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. I am making progress. It has been thirty years now of working through this whole thing so it’s been a long time coming…. I am discovering that I am facing the same thorny situations and events but over time I realise these are seen from a different perspective, each time from a higher place. Here are a few examples of how I have seen the landscape change for me even in the most recent lap of this mountain - just in the past two years or so.
Being able to genuinely feel vicarious joy for young mums and when I see young families being happy together. It makes my heart expand and sing instead of shrinking in pain.
Holding people’s babies and actually feeling neutral about it.
An understanding that grief comes in many forms and those childless women don’t have a monopoly on pain. This has (amazingly!) enabled me to empathise with women who for example, keep having boys and desperately wanted a girl, or who have secondary infertility, or who have a child who is really hard work.
Moving from seeing my life as lacking the one thing I wanted, to seeing the richness of a full and meaningful life I love. The gap of childlessness has become a space where good things can happen. I have so much emotional energy for friendships and time for solitude and reflection.
The decision to ‘come out’ as childless by joining the private Gateway Women community and to begin articulating where I am and who I am becoming.
Being able to handle the ‘do you have children’ question with no qualms or necessary pre-set answer. I can answer spontaneously depending on who is asking and what I want to say.
As I said it’s a path upwards and the mountain is huge – so despite these victories, I am so not there yet! I still dislike baby showers, ultrasound scans, families on half term who hog the train seats and make a racket - but that’s okay and mostly avoidable.
However, looming ahead is the predicted disconnect with much-loved friends who are becoming grandmothers - the jealousy, loss, sorrow, and detachment that will likely accompany this transition. As it was when they first got pregnant thirty years back, it is me who will put in the work of reaching out, being happy for them, celebrating their joys and walking with them in their sorrows. And hoping they will occasionally return the favour.
I always wanted to be a part of the maternal mainstream and yet I am outside of it. I had so many dreams of the kind of mother I wanted to be. I still feel a sense of shame that I have failed in this basic and uniquely female reproductive rite of passage: pregnancy and childbirth. Hence, I am using my middle name to avoid identification on this World Childless Week forum. I don’t like that I feel like that! I know it’s ridiculous. I want to be bold and brave and undaunted by social judgement; but the fact I am still not ready is something I am going to forgive myself for. Maybe next year I will be a bit further round the mountain, sitting on a little bench and seeing even what I have written here from a different perspective with my full name and no shame.
Frances