yet if we had had a family together, it seems inevitable that the marriage would still have ended. I would have struggled a lot financially as a single parent, and I would have found it incredibly stressful sharing our children between two countries and two sets of grandparents. Children would have tied us together for the rest of our lives. Childlessness allowed us to walk away and start again.
I met my second husband a year after the divorce, although I was not looking for anyone and was still feeling completely numb. As I knew I wanted to have children, we got engaged and married within three years. It took me a while to realise that having children was not going to happen easily, but when I did, I was already 37, and time was running out.
After various investigations, a diagnosis of unexplained infertility was given. We kept on trying to conceive naturally, and I tried acupuncture, relaxation, counselling, diet changes, vitamin supplements, daily charting etc, but all without success. I experienced a number of early-term losses, and I always wondered whether my fibroids were the cause, but the issue was never explored.
I have had many bouts of serious depression, which have affected my career path, but it took me a long time to connect the more recent episodes with the buried grief of childlessness. With the help of the Gateway Women network, I am now emerging from a long period of self-reproach, longing and regret.
I have come to see that blaming myself for the decisions I took in my twenties and thirties is unhelpful, self-destructive, and, ultimately, pointless. Marrying my first husband was my choice, and I accept the responsibility for it. But the long and winding path that led me to be standing in that bar on the night we met was built by thousands upon thousands of earlier decisions, not all of which were mine. There were opportunities to try more medical interventions earlier on in my second marriage, which might have helped us to succeed at having a family, but those chances were missed, and again, the failings were not always mine. We are still together and are coming, slowly, to the acceptance of a life without children.
At least in terms of my own life experience, I now believe that it’s actually pretty difficult to make one single, life-changing mistake and “miss your fate” when it comes to having children. That thought feels somehow liberating, and it has become part of my healing.
Our lives today are what they are because of myriad earlier experiences and choices, both the good and the not-so-good, and there are also myriad ways to end up without children. Blaming ourselves for missing the signposts, for driving right past ‘the road not taken’ when we should have chosen it, will only serve to hold us in a place of grief. The route to where we are today is far more complex than we can ever fully understand, and there is comfort in that thought.
Susie D
Image by Paul Henri Degrande fron Pixabay