Anonymous
Nothing prepares you for being childless. You literally spend you whole life being told that you are destined to be a mother. Damn it even your own body tells you every fucking month!
So the pain when you realise your chance has passed is a deep slow burning pain and it took me a long time to recognise it as grief.
And as I navigate the sea of my life with the ebb and flow of grief and joy on a different tide each day I must constantly also paddle past the emotional grenades that unexpectedly detonate in my path:
My job full of children and assumptions of their parents that I ‘must’ have my own.
Friends and family believing that as I chose to work with children I would want to spend all my time with their offspring instead of them as adults.
Feeling guilty for all the silent high fives I give myself when I see times to be grateful I don’t have kids which I focus on not to make me feel bitter inside or
Feeling guilty when I get to do adulting a lot more than my friends who are parents get to do.
All these challenges keep me unsteady as I try to find different ways to fight the tide of emotions even though some days are better than others. And it sadly doesn’t mean unexpectedly wandering into the baby section of a clothes store doesn’t produce an instant reaction of wanting to run away from everything, everyone and hide from the world.
But the biggest explosions creating the choppiest sea of all is the role of being a step parent. As a childless woman, in both my professional and personal life it’s one of the hardest challenges I’ve ever faced.
It doesn’t matter that I’m most certain the majority of the rejection I’ve faced as a step parent is naive, unintentional and subconscious in design. But as a by nature care giver, this force of response has started to rip huge holes in my hull. I’ve now leaked so much water that it’s obvious that I’ve been starting to drown. Drowning in the feeling of my heart being eroded, cracked and battered without the skills to cope and therefore making all the other types of waves and grenades harder to deal with. So much so that recently I could feel myself slipping under without any land in sight. I was desperately searching for a lighthouse when I at last I found the childless lifeboat tribe. The ones who have built sturdier vessels before me, who have realised the strength in validation to ride the unexpected seas.
Their stories have given me comfort, have guided me towards a new horizon. With promise of the sunshine and the wind in my sails that used to fill my heart but without the false promise that the emotional waves will stop completely. In doing so they’ve taught me that I can look forward to the fact that although the grenades will still explode and rock my boat occasionally there are water proof tools they’ve shared to skill me to push the boat in head on. So the waves will get easier to manage and I’ll even enjoy the odd surf back to the shore.
The Childless tribe are mighty and have helped me to envisage a future where I rewrite my own life compass. So my heart may be more buffered and cracked from the stormy seas I’ve endured but rather than becoming a wreck at the bottom of the sea I intend to emerge as an deeply interesting piece of sea glass.
Probably a broken slice from a bottle of silent pool gin.
Photo by Sara Codair on Unsplash