I was duped. I was cheated. I was well and truly taken for a ride.
And it’s too late for a second chance. It comes to me, the realisation that my life is finite. That this life is IT. No more chances to start again, from scratch.
And in this life, I am not a mother, and now, never will be a mother. It hits me like the slap of a breaking wave. I have never had the chance to love my children and I NEVER WILL.
Do I have children? No, I have no children. You expect that I will, because it’s normal, it’s what most people have. And after all, I’m bright, intelligent, attractive, interesting. I have a degree, I’ve had good jobs. You expect that I will have the whole shebang – the partner, the house, the children, the grandchildren. The whole bloody set-up.
The place to belong.
But I must disabuse you of all those notions.
Because no. I do not.
I’m single. I’m 66. I’m childless. The trinity of invisibility..
I’m up against the brick wall of reality. Of no escape. Of ‘this is it and there’s nothing you can do about it’.
Why am I childless? Because I was born in 1954 and those times of my youth and young womanhood were different; because of Catholicism – the brainwashing of a sensitive girl, eager for approval; because of waiting for the time to be right; because of unexplained things my body did, my poor, bleeding body; because I loved ‘not wisely but too well’; because in that final window of my 40s, I could only manage simply to survive.
Rivers of blood
At about 31, on the pill from 19, I began to haemorrhage every month, for two weeks out of four. I couldn’t get a diagnosis or treatment. I was anaemic, but no one seemed to realise that and I tried to live normally – as normally as you can, having to think if you have enough sanitary towels with you, where the nearest toilet is, and what you can wear to disguise any sudden ‘flooding’ that may occur with only the warning of a sudden acute pain as the clots of blood force their way through the neck of the uterus. I found that the vagina will accommodate two super plus tampons at a time, although if the blood flow suddenly dries up, they will suck all the moisture from the lining of the vagina and removing them feels like you’re pulling your innards out, like turning the finger of a glove inside out.
I tried natural remedies. I kept on working, even hill-walking and running. I kept ovulation charts. My husband and I fought. I screamed. I knew, deep down, regardless of the fertility question, that this marriage was a mistake. I’d married to become respectable and worthy. To have a proper place in the world.
Till then, I’d lived with a man, but I wasn’t open about it, because it wasn’t ‘the right thing’ – he’d been married – in ‘the eyes of the Church’ he still was. He said he’d get his marriage annulled, make it right ‘in the eyes of the Church’. I waited, saw others marry, have children, make families. Rome turned him down, and he didn’t even tell me.
I wasn’t even religious – I’d walked away from all that. But I’d never learned to live with disapproval.
I had various tests and minor treatments – a laparoscopy, a dilation and curettage (a ‘scrape’) and the one where they put a dye through your Fallopian tubes to see if they’re viable. During this test, they stopped and asked me if I was pregnant, because they’d seen some kind of mass inside my uterus. This was in fact, fibroids. The first I’d known that I had them. The first anyone had said about the possibility. Now, I can barely believe how I was fobbed off and neglected.
My husband had a test too. They found he had a low sperm count.
One Saturday evening, alone at home, I’d had enough and was sent into hospital, had a blood transfusion and refused to leave the ward until I had the operation I’d waited months for – a laser removal of the fibroids that could leave my uterus lining intact.
I took flight – my energy returned and within months I’d met the man I left my husband for.
The Fall
The euphoria was brief. And the fall was deep and dire.
The pregnancy was a total shock. I thought I was infertile. And I loved being pregnant. I felt like a whole, fertile, sensuous woman. I was one, but not one, two, but not two. A glorious, miraculous enigma. I carried life, and I felt it. I was a real, complete woman and I was fulfilling my purpose. At last I belonged.
On the island of Halki, we had sunny, long, sexy siestas. He looked after me and I thought perhaps he would, after all be a good father, although his record with his two existing children from two mothers wasn’t exactly encouraging. I was blind, blind with lust, with love, with need, with the thrill of finding a kindred spirit.
12 week scan: ‘I’m afraid we cannot find a heartbeat. I’m sorry.’ The consultant embraced and held me.
We went to the crypt of the beautiful church at Lastingham in North Yorkshire and laid white tulips there for our Kate-to-be.
In The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal, the woman whose baby was born dead, said ‘when was the baby’s last moment alive? Was it when I was sewing that last stitch, or just before the blood started?’
And I thought ‘when did the heartbeat stop? Was it when I was on my way for the scan? Was it during a row? Was it the night before I woke that morning and felt there was something different within me? Or was it just while I was drinking a cup of tea or laughing at Have I got News for You?’
My mother died.
I knew I was ovulating. I made sure we made love and the test was positive. A month later, I passed the embryo, bleeding into toilet paper in the toilets at Leeds Central Methodist Church. I put it in a plastic container in case they could find out why I had lost two pregnancies. This was 1995. I was 41.
I broke down. Everything was lost : relationship, job, home.
It was an insubstantial dream, an infatuation, a wild, thrilling, but ultimately fatal ride on an untamed horse.
On 13 October 1996, he left.
This was the beginning of my life alone. At the very back of my mind I knew that the chances of becoming a mother were now very remote indeed, but I was never able to really grieve that loss. So from here, my story was more about being alone than not being a mother. But we all know that our stories are a weaving of all the threads of that complex pathway.
Struggling to survive
I was 42. The year of losses had sucked the life from me. I was a shadow. Fear and insecurity drove me back to the same place to work in a soul-destroying job, the shining light being the women, the new colleagues who were simply kind and warm and asked no questions. Two out of four of them were lesbians and one was Asian. I think they understood what it meant to be an outsider, to feel rejection.
The grief and loss gnawed and tore at me. Being touched by the yoga teacher to correct a pose triggered agonising longing, I would howl in my car on the way home. Getting home to the empty, bleak house, after a weekend with other people, was desolate. I thought I would never, ever, get over losing him. I did, though. I got over losing him. I had other lovers. But it took so long. I was not able to look at another man for a long time, let alone consider the chance of having a child with him. All I knew was how to get through each day, the pain, the loss, the utter, swirling bewildering nightmare.
I had never even lived alone before, never been single since I was 18. My safety net was medication but I was still beset with anxiety attacks that came out of nowhere and had me feeling I was merely clinging on to life itself.
He was the only man I ever wanted to be pregnant by. I opened to him, he made me feel fertile and womanly. I drew him in. I couldn’t ever express it, even within myself, nor to him, but it was so.
After he left, I thought it was because there was something wrong with me. I tried to make myself worthy. ‘You’ll only find someone when you’re happy to be alone’ they said. I believed them.
After him, I didn’t buy a house because I didn’t feel able to sustain a mortgage alone and anyway, I didn’t have work that was secure or permanent enough to get a mortgage
After him, no one could compare, until, 17 years later, I fell in love with a man, an artist from my home city. He fell in love with me. He was not available though. It took me a while to understand that. And then I was very sad.
I struggled, almost constantly, on and off benefits, feeling the shame of living ‘on the state’ and a permanent bewilderment that this could have happened to me, that this was what my life had become. I never stopped worrying about money and to this day my stomach lurches if a brown envelope comes through the letter box. But, in amongst it all, I managed trips to Syria, to Spain, to Turkey. I never let go of my dream of foreign lands.
I had temporary, part-time jobs – admin jobs, cleaning, ironing, leading health walks at a women’s centre. Juggling jobs as a waitress and receptionist at a swish retirement village, with teaching English to rich young Arab men in a Yorkshire mill town. Working as an artist’s model and finally, much later, – and this was a brilliant job! – theatre attendant.
I was single, I owned no house or flat, I had no children and I had no proper job. I had sisters and a brother and they all had children. I was a kind of ‘bolt-on’ to their lives – but not really a full part. When my mother was alive I had a sense of security merely from her being in the world. After her death and the loss of my relationship, I felt I had to struggle for my place in the family. I was not like the others, with a partner and children. I no longer belonged automatically somehow. I felt out in the cold, or included as an optional extra.
Christmas times were so hard and miserable. It felt as if the world was taunting me. I had invitations but I felt like a poor relation. It just emphasised me as the outsider. Eventually, with a little more money, I was able to escape to places where Christmas was different.
I had numerous different anti-depressants, numerous referrals to mental health services. I was ashamed of all of this. I knew that if I had had someone to love and a place in the world, I would not have needed any of these things.
I cycled into depression and out of it.
I was desperate for affection and belonging and that made me make bad choices. Having someone, woman or man, seemed better than no one, however emotionally repressed or screwed up, manipulative or married.
I tried everything – courses, studying, religion, jobs, volunteering, communities, sex, exercise, gardening. The loneliness and the lack of a fundamental place to belong always returned.
I was, simply, full of shame, suffused with it, drenched in it, saturated. I needed to grieve, but I didn’t know it. And no one told me.
No one ever said ‘you are grieving your childlessness, because you know you will never be a mother. And that grief is intensified because you are alone to deal with everything in your life. You have to show up every day and make things happen. And that is hard, especially when you have lost so much – your relationship, your mother, your pregnancies, your home, your job’.
Hysterectomy
The heavy bleeding gradually came back and began to be disabling yet again and at around 50, I had a hysterectomy.
My uterus, it was implied, was a useless thing that had only ever given me problems. Had been barren. Empty. Fallow. Had only bled and bled and never nurtured and grown a baby inside me. Not only that but instead of accepting new life, had grown tumours that distorted it and caused pain. I felt de-sexed. There was no ‘permission’ to grieve the final, definitive confirmation of my childlessness and so I did not recognise it myself as something to be grieved. It was unwitnessed, unrequited grief, and I was alone with it.
Why wasn’t there help for a childless woman to grieve the loss of her womb? Why is there not understanding that this loss resurrects the deep loss of the children that womb never held?
Yet still I minimised and did not attend to my deep grief.
In 2012 I came back after some months of volunteering with a community on a Scottish island and fell into the deepest depression I’d ever known. I read somewhere that the last ‘bout’ is sometimes the deepest and I vowed in some deep place within that this would be my last, whatever I had to do to make it so.
I had no idea I was frozen in a glacier of decades-long loss that I had not been able to grieve.
A reason not to die.
There came a point when I had to decide whether I would continue to live, and I found, in the depths of despair, my reason not to die. It was this : I somehow deeply felt that it was not my choice to make. That is not to say I would ever judge another for making that choice. It was made in my circumstances – in other circumstances I may make a different choice. But that saved me and I kept on taking the next step, getting through one day, and at night, seeing that I had made it through a day, from some kind of blind faith, not even hope, nothing so alive as hope , I got up the next morning in the same way. And gradually, days became more than simply survival, sometimes they became sources of brief pleasure and satisfaction, and even a little joy. I was even loved and desired, and I knew some joy.
Through sheer good fortune, I found a good doctor and a gifted, compassionate counsellor.
For the first time I had consistent, involved support. Not those who were there for a while and changed jobs or who listened and then left it all with me again or who listened and forgot.
And so I began to make a life worth living. Yet still, the grief remained denied.
Looking back, I see…
I see how cheated I’ve been – cheated about children and cheated about worthiness, relationships, there being something ‘wrong’ with me because a man left me and because I was single.
I was a ‘good girl’. I was sensible. I did ‘the right thing’.
And those who didn’t care - who got pregnant without being married, got married in a registry office, who just moved away and led their own lives, who married much, much older divorced, non-Catholic men, drank gin and orange and smoked even in front of their parents - they got to be mothers, grandmothers. They got their place, they get to post their photos on Facebook – as if it’s to their credit when in fact, it’s just biology.
During my twenties, I never really thought I was ‘grown up’ enough to have a child. I saw it as a huge responsibility. No one ever, ever told me that NO ONE ever feels grown up enough! Probably because I never talked about it to anyone. So that’s my fault too? I was a ‘clever’ girl – and the ‘top set’ girls weren’t going to throw themselves away by becoming unmarried mothers… they were going to be professionals. It just wasn’t a thing. No one talked about it, and to me, it looked boring.
Yet ironically, having a baby means you’re a real grown-up – and if you haven’t got one, you aren’t one. You’re not a credible woman. Not a real woman. Fruitfulness, it seems, is the sine que non of womanhood.
They say I’m brave, they admire me. Yes, I’m strong, and vulnerable. Sometimes I think I tolerate too much, because I had no choice in the past but to live through the pain.
I was duped and cheated. I didn’t ‘do it wrong’. I’ve spent so long thinking I did.
I spend a long, long time writing this story, my story. Hours and hours focusing on my pain and losses. I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. Is it making it worse, this dwelling on the past?
Something Jody said somewhere, has come home to me.
‘We are worthy. It is not our fault’.
It is not my fault. The key turns and clicks home. And the tidal wave breaks over me. At last, after all these years of denying my very self.
The pain of losing so much I never had. A father. Children I didn’t even know I wanted. A happy, lasting partnership.
And in all this, no one particular moment that I could point to and say ‘that is when it happened. Then, is when I was bereft.
The weeping sweeps in and out like the tide. I am engulfed, but I know I will rise to the surface.
It’s not my fault.
I’m only 66. There’s time.
Anon.