Bernice Ambrey

Walking down the supermarket aisle my eye caught a cover line on a well-known magazine – “3 women share their emotional stories of their infertility journeys”. Having long since given up reading women’s magazines for various different reasons (their appetite for celebrity-mother stories hadn’t helped), I wondered if the tide might be changingand our stories might be finally being shared. So, it was with a tiny bit of forced optimism that I put the magazine in my trolly and carried on with my weekly shop. When I got home I sat down to flick through the magazine and did the ‘thing’ I’ve only started doing since I ended my long and tedious journey to become a mother; I jumped to the final paragraph of all 3 stories to see if any of them ended with no baby. 

All 3 wonderful and brave women had shared their difficult journeys…..to parenthood and how their lives were changed forever. 

While I had the utmost sympathy for what they had been through I couldn’t help but feel that yet again this was a wasted opportunity to share the knowledge that only we childless people know and live through – it doesn’t always work out. I decided to reinstate my boycott of magazines for a little longer, or until they realised that not all infertility journeys end with the ‘miracle baby’.

I thought the television might be a useful distraction from my upset/anger/deflation and was pleased to see an elderly woman advertising a well-known holiday company; she looked happy, in good health and enjoying life. It cheered me up, until the entire clan appeared in the next shot, lots of happy faces of the multi-generational family coming together for a very expensive seafront break. 

Next up was a famous actress asking me to donate to a global charity with heart-breaking pictures of hungry children. Staring at the camera she told me that “as a Mother” she was appalled to see children suffering in this way and I made a mental note to think about swapping my monthly direct debit from them to another charity that could appreciate that “as a human” I was similarly heartbroken.

I decided to cheer myself up with a social media trawl (I was clearly having a very bad day) and found that a well-known celebrity had just had a child in her mid-fifties and had shared that belief that only the rich and entitled can have about family forming: #it’snever too late! (Don’t you just love a hashtag?!)

In desperation I thought I’d take in a nice easy-to-watch film and scanned my usual streaming services only to find the same old bland “boy meets girl, girl marries boy, has a baby and they live happy ever after”. I decided to write-off the day and go to bed.

While that might seem like a bad day in my entertainment choices it is unfortunately not that uncommon to feel like the pronatalist world is against you. 

Why is it proving so hard for the media industry to include the stories and lives of childless women and men? Why does nearly every story of infertility treatment end in a ‘miracle baby’ when the statistics show that a successful outcome just isn’t the reality for most women? Why do women without children get reduced to characters of pity or shame in tv and film? 

If the media world is finally waking up to the importance of representation and inclusivity, why do they continue to reinforce these dangerous myths and messages?  They are not only emotionally damaging to women like me, but they are also inaccurate and do a great disservice to younger women and men out there who see the headlines and breathe a sigh of relief that it’ll all work out ok in the end (or was that just me?). 

As certain taboos are being broken (who would have thought the menopause would be talked about quite so much even 5 years ago) it appears that childlessness is one topic that is just too scary for them (motherhood dissatisfaction is probably another one). Do we shake up the narrative just a bit too much for them?

As the childless community sadly already knows, fertility treatment doesn’t always end with the babe in arms, no matter how much you try and get there. Sometimes you really don’t meet Mr/Mrs/Miss Right in time and actually it is too late to become a parent as a result. Sometimes you don’t have the funds to go it alone or the support network close to you. Adoption isn’t always the right choice. And sometimes medical advances sound great and push the realms of science but when you dig a little deeper you realise they are an opportunity afforded to only a very small minority of people, and still have no certainty of working – but that won’t stop everyone telling you about that headline they saw in last week’s Daily Whatever and that’s why you should “#nevergiveup”. 

The media continues to provide a one-dimensional story on infertility, childlessness, and family life in general and in the process excludes and silences the childless. But we are here, hiding in plain sight, just waiting for the day you wake up and we can share our stories of how non-motherhood changed our lives forever. 

Photo by Jan Baborák on Unsplash