Karen Morrione
Those of us without children know that the difference between being childless not by choice, or childfree – choosing not to have children – is not a bright, clear line. Most of us live on a continuum between these two states, and we can slide in either direction at any time. The grief of being childless and the peace of being childfree are not mutually exclusive; in fact, to heal the grief of childlessness is, at least in part, to find joy in the life we live without children, even though we wanted them. It is also possible to choose not to try to have children, for any number of practical, compelling reasons – and then one day wake up and realize that what we thought was a choice made of our own free will was nothing of the kind.
For much of my life, I considered myself to be on the “childfree” end of this spectrum, even though my decision not to have children was determined by a hereditary genetic clotting disorder called Leiden Factor V that also predisposed me to miscarriages.
I was eighteen when I had my first blood clot, a deep vein thrombosis in my left leg. I was hospitalized for ten days. When I was being released from the hospital, I asked the doctor what I needed to know about my condition for the rest of my life. He casually said, “If you ever get pregnant, you’ll have another clot.” That knowledge increased my fear of pregnancy, which was already very high.
The most serious of my clotting incidents occurred the summer I was thirty-six, and required me to be hospitalized on and off for 4 months and go through three bowel resections to remove dead or dying parts of my small intestines, as well as a gall bladder removal, and finally a hernia repair to fix the damage done to my abdominal muscles by the previous surgeries.
In the aftermath of that summer, my husband and I knew I should never try to bear children of my own. We also decided that if we couldn’t have a child of our own, we did not want to adopt. Surrogacy was not even a consideration for us and, like adoption, would not have been affordable. We spent our forties and fifties working hard, traveling as much as we could afford, and building a life that we were content with, and occasionally joyful to be living. We spent Thanksgiving in Cancun, we were in Paris on the Pont Neuf to ring in the new millennium, and we visited Amsterdam and the Netherlands almost every year. We went to the beach once or twice a year, with our beloved dogs and often friends or extended family, and we renovated our house. We took in a nephew for two years while he dealt with the trauma he experienced in Iraq, and we spent time cooking wonderful food, having game nights, and going to concerts and plays and other events with friends.
I found a job in health communications that gave me a purpose, providing clear, life saving guidance to people facing public health emergencies. In time, I became a supervisor and had the joy of growing and mentoring a team of talented young professionals.
It felt like enough, and because of my condition, I didn’t really expect to live to grow old in any case. But I stayed healthy, and we planted flowers and vegetables, we hung bird feeders, and we made the most we could of every day.
I turned sixty in April 2019. Three years earlier, in 2016, my husband and I had become caregivers for my mother, who was eighty-two and legally blind. We moved her from her home in Gulfport, Mississippi to an apartment near us in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. When it became clear that, due to her near blindness and a heart condition, she could no longer live alone, we made the decision to move to a new house where we could all live together. I remember taking friends to visit the new house before we moved in, and saying to them, “I am so happy about this house and this move! I think my sixties may be my best decade ever!”
But by March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading across the globe. With no treatment for this novel virus that was killing millions, isolation was the first line of defense. Around the world, people tried their best to adapt to a new way of life that kept us separate from friends, colleagues, and family - a separation that to some degree endures to this day.
As frightening as this was, I believed that somehow, everything would be alright, at least for my small family. My mother and I had already endured the loss of my father to cancer when I was only eight, and my brother to a drunk driver when I was twenty-four.
Nevertheless, the added responsibility for her well-being and exposure to what it’s truly like to get very old (as I write this my mother is a few months away from turning ninety), combined with the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic, ratcheted up my anxiety level to near unbearable. Then in late 2021, my husband had a heart test that was a wake up call for me.
Suddenly, I realized that, but for my mother and my husband, I am alone in the world. If I grow old, and blind, and unable to care for myself like my mother, I won’t have children to care for me.
This realization forced me to acknowledge that what I had always considered a choice to not have children was actually not a choice that I freely and consciously made. It was instead a blind acquiescence to the circumstances of my life – that pregnancy could injure or kill me, that my likelihood of carrying a child to term and healthy delivery was low, and that adoption wasn’t affordable, nor were we likely to be approved given my health issues. Further, I was terrified that I would lose a child the way my mother had, that I would have to grieve a child. After grieving my father and my brother, I could not take the risk of that kind of loss. What I didn’t know then is that it is not possible to avoid grief. It is a part of living and loving other people.
In other words, I was not “childfree,” I was actually “childless.” I would never know the joy of holding a baby that combined my heritage with my husband’s. We would never get to celebrate the milestones of life with children, like first days of school, marking our children’s growth on a chart or the door jamb, photos with Santa, school pictures, athletics, science fair, first dates, prom dates, learning to drive, college admissions, building a career, finding a partner, getting engaged, getting married, maybe even starting a family of their own. We would never have any of that.
Grief, my old frenemy, came back to visit. And for the last three years, grief has been my most constant companion. I know that I see family life through rose-colored glasses, and that the reality is as much stress and worry as it is joy and belonging. But that knowledge doesn’t keep me from thinking “if only…” and I will always grieve that I am childless by circumstance – that I didn’t really get to make a choice, even if I would have chosen to be childfree.
My wedding rings are the rings that my father gave my mother, and I love them because of that, as well as their beauty. It’s a small thing to worry about, but I wonder who will end up with them. When I die, two love stories that those rings have told will end…there won’t be anyone to carry them into the next generation. I wish that they could become part of a new love story that echoes the story of my parents, and of my husband and me.
I hope that in time, my husband and I find connections with the next generation that will allow us to pass on our story, my parents’ story, and maybe these rings, to someone who will cherish them and remember us with love.
