Ways to move through childless grief

Meriel Whale

I always wanted to be a Mum. When I knew for definite that it would not be possible, all my carefully made plans, my dreams, my hope for my future, all crashed and burned and I felt as if I was left with nothing. Alone in the ruins of my life, I had to find ways to start again, ways to survive. And that’s what I want to write about today. How to survive and thrive when what you have experienced feels un-survivable. The grief, the sadness, the pointlessness of it all, the horror of realising you can never be a parent. The hopelessness of it all. Watching others having what you have longed for, and the pain of feeling that no-one understands what you are going through. I was there. I thought my life was over. I felt as if there was a wall separating me from everyone I loved.

And that loneliness that I felt, leads me to my first point about healing from childlessness.

Find your tribe, the people who understand, the people who have walked this path ahead of you, and those who are still walking it. Find them and spend time with them. They are out there, just waiting for you to come and join them. If you feel comfortable to talk to people already in your life, then ask them where their childless friends and family members are. If that feels like too much, then join one of the many communities that are springing up, both online and face to face. Gateway Women, the Childless Collective, the Full Stop Community and many Facebook groups.

Allow yourself to grieve, don’t undervalue your own grief. People who try and tell us we need to move on, probably don’t understand how we are feeling. You have a right to grieve. You have a right to process what has happened to you in whatever way you choose. Mourn. Mourn fully before you try and find a Plan B, your future life. You could probably move forward by an act of will, but if you can, stop, wait, give yourself time to clear the ground of your life as fully as possible before you go on to build on it. Judge for yourself when it is time to move on. It’s your choice, not others, no matter how well meaning they are. Your choice when to move on, your choice about what to do to help you with that process, your choice whether you ask for advice or not. People who hurry you on can feel as if they are dismissing you and all you are going through.

Recognise your feelings, your right to grieve, claim this as a real loss despite what others say, the loss of the life you longed to live, the life you thought would be yours, the parent you hoped and dreamed you would be. Just the simple act of naming my feelings rather than pushing them down made a huge difference. Visual and tangible things work well for me and so I commissioned a ring from a childless jeweller and friend to symbolically hold my feelings.

Find things to feed your soul in whatever way works well for you. I found comfort from reading – Lord of the Rings is a favourite book of mine – from being outdoors and from studying Creative Writing.

Eventually, I had to – I wanted to - move forward and I did this in community, through courses, through my own creative projects, both connected to childlessness and not, through the gift of time, although there were times when I would have done anything to hurry it up. I did this in nature and I did this through reconnecting to life, even though this was sometimes painful. And I did this through reasserting my worth as a person, and reasserting that I was good enough – more than good enough – as I was, with or without children, that I did not need to follow that ‘normal’ path, much as I had wanted to, to be a good enough person.

I also changed my job. I was already a counsellor, but I decided to work almost solely as a counsellor for childless not by choice people, alongside my ‘day’ job. It really helped me to know, once the worst of my grief was behind me, that I was doing something positive with the experiences I had had, that I was finding ways to help the people walking the path that I had so painfully navigated.

And the final thing I would say, is that you are not alone. Our feelings are hard, and they come and go, recovery is not a straight line. But there are others who will walk with us, both people with and without children. Reach out –to groups, to individuals, to yourself. Allow yourself process your grief by acknowledging that it is real and normal to feel this way, and then by finding the best ways for you to make sense of how you are feeling. Through counselling, through social and support groups, through events like World Childless Week, through writing, journaling and the arts, through meditation, yoga, mindfulness, running…there are a million ways and all you need to find is your own and the people who will help.