Michelle Heumann
I collect rocks. How they look certainly matters to some extent, but even more important is how they feel in my hand, how they slip between my fingers. When I get a new rock, I carry it around in my pocket for a while, like an otter with a new favourite.
My most recent rock is a pinkish beigeish nugget of granite, curved on one end and square on the other. I found it on a walk through the woods with an old friend with whom I was hoping to repair a bridge. The bridge-burning wasn’t my fault and I should stop worrying over it, I’ve done what I can under the circumstances, and yet I still carry it, worrying over that conversation in my heart and between my fingers. But eventually, it will join the pile of rocks on my night table, or on my desk, or on the table in the front hall, and time and space will make the square edge seem less sharp, the memory less and less heart-rending.
Throughout human history, people have left a record marked inrocks: as boundary lines, as gravestones, as law tablets, as cairns to indicate something of significance, and for purposes we puzzle over, like Stonehenge. As I’ve travelled this particularly hard road of infertility and childlessness, I didn’t collect stones from each visit to the fertility clinic or the hospital or the lab or the pharmacy – or from every awkward conversation about my childbearing status – but there are memories I ponder over and over; sometimes a single event, sometimes a compilation of similar events that have implanted in my heart like grit in an oyster’s shell.
Ten such memories feel like both too few to encompass the entire journey of being childless not by choice, but also feel like an overwhelming burden to carry, so perhaps I’ll leave some of them here as a cairn that might help another traveller find their way through this wilderness of grief.
A jagged bit of stone that I wish I didn’t have to carry is an intense dislike of meeting new people. I’ve always been an introvert,but now the “do you have kids?” question that seems to be inevitable causes a series of mental calculations – is it a friend of a friend or a visitor at my church who I should be nice to? Is it someone who can handle me being blunt with them? I wish people would ask a different question, like “what are your plans for the weekend?” Because if someone has kids, it won’t take long for them to mention them, and if all the new person cares about is whether or not I have kids in common with them, it’s not going to take long for me to be a disappointment. It’s like a pointy rock trapped in my shoe and it’s always a sad surprise when it works its way underfoot again no matter how hard I try to shake it out.
When people assume that my cats (or anything else, really) are somehow a replacement for children, that’s also like gravel in my shoe. They are not “fur babies” and I am not their “mom,” and having cats is not something that makes a Mother’s Day greeting appropriate, and I very much resent the assumption that it is. They are great companions and good for my mental health, but I did not give birth to them. They are not going to come visit me in the senior’s home – they will likely be long gone by then. Cats are not my children, but they are an important part of my home, so they are a treasure in their own right, like a cat’s eye gemstone, which is bittersweet when people don’t understand, when they default to saying “at least you…” when they find out we don’t have kids.
Like an overly-polished semiprecious stone that’s been dyed a shade of pink not found in nature and sold in a tourist-trap store – that’s how I picture baby showers. The last one was while we were still hopeful that we might have one someday, but even then it was agony, so I made the decision to not force myself to go to one again. I have tried a couple of times, responding “maybe,” but then declining as the date drew closer. The very idea of being in a completely baby-focused environment makes me feel panicky. Spending time one-on-one with my friends and their kids is (usually) totally fine, but put multiple moms together in a room and I am an outsider as they share a common experience that I will never be able to be part of. Baby showers highlight all the ways that I am missing out, and so I choose not to collect them, for my own sanity.
Gems in my collection are my friends’ kids who I get to spend time with. They’re the only kids I’ll have in my life, and even though sometimes it is hard – like, when I met a friend’s new baby I was totally fine and had a lovely visit, but then suddenly started crying halfway home –I still want to spend time with them. I’ll never know if I would have been a good mom or not, but I can put my energy into being a good friend, which isn’t a replacement but isn’t nothing, either, so I look for opportunities to nurture the kids who are part of my life.
And I have a handful of friends who, if I had stones that represented them, would be smooth and polished just right, with interesting bands of colour,who have been there to help share my burden. Recently one of them asked me how I was really doing, and in the moment I was so pleased to have been asked so thoughtfully that my honest answer was “pretty good, actually.” But in the following days I got caught in a tsunami of baby announcements and suddenly I wasn’t so good anymore. Waves can polish stones, but can also crush them, and when my broken heart starts feeling pieced back together, it doesn’t take much of a wave to shatter it into gravel again – and then I need someone to help patch it back up once more, so I’ll keep investing in polishing those friendships (and the shiny rocks from my husband that I wear on my fingers).
I have a fond memory from my time in university of the giant rock in the middle of campus being painted to look like the TARDIS from Doctor Who. I had quit my boring yet stressful office job and gone to university to get an English degree and become an editor so I could have flexible work from home when we had kids. Ironically, I now have a very flexible lifestyle with a lot of freedom, but it’s quite a lonely one, being home by myself all day – it’s got a lot of blessings for sure, but it’s not what I’d dreamed of, and I have a lot of lost dreams discarded along the road, which I grieve. The waylaid plans and the detours are a very unattractive stone in my collection, the size of an elephant sometimes, and I’m often not really sure what to do with it.
An ugly sandbags of rocks that I carried around for far too long, because it was set on my shoulders and I couldn’t dislodge it without help, it is the trauma of my childhood, and I often wonder if I had started unpacking that baggage sooner, then if we’d started trying to have a family sooner, if things would have worked out differently – we certainly wouldn’t have collided with the pandemic shutting down the medical system and delaying everything. Or were we always going to end up being childless, no matter the timing? I don’t want to keep carrying this, but I haven’t been able to stop worrying over it – yet.
It’s an ugly, rock that stubs my toes; childlessness. It’s one of the worst experiences of my life, although not THE worst. And there are so many horrible, awful things happening in the world at this very moment that make my life look very easy and privileged by comparison. But I have come to believe that comparing pain serves no useful purpose at all. All pain and grief impacts the sufferer in ways no one else could ever truly understand, and diminishing it makes it harder to heal from. If we treat our pain, and others’,with care and dignity, it is possible to help make the pains of life a little easier for those around us, whatever they may stub their toes on, as those who’ve been hurt can hopefully heal and eventually help.
I also have seashells in my collection, and a tattoo of a scallop shell that represents my faith, which really took a beating through years of infertility, the pandemic, and Dad’s sudden death, alongside the childhood baggage. This has caused me to believe that it’s bad theology to cite the miraculous pregnancies in the Bible as hope for modern childlessness, and I think we don't do enough weeping with those who weep instead of trying to tidy pain away. And for a long time I felt like God’s least favourite child as I watched families grow around me and wrestled with the grief of unanswered prayer. But one day I went for communion and realized that the questions, though unresolved, had come to matter less – the “whys” didn’t have as much power anymore. And this summer I heard a sermon about God being for us and not against us, and infertility was included as one of the examples of things that can weigh a person down. A few years ago, I would have given anything to have heard that message, but I just felt numb and vaguely appreciative, like looking at a museum exhibit through distorted glass, wondering about the person in the very long past who’d shaped that rock into a tool, and how they’d felt as they did it – the sermon example seemed just as foreign to my present life. But just a few weeks later I was surprised by a baptism and a sermon about living with seemingly unanswered prayer, which together caused a wave of grief. I don’t know what this rollercoaster from numbness to grief means for my journey, so I’m going to sit and worry over this stone a while longer.
Finally, a mill stone I carry and hope to set down soon is the fact that I don’t want to be writing about infertility and childlessness and disenfranchised grief for the rest of my life! I would rather be known for being a kind and compassionate person, and perhaps I will always be tinged with grief, but I don’t want being childless to define the rest of my life. However, for now, I hope that sharing my wilderness wanderings can help people learn to cause less hurt when faced with someone’s grief, whatever its source is– that my story can help people think about responses that don’t diminish or disregard the hurts of others, but instead help share their burden. We all collect things in this life, and I hope to be thoughtful about what I choose to keep and how it impacts me and the people around me. And now that I know more about how wearisome grief is when you’re lost in it, maybe I can leave a path of words, like stones radiating hope in the wilderness, for those who are on a similar journey, and maybe, maybe,someday, this grief will become a pearl.
