DZ

I started writing in the World Childless Week of 2020. Since then, I talk about the feelings that ebb and go as we come to terms with our involuntary childlessness.

In Episode 1, I spoke of how my identity as a woman was broken when I learned of my infertility, as I had interiorized that woman equal children. So, I pivoted my identity to my work and career. In spite of me enjoying problem solving and spending countless hours at work, that was not my identity; I was working hard as the means to provide better opportunities to my future children. With no future children in sight, a career identity was the obvious choice to fill the void.

But when in one of the fortuitous turns of corporate world, my work stopped giving me the agency I needed, my identity was falling short. I tried career coaching, which gave me tools, but was not addressing the identity issue I had not realized I had. Unconsciously, from career, I pivoted to my relationship and when a wedge opened in it, I was left clinging to my previous dissolving identities. The mere sight of kids in the subway would make me cry. That was the point when I started therapy.

Growing is the process of becoming; of choosing among all the potential possibilities of ourselves, sometimes with unexpected binding constraints or limitations. The identity is always looking for that next choice that defines us. I want to become the things I admire. I admired motherhood, I wanted to become a mother. I admired agency, I wanted to become an executive. I admired lasting loving relationships, I wanted to become a wife.

I recently gave a workshop on model risk management. The basics of it: every model has limitations; risk managing models is about identifying those, establishing compensating measures, monitor the model performance and re-do the model if it starts to diverge from reality. Identity is a model of the self.

I am in the process of building those compensating measures.