When did you know you’d started to move forwards? Did you wake up one morning and decide today was the day to makes changes or did you reflect over the last year and see subtle differences? Perhaps you accepted an invite to an event that you would have previously declined attending?
What has changed in your life and how does it make you feel?
In this webinar Sue Bulmer of Metaphorically Maternal will explore creativity and its many benefits. Simple ways we can be more creative in our own daily lives and how creativity can help us to process difficult feelings and emotions such as grief and loss.
You can see Sue’s list of ‘ways to boost creativity’ here
Join Anastasia MacDonald of Full of Life for this thoughtful self-care workshop. Anastasia will start by leading you through a meditation and then mindfully hold the space while you create an artistic expression that captures your own experience of the meditation.
You can read the guided meditation here
Join Sarah Jane Smith of Embodied Possibility for a guided 30-minute Self Compassion Meditation. No experience necessary, come as you are. Create a comfortable seat in a quiet place, have a pen and paper or journal nearby.
In this webinar Stephanie Joy Phillips, Meriel Whale, Susan Darlington, Vicky House, Chiara Berardelli and Lesley Pyne talk about some of the different ways we can acknowledge and remember the children we hold in our hearts and not in our arms. Actions we have taken to help us to move forwards through our grief, without forgetting our parenthood dreams.
It’s been almost 8 years since my only pregnancy and miscarriage,
Five years of fertility treatments, and
many embryos that did not grow in my body.
So many sad months of getting my period.
So much grief.
Until the moment I met my husband I was child-free. In that I knew I wanted children some day, but had never yet met anyone I wanted to have them with.
My story is almost two decades old now. It has been over 20 years since I began trying to conceive. Over 20 years since I first realised that it was not happening.
Peace in her Smile
Her smell.
The touch of her soft skin on mine.
The sound of her gentle breath.
The wonder in her tiny form.
I sat as calmly as I could this week while Esther, the acupuncturist, held my wrists palms up and felt my pulse. Her pulse check came after inspecting my tongue and my eyes.
10th April 2012, my husband and I had just failed our 4th and final attempt at IVF.
My child’s name lays on my lap.
What I thought I knew.
My life has slipped through my fingers.
Sitting with my tears
I recognise the etched feeling in my heart
Yes, it is grief
Why has it taken so long… perhaps it hasn’t as the small steps have constantly evolved but I am now at a point where I am looking back at the long road behind me.
Mine is a childless-not-by-choice story. A year ago, at age 39, I was finally diagnosed with Endometriosis.
Is that really possible? If we ‘move on’ from our grief of childlessness, does that mean that we didn’t
want children badly enough?
There were truth seekers and speakers,
hysterectomy and cancer conquerors
and many who finally felt seen.
I move forward, always slightly uphill on rocky terrain, carrying my experience and treasuring the contents of my baggage.
A poll was carried out in Childless Perks!! to discover our favoutite Perks for 2021.
I dreamt about you
You never had a face
You were part of my dream life
You were part of my silent thoughts
I spent most of my life looking to have children. As a child I loved playing with my dolls, pretending they were my little babies, thinking that one day they will be real kicking, screaming, giggling bundles of pure joy that will love me as I will love them.
All I wanted to be when I grew up was to be a wife and mother. I was a social misfit and longed to fit in.
My experience of childlessness is like climbing a mountain on a circular path- moving on is moving upwards and to my surprise I am feeling hopeful.
Have you heard of parallel universes? I’m no quantum physicist but basically it is the idea that many universes exist at the same time, parallel with the one we live in right now.
Sharing my story has given me strength, courage and healing in accepting my life as a childless woman.
I expected to have children. The lives of everyone in our family were derailed by a car crash that happened to a family member. My first husband wasn’t good at helping a bereaved wife.
I am 69 years young. I was a nurse, Ward sister and midwife. Like many of you I have experienced the profound sadness that not being able to have your baby brings.
There was a time when I was caught in a small sense of self, living with apprehension, fear, avoidance and grief.
I had high hopes for 2020, it was the first time in a long time that I felt a stirring inside me of things shifting and moving of change and energy. I even made a list of all the things I wanted to do, see, achieve, and explore…
You are able to conceive as both of you have all working parts. Never did I think these words from the fertility specialist would end up being a lie.
Growing up, so many of us think about what we will do as adults and what life will look like. For me, the overriding dream I had, from a very early age, was to travel the world.
For good chucks of my life, I would be thankful for the way my life was unfolding.
Shortly before midnight on the night of my 50th birthday, I started to cry and could not stop. My mother had died four months earlier.
Lengthening of muscle as the stretch reaches a hand's-length further past the mole on her right calf.
Opening of psyche as her new and healthy thought bubbles up unbidden and is accommodated.
Right now I am happier than I’ve ever been. This doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t change anything if I could.
When I was a young child my pre-school bully teased me for being “a scribbler.” My inability
and unwillingness to color inside the lines earned me the taunt.
My colleague told me today that she was pregnant. I smiled and congratulated her wholeheartedly. At
last, I thought, I have accepted my fate.
This poem I wrote the time when things started to click that I could create a new life, one that wasn't dictate to by society, but one of my very own.
A few years ago, I carried out a private ceremony to mark the loss of my unconceived children.
Like many experiencing confinement at home, there have been a few emotional struggles. Anxiety brought on by not knowing what lays ahead.
‘There’s more to life than just getting married and having kids, Yvonne’, said my confident, beautiful, perfectly organised blonde P.E. teacher, during a return visit to my old school with other friends from my year.
When did I start to know I had started to move forwards? Was it when I gave away the baby clothing I bought on our first IVF cycle?
I am always very keen to move forward. So keen that I would happily put the pain in a box, label it “dangerous/don’t open” and lock it up the attic for ever.
One afternoon a few years ago, after a searing romantic disappointment, I sat at the piano and, unexpectedly, poured out all my feelings into a song.
We both remember that moment vividly, the exact moment when we decided to stop fertility treatments and embrace life as a complete family of two (and pets!).
I submitted a story last year as we were right in the middle of lockdown. It was like therapy for me submitting our story, it really brought home what we had been through and survived!
I never foresaw that I would be childless. Never imagined that I could not only survive this but thrive.
I was never ready to have a child, but I always loitered along the razor’s edge of wanting one. I cast away all my healthy reproductive years to the agony of indecision.
In a fairytale world, I would be the witch. Not to be nasty: in fact, I am quite happy. Grey and drizzly outside and I am tucked up by my fire, my cat at my side, her head all warm and comfy on my hip.
Dreams shattered and destroyed
Feelings of loss and loneliness
Not fitting inside society’s box
Having a hysterectomy felt like, at the time, the permission I needed to start moving forwards, to begin to widen the scope of view on my life.
It sounds so mature – I’ve accepted my unexplained infertility, embraced my childless state, and am moving on into a new and wonderful future full of joy and endless amazing opportunities.
As I struggle to find the words to express my journey, I decided to use textiles.
It was the end of 2015 and my now-hubby and I had just bought our dream house in regional NSW.