I’ve never really liked sharing anything about my personal story - the part about not having kids, anyway. I never had a succinct answer I could give, no tidy three-sentence summary of my situation that made everything okay - made me sound okay. Rather, I always felt like such a failure for not becoming a mother. And an oddball. I actually felt ashamed about it. I recall a therapist once telling me, “Well, maybe you just don’t get to have that,” in response to my asking why I couldn’t be normal and have a family, something I so desperately wanted. In other words, to my ears, you’re a failure, an oddity. Why would I want to talk about that with anyone?
I’m now 53 years old and married for the last 15. The truth is, I was always ambivalent about having children, having grown up with parents who weren’t horrible people, just not very interested in their children. Their own anger and problems consumed them. I had to unlearn a lot of negative things from childhood and didn’t completely understand until my mid-30s that children and family weren’t a burden but something to cherish. I so wanted a partner to share that discovery and journey with.
I met my husband in my late 30s and kind of figured out after a few years that biological children were probably not going to be in the cards for me. That was difficult to say the least, but I had no idea what I was stepping into with his daughters from a previous marriage. I foolishly believed that his sabotaged relationship with his 4 teenage daughters could be healed and that we would be part of their lives - at least I would get to be their friend if not a “stepmother.” I had naively convinced myself that our being kind and caring people could overcome the extensive parental alienation instilled by their mother.
Unfortunately, that’s not how things work. Three of the four daughters behaved so awfully, so cruelly, that we actually stopped trying to communicate with them due to the emotional toll their behavior and actions took. After 9 years of giving them the benefit of the doubt, I finally let go of the illusion that they wanted to have a relationship, that we would be buddies and we would all be one big happy family. I finally understood that these were not and would never be my people. The oldest daughter has a good relationship with my husband, but she and I are friendly but not close.
At the same time, I had hoped for many years to move in the direction of adopting a foster child, but my husband bailed on me after the first mandatory class required for that process, feeling that he couldn’t go through the complications and heartache that would come with the process, things like having to explain his relationship with his adult daughters, to the social workers. Further, I believe he was genuinely traumatized by the daughters’ rejection and cruel scapegoating. He was full-up in the family heartache arena. But that didn’t lessen my pain. Still to this day, not adopting haunts me, because it was something I was open to doing, something that felt within reach.
A few years ago, I somehow stumbled on the work of Jody Day and her Gateway Women online community. I finally had words and knowledge to comprehend what I was going through. It was loss and grief, something that I never once talked about in therapy. (That still blows my mind to this day and highlights how important it is for childless women to find a counselor who does not dismiss or belittle our feelings about being childless.) I have worked through grief for a couple of years now, grief for the family I will never have - biological, step, or adopted.
I’ve come a long way in the last few years as I work on acceptance and contentment with my life. There are those days, though, when I falter. I get that feeling that I’m standing here kind of empty-handed and a little worn down, like I’ve taken some serious body shots over the years. I also feel a void sometimes that comes from the place where I think children, a family, should have been. Those days do come, but I don’t sink into depression and I do bounce back quicker. Additionally, a testament to my healing is that I no longer feel like a failure, which was a tremendously heavy and real burden for me for a very long time.
My journey will never be an elevator speech. There’s no succinct answer, but I do know now that I don’t have to explain or justify myself when someone asks about kids. I also don’t have to prove my worthiness to anyone asking the question. I don’t have to prove it to them and, much more importantly, I don’t have to prove it to myself.
Debra M.