fertility

Politicians trot out their families while we remain childless

Sue Fagalde Lick painful reasons for being childless, people who don't understand childless, Reasons not to have children , , , , , , , , , , ,

On Monday, some of us watched the second inauguration of President Donald Trump. A lot of my friends chose to do other things, but it’s history, so I watched.

Trump has a huge family, five grown children and their spouses and ten grandchildren, who all kind of look like him. Clearly, he has no problems with fertility. He preaches the gospel of family, although one has to wonder how involved he actually was when they were growing up. In addition to his wives, he had the means to hire paid help and send the kids to private school.

Good for him. Really. But what about single mothers who can’t afford day care, private school or even a decent car? The couples who spend years trying unsuccessfully to conceive? The unmarried veteran living in a crummy apartment because he/she can’t afford a house?

Trump’s vice president, JD Vance, showed off his own beautiful family. He’s the guy who said childless cat ladies have less of a stake in the future than women with kids.

It might be hard for those guys to understand why so many young people are not having children these days, why twenty percent of American women reach menopause without becoming mothers.

Yes, some choose a childfree life. That is and should be their right. Every child growing up should know they don’t have to be parents. They can choose other paths. And if they want to be parents but can’t for some reason, their lives are not over. It’s okay to embrace a Plan B, as Jody Day says, despite Russia’s new law against preaching the possibilities of lives without children.

Many of us grew up expecting to be parents, but it didn’t happen. We don’t hate kids. We’re not selfish or immature. But for some reason, we are childless. We grieve the loss of the families we don’t have.

Maybe we are physically unable to conceive or to carry a baby to term. Maybe we or our partners suffer from illnesses we don’t want to pass on to a new generation. Maybe we love someone who is unable or unwilling, and we choose love over children. Maybe we’re gay and have not been able to adopt or get pregnant with medical assistance. Maybe we’re trying to finish our education, pay off our student loans, establish our careers, and, by some miracle, be able to afford to buy a house. Maybe the state of the world is so frightening to us that we don’t want to bring new lives into it, especially when we might not be around when it hits the fan.

Some of us are terrified that the fertility assistance we count on to create a family will become unobtainable under the new administration.

Our leaders need to know these things. They know the birthrate is falling, but they also need to understand why and to help where they can with the financial burden, childcare, healthcare, insurance, and a big dollop of open-mindedness.

They may be no more clueless than your Uncle Joe or the ex-friend who doesn’t understand why you hate baby showers, but they have the power to change our lives in both good and bad ways, so they need to know.  

I don’t know which side of the political spectrum you fall on. However you voted, it’s a done deal now. Perhaps we should write to our legislators and even the president to make them more aware of our needs. Perhaps we should look for candidates who don’t have typical families, so we can show that you don’t have to have a traditional spouse and 2.5 children to be a leader. Or maybe we just need to be more courageous in talking about our situations instead of trying to hide or pretend we’re not childless. It is all right to say to anyone anywhere, “I don’t have children, and here is why.”

What do you think? Let’s talk. Keep it civil. I will not approve mean-spirited political posts about Trump or any other politicians. Readers in other countries, feel free to chime in. Do your leaders understand about childlessness?

BTW, is the .5 child the dog?

If you’re thoroughly sick of politics, visit my “Can I Do It Alone?” Substack, where we have been discussing the challenges of cooking for one person. When in doubt, let’s eat.

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The Womb is Not Our Only Source of Creation

Sue Fagalde Lick childless, mother energy, other ways to mother, poem by Sue Fagalde Lick, poems about childlessness , , , , , , , , , ,

“It’s Not that I Can’t Have Children” is the title of a poem by Kai Coggin that was featured at poets.org recently. It really caught my attention. I think so many of us can identify with it. For copyright reasons, I can’t reproduce the whole thing here, but I encourage you to read it.

The poet speaks of the ways her womb could have been a home for children but never was, and yet she has been a mother in many ways.

I love these lines:

But perhaps that proverbial ship has sailed,
and the life that I have created
is the life I have      the life I love.
Perhaps my womb has turned outward somehow
and my heart is fertility itself.

Isn’t that beautiful? “The life I have created is the life I love.” Think about that. Can you treasure the life you have right now, not calling yourself “less” anything but full of all that you are and all that you need?

“My heart is fertility itself.” This can mean that we plant seeds and grow all kinds of things, literal things like flowers and vegetables but also ideas and projects and love. For me, it’s books and music, which the readers and listeners take in and then create something of their own.

We may not have children, but that doesn’t mean we’re idle, that we don’t do anything. The things we make, the things we do, the love we give, wherever we give it—it all counts.

Coggin concludes:

I mother other kingdoms,
rock every other species to sleep--
the green and howl and pulse and bloom.

It's not that I can't have children,
it's that I already do.

Yes. We use our mothering energy in all kinds of ways, whether it’s with pets, partners, parents, friends, students, or through volunteer work. We use it with the flowers we nurture in our gardens and the birds we rescue when they fall. We use it when we clean up litter or fight for clean air and water or assist others with whatever they need, whether it’s a babysitter or help rebuilding after a hurricane.

We mother. And we father.

And it’s okay.

I know not everyone likes poetry, but I find that sometimes a poem can say in a few words what is impossible to express in a whole book. If you’d like to read one of mine, here at the blog in 2017, I posted this poem about being surrounded by grandmothers: “Sunday Brunch with the Grandmas.”

I welcome your thoughts.

Photo by Photo By: Kaboompics.com on Pexels.com

More to Read

“The Son I’ll Never Have” by Mark Wunderlich

I Will Bear This Scar: Poems of Childless Women, edited by Marietta Bratton. Nearly twenty years old but still beautiful.

Nulligravida, poems and essays by Saralyn Caine—just arrived in my mailbox, but it looks goods.

Bearing Life: Women’s Writings on Childlessness, edited by Rochelle Ratner. This book includes poetry and prose about life without children.

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It’s All About Eggs and Expiration Dates

Sue Fagalde Lick 35 and childless, fertility in your 40s, frozen eggs, having babies late in life , , , , , , , , , , ,

You know how the egg cartons from the grocery store have expiration dates stamped on them? Living alone, it takes me a while to use a dozen eggs. I usually ignore the dates and keep using the eggs until they’re gone. If it’s really getting dicey, I’ll hard-boil them for sandwiches because I don’t want them to spoil. Eggs cost money, and, judging by the noises my neighbor’s chickens make, they aren’t easy to lay.

But I’m not talking about chicken eggs today; we have to talk about our own eggs, the ones we women produce in our ovaries, the ones that occasionally hook up with our partner’s sperm and make babies. I’ve said it here before and you don’t want to hear it again, but our eggs have expiration dates, too. Sometimes you can stretch things out a bit, but the time will come when if you don’t use them right now, they’ll be no good.

A recent Radiant Menopause podcast made the human egg situation very clear. In a Nov. 23 interview titled “OMG, I forgot to have a baby,” Joyce Harper, a professor of reproductive science at London’s Institute for Women’s Health, gave us the depressing facts on eggs and fertility.

Harper spoke from experience. When she was 28, she was ready to have children, but her husband was not. After they split when she was 32, she got into a relationship with another man who was also not ready. At 35, with a new guy who was ready, they started trying for a baby, but nothing happened.  Tests and IVF followed. Just before her 40th birthday, she gave birth to a son. They wanted more children and had twin boys via frozen embryo transfer two years later. Easy, you think? No. Harper did get her children but it took seven years of high-tech trying at great financial and emotional cost. The trauma of all those years when she couldn’t have a child will never go away, she said.

Fertility does not wait for us to be ready, warned Harper. She is on a crusade to make people understand the math. At 35, fertility dives and the chance for miscarriage rises. Most miscarriages happen because something is wrong. The baby wouldn’t survive due to chromosome abnormalities or other problems. The eggs decline in quality as we age, so we’re more likely to miscarry when we’re older. We feel young, but our ovaries act the same way they did a hundred years ago, Harper said.

Gateway Women guru Jody Day wrote on her blog, “Most doctors agree that by the time a woman is 40, her chances of getting pregnant each month are approximately 5 percent.” That’s pretty poor odds.

There are exceptions to every rule, but for most women, conception after 40 will be difficult if not impossible. Menopause may not come for another decade—51 is the average age–but the factory is already shutting down. The age when your mother hit menopause is a good clue as to when you will, Harper said.

Here’s something crazy and seemingly unfair. Men’s fertility only declines slightly with age. Normal ejaculate contains more than 100 million sperm. Women are born with 300,000-400,000 eggs, but by puberty most of them have already died. During a lifetime, we ovulate about 500 eggs; the rest just die and slough away. What was God thinking?  

What can we do if our relationship situation does not allow us to get on with the baby-making before our eggs expire? Harper said more women are using donor sperm every year, but that’s not how most want to have their families. Freezing one’s eggs is a viable option. The ovaries may shut down, but the womb stays quite healthy. As you get older, pregnancy poses more risks, and you have to ask yourself whether you want to have a baby in your late 40s or 50s, but it can be done, just not in the usual way. When we hear about older women having babies, we can assume they had help. They usually have a willing partner, too.

According to an article in the AARP magazine (for people over 50), the majority of 50-plus women who become pregnant use donor eggs fertilized by sperm and implanted into a womb. It’s  expensive, $25,000 to $30,000 for one attempt. You could put a down payment on a house for that. Insurance rarely covers it, and it rarely works the first time. In fact, Day’s post said IVF fails in 77 percent of cases. You cannot count on it. You may go through a lot and still end up childless.

Bottom line? You can’t just let the years go by and hope for a miracle. The eggs won’t wait.  

Big sigh.

Harper has a new book, Your Fertile Years: What You Need to Know to Make Informed Choices, coming out in April 2021. It’s available for pre-order at Amazon.com now.

Feel free to share this post with your partner. Listen to the podcast, buy the book, and make an informed decision.

I know this isn’t a happy story. But with eggs, it’s use them or lose them.

As you think about whether or not you’ll ever have children, do you worry about your age and your eggs? Do men really understand how this works? I welcome your comments.

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The new book, Love or Children: When You Can’t Have Both will be here next week. I will offer the ebook for a ridiculously low price during December so you all can get your copies. All the info will be in next week’s post.