Anonymous

Over the last year I thought quite a lot about my role in people’s lives, and their role in mine. I see World Childless Week as being a time to reflect on the last year since my last submission, and what has changed in my thinking, where I am now, and what’s been my main themes to do with childlessness throughout the year. My friends have been so deeply important to me throughout my life, and so the Childless Friend or Foe topic appealed to me the most, as it is within my friendships that I find my childlessness most prominent. It can make me feel the loneliest, the most recognised, and can bring out the most confusing of thoughts.

A very large number of my friends have children. They fall into different camps into how well I know the children, despite how well I know my friends. Some of my very oldest friends have children I’ve not met, some of my friends I know their children well. Some I am deeply fond of; some I am quite indifferent to. But I’ve noticed some of my friendships changing, and at the moment I am undergoing a shift. A shift in how I feel about people and situations, but also what a shift in my thinking about it. How do I make things more on my terms? What does it mean if this friendship is different? Does it bother me if our friendships are different?

The friendships with my friends who have children where I feel the most valued are those where the focus of our conversation is not the children. Occasionally it needs to be – a sick child, asking how a family are, but when it isn’t dominated by things that I can’t contribute to.

So many new children in the last ten years. I feel angry sometimes because I am always expected to fit into these new interactions without any consideration into how I might be, or how that situation might be for me. I have sat silently through conversations that I absolutely can’t contribute to: how childbirth was, bed time routines, what and how their child eats, how difficult it is trying to do something with children around, how logistically they deal with hectic after school schedules. I literally cannot contribute, so I sit, mute.

It’s so othering.

I recognise in the many ways, many more serious, that people can feel othered and excluded, this is perhaps not as significant, but to me, in a group where I should feel safe and comfortable and valued, I don’t feel that. I don’t feel valued when conversation turns to children, because I have nothing to offer, and I can almost feel myself getting smaller and smaller, being diminished. I feel it physically – I blush, and my stomach clenches, knowing that throughout this next conversation I have to sit there, like a third wheel, useless, with a sign on my head ‘HAS NO CHILDREN, CAN’T CONTRIBUTE’ and so I prepare myself for the awkwardness. I feel it mentally, my mind racing: “how long will this go on for? Would it be weird if I mentioned my niece? How can I stop this politely?”

In some groups of friends I do say that I wonder if we can change the topic, because I have nothing to contribute, and for some groups they respect that, and we do, and I feel grateful, and seen.

The gap between me and my friends with children can be very small, and it can feel very wide. I try and now stay clear of those where the gap feels wide, but that is really heartbreaking for me, because these people – these women mostly – I have known since I was young and are a part of me. So I grieve – I grieve the children I don’t have, and I grieve the friendships that have changed. Sometimes it bothers me less – people just talking about their children are so boring.

I wrote this in the notes app of my phone the other day:

You can’t understand my life and I can’t understand yours. But I have no choice but to sit in a world that is designed for your type of life (square peg in a round hole - square peg is the childless woman and the round hole is the world made for families). And yet you never ever have tried to find out what my reality is, what my existence is like. You don’t see that it’s entirely different to yours, and you don’t see that I battle every day to feel seen in a world that doesn’t want to see me, and that is the most painful thing of all. Imagine! Imagine if you sat there in a room with me and my childless friends... you’d have nothing to say! You’d feel out of your depth and lost. Recognise how it is for me in a room full of parents. Try and make some inclusion.

My final thought is that sometimes I love not having all the things that people complain about – yesterday I got a three-minute voice note about a useless husband, exhausting in-laws and disruptive children, and I felt relief that I don’t have to deal with that. Instead, I can listen to Taylor Swift (Queen of Childless Cat Ladies, and my saviour) all day if I want, and eat just crisps for supper, and do what I want when I want without any restrictions. But it creates distance between me and them, and I feel that. I feel relief, but I feel sadness, and then I go back to all the emotions that I experience on a daily basis, of wanting children, of not wanting to be alone, of not really knowing what I want, even if I could have it, and I realise that I am still on my childless-processing-journey, and it isn’t over yet.