regret

Will You Ever Find Peace with Your Childlessness? 

Sue Fagalde Lick "get over it", accepting a life without children., childless grief, infertility, menopause for childless women, regret, regret not having children , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Facing a future with no children used to drive me crazy. Back when I was fertile and married to a man who was not, I cried a lot, mostly where he couldn’t see me. I resented my friends whose lives revolved around their kids. I did not want to hear their happy stories or look at their pictures. Baby showers? What do I know about babies? Count me out.

As far as I knew, there was nothing wrong with my baby-making parts, but they were being wasted, evidenced by painful periods every month, reminders I was running out of time. 

Now I’m 72, childless and widowed. Although being alone can be difficult, I have to tell you that I don’t think about childlessness all the time anymore. If you are in your 20s, 30s, or early 40s, feeling bad because you wanted children and might never have even one baby, know that it does get easier. Like any loss, it doesn’t go away, but you do learn to live with it. 

Yes, you will feel breakthrough grief and anger. You’ll see a family at play or hold someone else’s baby and think I could have had that, but as you get older, it will become a less important feature in your life. You will wonder who will care for you in old age, but know that even if you had children, they might not be available to help.

When you’re surrounded by people getting married and having babies, you feel excluded, jealous, and angry at whatever keeps you from having the children you always wanted. Or you resent the people who keep pushing you to have the children you never wanted. You’ll regret it, they warn. What if they’re right? It can be a brutal time. 

The night before my 40th birthday, I had a meltdown that I describe in my Childless by Marriage book. At a Catholic women’s retreat, everyone was talking about their kids. Our guided meditation put me face to face with what I had lost, and it felt unbearable. As the women running the retreat held me, I sobbed in front of everyone. I felt broken. It didn’t help that I really wanted a drink, and there was no alcohol around.

But as I approached menopause, so many other things took my attention. My writing career was taking off. I was performing music almost every weekend. I earned my long-delayed master’s degree. We moved from San Jose, California to Oregon and experienced a very different life in a small coastal town.

My mother died, my husband was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and my father needed lots of help before he passed away. You hear about the “sandwich generation,” about people caught between caring for their children and caring for their parents. Without children, we can be open-faced sandwiches, helping our older relatives without neglecting our children. 

By my 50s, people stopped bugging me about having kids, and my friends were free to do non-kid activities again. Yes, the grandchildren came, but that was an off and on thing. We could still be friends.

Do I wish I was a grandmother? Sometimes. but childlessness is not at the front of my mind anymore. I took a different path, and it’s too late to turn back.

With every choice, you lose the chance to pursue the other option. By moving to Oregon, we lost the chance to grow old in San Jose, closer to family and so many resources that don’t exist here. If I had married someone else or not married at all, my story would be different. You choose one road and let the other one go.

I can torture myself by imagining what it would be like to have children, how they would look, what we would do together, how I would hold my grandbabies in my arms. But my life didn’t go that way, and I suspect that’s how it was meant to be. 

Not having children has given me the gift of great gobs of time that mothers don’t always have. Time and freedom. I don’t have to find a babysitter or take a kid with me if I decide I want to go to lunch, take a walk on the beach, or spend the night elsewhere. I just go. 

Would I trade my freedom for a walk on the beach with my son or daughter, maybe with their children splashing in the surf or building sandcastles? In a heartbeat. But that’s not on the menu for me. And I’m 80 percent okay with it.  

Maybe you’re at that age when becoming a parent would still be possible under other current circumstances and you’re driving yourself crazy trying to decide what to do: Leave your partner in the hope of finding someone who will give you kids? Try IVF? Hire a surrogate? Adopt? You may fight with your partner over it and cry a lot.

I know how bad it hurts. I’m saying that later it will be easier. Childlessness will not be the center of your life, and that makes room for other things, wonderful things. 

That’s not nothing.

How about you? Are you going crazy over being childless? Do you regret the choices that led you to be without children? Did you have a choice? Do you think you will ever be okay with it? Or are you fine with it now? Have you found peace with your situation? How?

I’m great-grandmother old. Tell me how it is for you at whatever age you are.

I welcome your comments.

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It Hits Me Hard: I Could Have Made a Person

Sue Fagalde Lick childless grief, moving on from childlessness, old age and childlessness, regret , , , , ,

Dear friends,

I debated about whether to share this post. It’s a bit intense and belies the image I’d like to project of someone who has dealt with her childlessness and become a wise elder, but perhaps this moment of truth will help someone who still has time to change her or his situation. I read it last week at “Coffee and Grief,” an online reading series and now I share it with you

Photo by burak kostak on Pexels.com

I don’t know why these things come into my mind when they do. I was taking a quick bathroom break while my chicken took 10 more minutes in the oven, just long enough for me to put together the rest of my dinner, when it suddenly came to me that instead of choosing my man over the children I might have had, I could have made a person, a full-grown person like me. I never thought about it this way before.

For some reason, my brother comes to mind. I could have made a man like him, a real man. Or a woman. My brother is a judge, but my children could have been anything. I could have made people. With arms and legs and hearts and kidneys. With ideas, abilities, and feelings. With hands like mine. With brown eyes like mine. A man or woman who laughs, cries, loves . . . my heart is breaking. I could have done that, and I didn’t. Who would give up the chance to make a person?

Here at the Childless by Marriage blog, we talk about babies all the time. We want to have a baby. Our partner doesn’t. Or can’t. Babies take lots of care and cost money and interrupt one’s life in enormous ways. But babies are the seeds for grown people. Oh my God, what a miracle. That I could have a grown person walk through my door whom I made inside my own body, that that person could hug me—or fix my broken light fixture–or just talk and listen, that I could teach them and they could teach me…

That we could show up at a restaurant, church, or party as a team, a whole family instead of me walking in alone. That we could watch Fourth of July fireworks together. That they might make me a birthday cake and sing to me. That they could make children of their own and they would all be part of my family and we would grow and grow, new people to make up for each one who died. That someday, a young descendant might look me up on Ancestry.com and trace the lines leading from me to themselves instead of a name leading nowhere. Sure, there would be losses and sorrows. Some of my family might die. Some might be disabled. Some might be nasty, rotten people who want nothing to do with me. I know.

Of course, I might have proved to be infertile, although I don’t know of any problems in that area. If I were infertile, there would be no end to the sorrow, but maybe I’d feel less guilt. At least I tried.

In this minute while my chicken is probably burning and the dog is picketing my office door because her dinner is late, suddenly the reality is unbearable. I missed my chance, and now I can’t go back.

I consider my marriages. My first husband was a child, barely 30 when we divorced. He was unfaithful, drank too much, and didn’t want to work, but now I can see he was still so very young, and I was even younger. If the marriage had not failed, we might have had children after all.

And Fred, well, shoot, nobody ever loved me like that. Nobody else ever will. But he was older and had already made his own family. And now, too soon, he’s gone. Alzheimer’s. It’s just me and the dog.

It was all timing. Miserable, unfortunate timing.

Damn.

Maybe my church is right. Throw out the birth control, outlaw abortion. I know, we can’t do that. We need those things, but sometimes . . . What if we just tell all those people who don’t want children to find other people who don’t want children and leave the rest of us alone.

Young women whose partners won’t give them children often worry that they will regret their choice later. You will. No matter what you do. But not all the time. Most days, I’m fine, and you will be too. We can only do the best we can. If that means we cook a chicken dinner for one on a Sunday night, so be it.

This thought, that I could have made a person, hit me shortly after I turned over the chicken in the oven. It couldn’t be the chicken’s fault, but be warned, even at 68, childlessness can suddenly squeeze your heart and make your chicken taste like cardboard.

Today I’m okay. Taking care of business. But I still have these moments. How about you? I welcome your comments.

*****

Annie is doing better, but now she has an infected wound near her eye, requiring ointment and more pills and frequent checks to make sure she’s not rubbing it. I may not have had children, but I do know about taking care of other family members.

*****

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Are you grieving over your lack of children?

Sue Fagalde Lick advice, childless by marriage, grief, regret, therapy

As many of us know, not having children can be painful. A terrific article in today’s Contra Costa Times talks about this and describes some of the agencies that are helping childless women deal with their grief through therapy. The piece, called “Childless by Fate, Choice,” was written by Jessica Yadegaran. It includes a forum to answer the question “Have you come to terms with not having children?” I would love to have people answer that question here, too.
I’m currently working on the chapter about grief in my Childless by Marriage book, and it is interesting how one’s feelings change over time. It’s also hard not to project my feelings onto other people.
So how do you feel about it? Do you regret your choice? Are you still trying to decide what to do? What advice would you give someone like the 35-year-old woman I interviewed this weekend who is dating a man who doesn’t want any more children?