Life Without Children, Not by Choice

Only I knew my unborn child, she lived inside me, in my mind, in my heart, in my dreams. I can still see her. I remember the decades of longing for her to grow inside my belly and the yearning to experience that powerful initiation of giving birth into mother-hood, the desire to feed her from my breasts, sheltering her beneath the curtain of my long hair as she fed. I remember my dream child’s full heavy limbed body lying satiated in my arms, one of her own plump little arms flung out in complete acceptance of the safety of my embrace. Her tiny hand closing and unclosing, her eyes moving beneath her eyelids as she dreamed. Her small moist mouth, milk dribbling from one corner down her smooth velvet cheek. Her soft curls glinting in the moonlight…her father stroking those tiny silken springs of hair and smiling at me.

I knew I wanted to be a mother from when I was a small child. It was what the women in my family were good at. They raised chickens, pigs, cows, and kids. They grew fruit trees and vegetables and provided the family table with eggs, meat, milk, butter and garden produce. It was a whole mess of work and fun and you got to spend a lot of time outside.

I was ready to be a mum from the time I was 21, not actively seeking it then but prepared to go with it if it happened. By the time I was 28 I was definitely doing everything I could to get pregnant. At 34, I had a miscarriage and as far as I know that was the only time I was ever briefly pregnant. We looked into IVF but decided it  wasn’t for us. It was an easy decision to make but a very difficult decision to live with.

My friends were all having babies and I started losing them to the overwhelming business of young parenthood - nappies, sleepless night, teething babies, sick kids, feeding kids, clothing, educating, disciplining kids…..

Conversations around me became exclusively child related and I wasn’t able to contribute to them, I wasn’t endlessly changing nappies and I didn’t have any good textural or visual poo stories to tell.

I became increasingly isolated, not part of the baby club, no milestones to report, no school pick ups or sporting events…which meant that when my grief reached it’s peak in my early 40’s, apart from my husband, I had no-one to share it with. Not one of the mother’s in my community had any sense that I was overwhelmed by an incredible, inexpressible grief. It wasn’t a lack of empathy that made them tell me endless stories about their brilliant offspring  but my inability to talk about how painful it was for me not being able to have children, which is, in part, due to the absence of an acceptable social narrative of this experience.

By my late 40’s I had done a lot of grief work around being childless and started talking to a select few (mothers) about my experience.They moderated their conversation, and were able to talk about themselves rather than just their children.

Of course if you are childless-not- by-choice, the inherent core of the grief is the longing for a baby, for a child; to birth, to suckle, to love; to share with your significant other and your parents and siblings and friends. This grief also projects into the future, there will be no grandchildren, nor children to look out for you when you are old. 

If a child dies everyone knows the bereaved family needs support. When you are childless and have no body to bury - just your dreams - your loss is intangible to the wider community and therefore receives no acknowledgement or support.

Just yesterday I was explaining this to a friend, who is a mum and she answered with, ‘Well it’s not as bad, losing something you never had, not as bad as having a child die.’

I would argue that any mother who’s child died would never wish to have never had that child, in spite of the grief. That’s where we live - we who have longed to have children but who have been unable - we have had no time at all with our dream child or baby. There comes a terrible, pivotal moment, generally after years of trying to conceive, when we realise that we are never going to know that child or hold her in our arms - thats when the grief hits hard.

For me, after that realisation, after the death of my dream baby, it took ten painful years of working with my sorrow and loneliness, suicidal ideation, breast cancer, anger and resentment until finally I had incorporated those feelings and experiences into a new me - into a person who was no longer identified with having, or not having, children. The tools that supported me during that active grief work, were dialogue with wise women, time alone in nature, meditation, yoga, visualisation and massage.

Into my sixth decade I realised I’d passed through the annihilating grief of childlessness and had come through the other side of this rite of passage feeling content, often happy and generally inspired by my child free life.

In fact the lived experience of being childless, now that the overwhelming grief has passed, is a life where I can attend to so much more than the drudgery of raising children. I have time to drift through the forest, barefooted, totally present with the moment and the mystery of that diverse Being. A Being who is made up of the complexity of relationships between trees, rocks, soil, birds, animals, mist and wind and me. In this sapce and this relationship I am more than human, I know myself as an intimate part of the biosphere and I am no longer separate and alone. That’s our incredible birthright and heritage, our potential as humans and where we need to get to if we are to avert the current climate crisis….parents busy changing nappies can’t do this…

We, the childless, are essential and necessary to life on earth and we always have been. We have the time and the wisdom to act for the collective good in a way which is not available to the ‘time poor,’ people who are actively parenting.

Embrace your unique and powerful self, lean into the grief, work with it and find a way to weave it into a new sense of self that sits outside the limitations of the cultural narrative dished up by a blinkered, pro-natalist society. It takes time, patience, hard work and gentleness. You will most likely need the support of other childless people and possibly professional counselling. Remember there is incredible opportunity and purpose somewhere in your future...keep putting one foot in front of the other and be prepared for unexpected loveliness around the next corner sometime, possibly sometime soon!