Sarah S
My ten-year run at trying for a baby ended the day of my thirty-fifth birthday when I spilt with my partner. By this point I’d already suffered nine miscarriages and an unanticipated two-year bout of unexplained infertility in between pregnancy’s three and four.
All tests performed by medical professionals, both for the infertility and the miscarriages concluded that they could find nothing to cause either; my reproductive system was working normally - accept of course that it wasn’t. I was so far from normal, normal was a distant twinkle in the night sky, now many light years old.
My unwillingness to give up hope of one day having a child ended up costing me dear; my marriage did not survive. Having fertility issues is like trying to survive a black hole as it swallows everything whole: romance, dreams, happiness, hope. And just as even light cannot escape it, it took our marriage too. And it was not the only way I lost out. Those years when I was held hostage by my hormones, I made one questionable decision after another. I stayed in a job I hated simply because the maternity package was sogood (you know, just in case) and after my divorce I pursued a highly unsuitable and damaging relationshipsimply for another chance to have a child. And I only ended it when he got another woman pregnant.
So that was me. Thirty-five, a bloody nose and waving goodbye to my last chance of becoming a mother. I had hit the proverbial rock bottom.Only, now I’m not so sure that I had. One of the consequences of being childless not by choice is that, amongst other things, it leaves people feeling utterly powerless. But, as I surveyed the wreckage of my life with all my dreams in tatters, I realised something. Yes I was alone and I was childless; it was the very thing I had feared the most. And yet, I was amazed to find I was still here. I was alive and functioning and contrary to what I had once believed, I had not self-combusted with the pain of it all. And that’s when it dawned on me that I did in fact still have some power; the power to choose.
Did I want to spend the rest of my life just surviving each day miserably and maintaining (as I had after each miscarriage) that something in me had broken which could never be fixed. Or did I want to believe I was fixable; get on and live my life and make it mean something.
It was empowering to realise I could refuse to live in unhappiness anymore. And over the next seven years, I treated my life as an art project to be carved out anew. A life that both excited and fulfilled me, regardless of what anyone else thought. I took heed of a suggestion to rekindle my childhood passions; to remember the person I used to be before I became an adult and life got all serious and shitty. I returned to university in order to retrain for a nursing career. I welcomed new friendships, wrote a book, rode horses, danced at festivals, kept chickens, travelled the world and for one year, I became a short-term foster carer. And yes, there was also a lot of love. In particular, I got to dedicate a significant amount of time with my mother when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer; something that might not have been possible if I’d had young children of my own. And a year after that, I met a wonderful man who is now my husband.
It wasn’t always easy. Sometimes all of this activity felt like the runner-up prize I had never wanted. But there comes a point when you realise, unless you want to spend the rest of your life in mourning and defining yourself by what you are not; to forever feel like a part of you is missing, there is only one option left. I had to accept my childlessness and move on.
For too long, I’d remained stubbornly attached to the belief that I could never be happy unless I became a mother. But in the end, it was the belief itself which caused me most sadness; I found the reality of not being a parent not nearly as painful as I’d anticipated. And after ten years of heartache, I was so ready to feel whole again. And so eventually, I went from someone who desperately wanted children to a person who was okay not having any.
I appreciate how ridiculously over simplified this must sound, but I have never found another successful way of dealing with unwanted childlessness. It took a lot of time and soul searching do be capable of changing my mindset. A person has to feel ready to leave their motherhood dream behind. They have to feel they have tried everything and pushed it as far as they can. One must process their grief first. But the truth is that for me, there was no other alternative and in the end, letting go of my desire to be a mother was ultimately what set me free.
Someone once told me there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and then finally, acceptance. During my darkest years, I found it impossible to imagine ever accepting my losses and my childless status. This was in part because I hadn’t finished processing my grief. But mainly it was because I didn’t know what acceptance would look like for me. In fact, I lived in it for some time before realising I had finally gotten there.
Sadly, there is no formula. Each of us has our own path to walk and our journeys will be unique; we will all be pioneers of our own story. What I can tell you is what acceptance feels like now that I’ve arrived here and hand on heart, I now accept my childless status without heartache, longing, or regret. Acceptance is a truly wonderful place to be at and my life without children is very content. It does not in any way feel inferior to the one in which I imagined being a mother.
My life, like all lives are made up of blocks of good and bad, happiness and sadness, wonder and tragedy. They are just different from one another. And I’ve had many moments since when I’ve felt giddy with happiness and actually wondered out loud, ‘Is this much happiness allowed?’ It still astonishes me to remember how I once believed all those cliches that try to suggest parents have exclusive rights to love and fulfilment in this world and the rest of us are just feigning it. That has not been my experience.
If hearing this makes you scoff with disbelieve then I understand. If hearing this makes you angry or makes you think that I couldn’t have wanted children as much as you do or else I’d never have gotten over it, then I get that too. When I wasn’t ready to let go of my motherhood dream, I would never have believed in acceptance either. When I hadn’t finished processing my grief, I couldn’t imagine that one day my broken heart would heal, my happiness would bloom and my sense of injustice would fade. However, I wonder now, that when I was in my darkest moments, would it have been enough just to know that I wasn’t alone? To know that there were others out there who had not only walked in my shoes and gone through all the pain and self-doubts as I had, but to know they had now made their peace with childlessness? That they were not only surviving life but were now happily thriving. Yes. I think it would have been good to know this.
