Our Stories

Plan your life, plan your baby, right? No, sadly it doesn’t work like that!

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.

I’d sit with my grandma and tell her about how I was going to travel around Europe in a campervan.

At other times, South Africa was my dream destination, maybe from seeing TV shows about animals in their natural habitat, or perhaps from attending Sunday school and hearing missionaries talk about their experiences in Africa.

I can’t really pinpoint how I was always so fascinated in travel, especially growing up in a fairly homogenous sea-side town in the north of England.

Travel wasn’t something that was really discussed much in our family, although we always had annual family holi-days in the UK and when I was 10 years old we flew to Spain from Blackpool airport! Wow, it was so exciting to be going abroad, albeit on a cheap package holiday with a bunch of Brits looking for Britain abroad. Ha ha!

Anyway, fast forward to my late teens and I took every opportunity to head off working or travelling overseas during my summer holidays, whilst training to be a teacher.

I had actually chosen teaching for 2 reasons, firstly because I loved doing voluntary work in primary schools during community placement in High School and secondly, those holidays!! The perfect career to fulfill my passions of liv-ing and travelling overseas and also working with kids!

In the late 70s my boyfriend and I travelled around Europe on his motorbike one summer to 7 countries and visited 3 of my German penfriends. Another year I travelled with friends to Italy, where I joined students from all over Eu-rope at a fabulous villa for a 2 week archaeology course, followed by a month working in a pizza restaurant. In 1980 we hitchhiked up through Scandinavia as far as the Arctic Circle, visiting my penfriend in Finland on the way and coming back down through Sweden. Another year I went to work on American Summer camp as a camp counselor and after getting married at 22, my husband and I did a bus/ hiking/ camping trip around Iceland.

Finally in our mid 20s we went to teach in SE Asia, which was a great base for travelling throughout the far east. After a couple of years I landed a dream job at the American School in Japan Nursery-Kindergarten. I loved the work, the kids, my colleagues and the philosophy of the school, but it was during this period as I was heading into my 30s that the nagging question kept popping into my head ‘Isn’t it about time we started to have babies?’

My husband and I knew that ultimately we wanted a family, but life overseas was good for us and he was very laid back, however it was MY body clock that was ticking! As I put my heart and soul into my teaching, I felt that it would be exhausting to actually teach AND be a mum at the same time, especially overseas, so we made the com-mitment to return to UK, closer to family and we came up with a great idea to set up a homestay business for Japa-nese people who wanted to come to UK and immerse themselves in life with a British family who knew and under-stood the Japanese psyche! Best laid plans......

Despite my best efforts to prepare myself holistically for pregnancy, it never happened. Friends were constantly an-nouncing their wonderful news and it turned out that being back in UK made my husband miserable as he mourned our free and easy life in Japan. All the things he thought he’d missed about England (going to pubs & football matches!) no longer appealed and we decided that we had in fact grown apart and we separated amicably and he re-turned to Japan.

And so I found myself, at 33, in UK wondering, what now?

Having been together with my ex since I was 15 I was at a loss as to where to next. It was obvious by this time that some women (me!) don’t just ‘fall pregnant’ when they decide that it’s time, and how on earth was I ever going to meet someone that I wanted to have a family with now!

My choice was to stay in UK or head back overseas. I was offered some interesting positions in education in Eng-land, but my true passion was still TRAVEL! But what about having my own kids????

I decided that the next area on my travel agenda was Africa or South America, so I started applying for jobs and to my delight a job came up at the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam, which is on the Indian Ocean and with a yacht club close by. Back in the late 80s my ex and I had gone on a Club Med holiday to the Maldives mainly to try our hand at scuba diving and sailing, so when the job came up in Dar I was excited at the thought of finally learning to sail and sure enough within a month of arriving I met a hunky Australian who told me that his dream was to build a yacht and sail around the world!! Well, you can imagine my reaction to that statement.... “I’ll be your crew!”

We got together and talked through everything, including the fact that I had always wanted children. To my surprise he told me that he’d given a lot of thought to this, as he already had a family, but he was willing to try again with the right partner. What wonderful dreams we had to look forward to!

As a teacher and a traveller, I had met many home schooled children and I had no qualms about sailing around the world with our kids, so the future was looking very rosy.

But try as we did, no kids came along. I went for tests back in UK during my summer holidays. Nothing seemed un-toward, but still no pregnancy. I always said that I wouldn’t go down the IVF route, but later when we were building our boat in Australia and I was turning 40 we agreed that we’d give it a go. Sadly the chances at that age were very limited. Alongside this I continued to try natural treatments and eventually it was time for us to launch our boat and sail off into the sunset.....

Moving Forwards.....

Part 2: Coming to Terms With the Disenfranchised Grief of Involuntary Childlessness

After a number of failed attempts at IVF, we looked at the area on our boat that we were considering making into a nursery and I reluctantly suggested that we turn it into an office. Finally we launched our boat in July 2001 and set sail back to Tanzania from Australia in 2002 to set up our marine consultancy and charter business.

Back in Dar es Salaam I considered returning to teaching, but it was all too raw and painful for me, being around young children knowing that it wasn’t happening for me, plus we had our business to run. As the clock ticked and life went on, we had fun living the expat life again with friends old & new. We loved living on our boat based at the Dar es Salaam Yacht Club, doing charters around East Africa and life was good in many ways. Our friends’ kids were growing up and parents were coming out to play again, and I must say I didn’t really envy the challenges of raising teenagers! Apart from that, I enjoyed the connection with many of the expat kids in our circle as they did tend to have a wide global outlook.

Gradually my husband and other friends became grandparents and this began to change the dynamics of our rela-tionships all over again. From our perspective we hoped to be able to continue sharing our lifestyle with our family, all of whom had flown out to Africa to visit us at one time or another, but soon after we closed off our business to pursue our dream of sailing around the world, the GFC hit and the money we’d made on the stock market crashed through the floor leaving us to decide whether to return to Australia from South Africa or to continue on our circum-navigation.

I decided that we didn’t build a boat to sail as far as Africa then turn round and go home, so despite our finances be-ing decimated we continued on our adventures way more frugally than we had planned, knowing that it was unlikely that our family would have the opportunity to join us on our travels as we’d originally hoped, as the distances and costs were prohibitive both for them to fly to us and for us to return to Australia. It was a heartwrenching decision and one that I have always felt guilty about, as I felt that I was keeping my husband away from his grandchildren. Having said that, I missed them terribly myself, but we had OUR dreams to consider too, right?!!

Around this time I was also moving towards menopause and I was definitely NOT prepared for the heartache as I finally accepted that, not only would I never be a parent, nor would I ever be a grandparent! Seeing my friends shar-ing photos of their darling grandchildren tore at my heartstrings. I was over the moon happy for them, whilst at the same time dying inside that I would never have that deep connection that they experienced. For me round 2 was def-initely harder as menopause cruelly shuts the door for us women. I felt myself becoming more and more disillu-sioned and bitter with life and our dreams and this wasn’t helped by our change in lifestyle and leaving the ‘security’ of our community and business, even though we were embarking on the next phase of OUR long held dream. Along-side all of this, what I didn’t realise was that the massive sense of failure that went along with being unable to con-ceive was actually a form of disenfranchised grief, which needs to be acknowledged and mourned.

How can you grieve something you’ve never had? It’s a very different kind of grief to losing a child, or even miscar-rying. I have never even carried a child, so how could I be grieving? It took me a long time to actually accept and acknowledge that that massive empty space in my heart was actually the disenfranchised grief of intangible loss.

The lightbulb went on for me when I came across Jody Day’s Gateway Women website and I started to read other women’s stories and realised that I was not alone in how I was feeling and there was a private forum for us to share our stories and our heartaches. This was an incredibly cathartic process and although I was, and remain, isolated physically I’ll always be grateful that the internet has provided me with a way to connect not only with family and friends, but also with my tribes; my childless tribes and my tribes of sailing women, global nomads and cruising ca-nines!

As I became more connected to my Facebook tribes I started to open up to my grief more and to acknowledge it by posting about it, not to be pitied, as my life was full and exciting as we sailed around the world meeting amazing people, experiencing different cultures and living life to the full. But I wanted to create more awareness of the chal-lenges of involuntary childlessness within the wider community. One of the hardest things for me, as a childless step parent with a wonderful step family, was the feeling that I didn’t actually fit into the childless camp (being a step mum & grandma, albeit very different than being a biological or even adoptive parent). I actually felt guilty posting things about my childlessness, as it felt like a betrayal not only of my step family, as they fully accept me and in-clude me in their lives, but also of my tribe of childless women!

Now in my early 60s I have moved on, but the heartache that goes along with involuntary childlessness never leaves. This past year being stuck in lockdown in the Philippines away from family, unable to get home to spend time with them or have them visit us has been particularly hard and were it not for the fact that we have our 2 little dogs onboard with us we would have sailed home to Australia. Similarly, people without children or partners or without close family support networks, have been incredibly isolated during the pandemic.

My hope, by sharing my story here, is that more women (and men) share their experiences so that we can not only support each other and know that we are not alone, but also bring this narrative to the table within government poli-cies, whereby more support services are created to meet the unique needs of the growing numbers of people without family support networks.

Lynne Dorning Sands