“Other Ways/Andre Veier”: From the grief of a “life never imagined” to founding the first Norwegian organization for the permanently childless

Saturday 28 May 2016, Stockholm.

I am guest speaker at a “Childless Day” event organized by a Swedish association for the involuntarily childless in Stockholm. I have been asked to talk about my experience. ‘But what shall I say?’ I remember asking, incredulous at the invitation I had just received. ‘Just tell your story,’ said Linda Malm with her eternally smiling voice. I am staying at a hotel in the hip area of Södermalm. From here, this morning, while having breakfast in a cloud of cinnamon scent, I recognized in the distance the dome of the venue where, just a couple of weeks ago, the country hosted the Eurovision song contest. My academic expertise is in politics and media. I never decided not to have children. I am not infertile either. How did I get here?

I am Italian, 44 years old, I am Professor in Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Oslo, and I was diagnosed, years ago, with “unexplained infertility”—and what you have just read is not, really, the beginning of my story.  It is, however, the turning point where I understood the importance of breaking the silence about what it means to be childlessness, both for myself—as if, with every word I let out, I could drain one more drop of the poisonous pain I had inside—and for others—who, I realized, could find comfort in knowing they were not alone in their grief.  It was also the beginning of an inspiring friendship: first with Linda, then with the members of a growing international network of men and women in similar circumstances who wanted to help others. They all have supported, given purpose, motivated me—through the power of human connection and the sense of belonging to a community—to research childlessness and writing about it.

As I explain in another post published on Wednesday as part of World Childless Week both research and creative writing helped me process my own grief and make sense of the deafening silence that, even in the alleged “age of communication,” surrounds millions of individuals (Rutstein and Shah 2004: xiii; Boivin et al. 2007: 1509) around the world.

I have come a long way from a point in my life—not that long ago, actually—where I had, literally, lost the plot. I was in free fall, the reference points I had grown to expect, since my childhood, about “family,” the “future,” even my very being a “woman” completely drained of any meaning. I was not sure what reason I had to get up in the morning. I had lost interest in, practically, anything.

Since then, if I look back, with ups and (a lot of) downs, not really knowing at any single time where I was going, and taking it one day at a time, I have conducted a study that explained the silence around involuntary childlessness (Archetti 2019a); demonstrated the extent to which childless individuals are publicly stigmatized (in films, for example: see Archetti 2019b); experimented with theatre in talking about involuntary childlessness (Archetti 2018); (co)organized two public events (“Untold Stories” 2018, Litteraturhuset, 8 February Oslo; “Ufrivillig barnløshet og helsemessige perspektiver [Unvoluntary childlessness and health perspectives],” forthcoming 24 October 2019, Arkivet, Kristiansand); contributed as one of the main characters to Mammaen i meg (The Mum in Me) (2020, forthcoming), a documentary on the unexplored emotional and social consequences of involuntary childlessness, by director Hilde Merete Haug, now one more friend I turn to for inspiration; joined World Childless Week and became one of their spokespeople (“champions”). I am publishing two books about this whole journey: Childlessness in the Age of Communication: Deconstructing Silence (Archetti 2020, forthcoming) will be in print early next year; Writing About Silence: An Autoethnography of Researching Childlessness (provisional title) is in the pipeline.

But the journey continues. I have now teamed up with Cecilie Hoxmark, a courageous loud voice in an otherwise silent land—listen to her brilliant podcast series on involuntary childlessness, “Banrnløs på godt og vondt (Childless for good or bad)”; watch her telling her uplifting story). Together we have founded a support page for involuntarily childless women in Norway “Den hemmelige hytta (The secret cabin)” and the first organization for the permanently childless, “Andre veier (Other ways).” “Andre veier” is open to women, men, transgender, voluntarily and involuntarily childless individuals, parents who might have lost their children or whose children are estranged—indeed anyone who would like to support our efforts to create a society where everyone is truly equal regardless of reproductive ability (find out more about our mission here).

Particularly the founding of a formal organisation was important to us for two reasons, one related to raising awareness of and understanding of involuntary childlessness, the other concerning the unique challenges this issue faces in a Nordic context. I will briefly expand on them.

First, it is essential to reclaim childlessness the way “we” experience it. Childlessness is not “just” about infertility or (not) having the baby. Of course the (missing) “baby” is a key component of this picture. Yet, childlessness happens more often “by circumstance” than out of any purely medical problem and involves a whole existential dimension: a life crisis with devastating consequences on relationships, identity, even one’s relation to her or his own body to name a few (Archetti 2020, forthcoming). The silence and shame that envelop involuntary childlessness have also far-reaching social and political consequences. They translate into the needs and interests of individuals without children not being publicly represented. There are, in fact, no structures, at the moment, that help us dealing with what happens when we “stop trying”: an extended grief process comparable to bereavement (Volgsten, Skoog Svanberg, and Olsson 2010; Day 2016, especially Chapter 4 “Working through the grief of childlessness”; Day 2018; Farncombe 2018; Hooper 2018), disorientation (Thorn 2009, Leon 2010), isolation (Wenger, Scott, and Patterson 2000; Dykstra 2006; Dykstra and Wagner 2007), having to rebuild a life from scratch with no available alternative script to fall back onto. Not only do we need creativity and each other’s help to imagine a new future and carving a role for ourselves in a society that is not designed for “us.” There are pressing practical concerns, too, that need addressing. To mention only the one that causes most anxiety: Who is going to take care of “us” when we grow old? I will return to this in a moment.

The second need for having an organization to represent the childless is that some of the issues I have just mentioned are extremely difficult to raise in a country, like Norway, that consistently tops the ranking of the best countries in the world to live in (see, for instance, Helliwell, Layard, and Sachs 2019: 24-27), and is internationally renowned for its extensive welfare state and women-friendly policies (World Economic Forum 2018: 10-11)—because according to the “majority discourse” and against existing research that shows that men, too, long to become parents (Hadley 2015, 2018; Hadley and Hanley 2011; Hanna and Gough 2016, 2017, 2018), having children is regarded as a “woman’s” domain. While these aspects reflect, without question, a well-functioning society in comparison to many other lands around the world, the reality of life in the country is not for all that narrative of “perfection” and “happy exception” (“it might happen abroad, but not in Norway” is the usual refrain) that pervades public discourse. More precisely, to put it bluntly, Norway is not as inclusive a society when you don’t have children. 

To start with, the omnipresent Scandinavian welfare state is, at a closer look, not that ubiquitous. When it comes to the care of the elderly, even the welfare state (as anywhere else!) relies on the informal labour provided by close family members. As fertility and reproductive health expert Johanne Sundby (University of Oslo), in an interview I conducted with her for my book (12 September 2017), pointed out, institutionalized (non-family-provided) care is regarded, even in Norway, as ‘the last resort.’ Not to mention the fact that rural populations across the Nordic countries live in truly remote areas with extreme weather conditions for long spells of the year. 

Through both my study and personal experience of having lived in different countries throughout my adult life I have understood that involuntary childlessness, while being a stigmatizing condition everywhere, is in many respects a greater taboo in Nordic countries than, for instance, in Southern Europe. Because the entire society here revolves around children, deviation from the “norm” tends to mean a greater degree of isolation. It also generates unbearable pressure on women to go to extreme lengths to get that-baby-that-everyone-else-has. My research also confirms that women-friendly societies, like Norway and Sweden, might in fact be only mother-friendly, raising questions of inclusion for those women who will never experience motherhood. Some women, in other words, are more equal than others.

The case of socially isolated childless men in Norway (Skrede 2015) underlines a further potential failure of inclusion of the “Nordic Model”: in Norway practically one in four men (24%) born in the 1970s will never be a father (Bye 2018: 7), but this issue, with the exception of some unenlightening media articles that regurgitate statistics every now and then, is quietly ignored.

There is an urgent need to bring into the open the issue of childlessness and its multifaceted consequences, especially in Norway and the Nordic context more at large. We were inspired by the example set by Linda Malm, particularly by her Facebook group “Ofrivilligt barnlös – Andra sidan tröskeln – för kvinnor (Involuntary childless – The other side of the threshold – for women)” and the organization for the permanently childless (Andra sidan tröskeln—Föreningen för permanent ofrivilligt barnlösa (The other side of the threshold—Association for the involuntary permanently childless) she founded in Sweden. We want to work with anyone who shares our concerns from anywhere in the world, of course. We are even more interested, though, at this stage, in networking with similar organisations in Denmark, Finland, and Iceland. If they don’t exist yet, then do get in touch and let’s find out how we can help each other establish one! 

A Nordic network would be a powerful platform to tackle the challenges we face in breaking taboo in the lands of alleged “equality and freedom of speech.” Nobody out there is asking questions that are crucial to the health, wellbeing, and rights of an increasing proportion of citizens and who, as a result, remain in the shadows. Nobody does, but we will.

 

Cristina Archetti (cristina.archetti@media.uio.no) is Professor of Political Communication and Journalism at the University of Oslo, Norway. Her book Childlessness in the Age of Communication: Deconstructing Silence will be out early in 2020, published by Routledge. 

 

References

Archetti, Cristina (2018). Embodied. Performance lecture delivered at “Fortellerfestivalen [Norwegian Storytelling Festival],” Sentralen, Oslo, 14-15 April. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XcAzx0jlhI [Youtube video].

Archetti, Cristina (2019a). From inside the body to policy: Towards an embodied theory of silence. Paper presented at the International Communication Association Annual Convention, Washington, D.C., 26 May. https://bit.ly/2QtgSPK

Archetti, Cristina (2019b). No life without family: Film representations of involuntary childlessness, silence and exclusion. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 15(2): 175–196. https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.15.2.175_1. Read a draft of the article here.

Archetti, Cristina (forthcoming 2020). Childlessness in the Age of Communication: Deconstructing Silence (Abingdon: Routledge).

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Mammaen i meg (The Mum in Me) (2020, forthcoming). [documentary]. Directed by Hilde Merete Haug. Haugtussa Film.

Rutstein, Shea O. and Iqbal H. Shah (2004). Infecundity, infertility, and childlessness in developing countries. DHS Comparative Reports No. 9. Calverton, MD: ORC Macro and the World Health Organization. http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/topics/infertility/DHS-CR9.pdf

Skrede, Kari (2015). Når menn velges bort [When men are shunned]. Humanist, 9 April. https://humanist.no/2015/04/nar-menn-velges-bort/  

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Wenger, G. Clare, Anne Scott, and Nerys Patterson (2000). How important is parenthood? Childlessness and support in old age in England. Ageing and Society, 20(2): 161-182. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0144686x99007631

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