25 (!!) years of childless living

25 years ago today (!), while licking the wounds (physical, mental, emotional) inflicted by five-ish years of trying and failing to conceive a baby -- including three years of unsuccessful fertility treatments plus a stillbirth at 26 weeks -- I took my first concrete step toward acceptance of the new reality I found myself facing: I posted my story on the Childless Living message board on a now-defunct site called iVillage.  (I've been sharing my story here on this blog since fall 2007 -- coming up to 19 years now!)  

I started writing a "25 years later/things I've learned about life without children" post -- and then I realized I was repeating myself:  I already wrote many of the same things five years ago, in a post titled "20 years of childless living."  Have a read there!  

There is life (and joy) without children.  Not better, not worse than being a parent. Just different.  

Thank you all for being part of my journey so far on this road less travelled!  

What lessons/advice from your own childless living experiences would  you add?  

World Childless Week 2024: Day Four: Childless Friend or Foe?

Day Four of World Childless Week 2024 is about friendship -- "Childless Friend or Foe?" From the website description: 

 Have you seen or felt the gap of friendship widen as friends become parents? Have you struggled to find mutual ground and felt pushed aside as they navigate to other mums, cancel dates or suddenly appear with a baby in tow when it was supposed to be a girl’s afternoon? Have you had a situation where a friend who you thought understood has suddenly made a comment or sent a photo that totally broke down the bond you had? Who was it who pulled away, perhaps you did and are happier for it; or maybe there is lasting sadness? Or have you stayed friends with someone who really has been there for you and tried to understand even when they truly don’t? Maybe you’ve reached out and reconnected with a past friend or created a whole new friendship circle. 

How do you feel about building friendships, are you confident to reach out to mums, the childless and childfree alike in order to build bridges and create understanding?     

This blog includes nearly 500 posts (!) labelled "family/friends."  Clearly, there's a lot to talk/write about when it comes to our friends and families, and how they support us -- or not -- as childless people.  It's also clear that I did not have the time nor the energy to comb through 500 posts in search of some good representative posts to share here...! 

I did, however, remember that I have written a lot of posts about the support I've received from childless women in online communities over the past 20+ years.. Some of them are tagged as "iVillage message board" and "SPALS email list."   

As I went through those posts -- and did a search specifically for posts about "friendship" -- I found a couple of posts that seemed worth noting:  

• From 2017: "It takes a village" 
• From 2018: "Social capital, adult friendships & childlessness"
• More recently, from August 2024: "#MicroblogMondays: Online friends are real friends :)"

Check out today's content on the WCW site, including community members' contributions, and two free, live webinars related to this subject. They will be recorded and the links will be posted later on the Day Four page for anyone who cannot make the live event. 

#MicroblogMondays: Online friends are real friends :)

Katy at Childless Collective wrote a blog post for the World Childless Week website recently titled "Online Friends are Real Friends." 

Amen!  My online friends are just as "real" to me as the people I know "in real life," and in many cases, they have been there for me over the past 26 years in a way that my "real life" family and friends have often not. I was lucky enough to find a "real life" local support group shortly after we lost Katie in 1998 (and wound  up staying 10 years as facilitators), but that group only met twice a month at most. Especially in those early days of bewildered grief, I craved something more.  And I found it, online.  (Even in those pre-blogging, pre-social media, pre-Zoom days!)  

I've written in the past about some of these friends -- the women (and a very few men) on a pregnancy loss email list I joined a few weeks after Katie's stillbirth;  the friends I made on the iVillage Childless Living message board in the early 2000s, several of whom I'm still in touch with regularly today.  And, since 2007 (17 years!!) bloggers.  I've been lucky enough to meet a few of these online friends face to face over the years too.  

Add one more to the count. :)  

A couple of Sunday nights ago, Mel -- the Stirrup Queen herself  -- messaged me:  "So totally random question - are you around this upcoming week because we just decided to come to Toronto."  

Me:  "Are you serious??!!  I would LOVE to meet up!!!!" 

If you're reading this post, you no doubt know Mel too, and all she's done for the blogging community over the past 18 years.  Blogging is, admittedly, not the force it once was (although I think it's just taken on a new form lately, i.e., Substack) -- but there was a time, pre-social media, when there was a flourishing community of adoption, loss and infertility bloggers -- and Mel was at the centre of it all, with her gargantuan blogroll and other regular community-building features and projects -- like this #MicroblogMondays, the Friday Roundup (which recently marked 1000 Friday posts!), the Lushary (which was always a favourite of mine, lol), the Barren Bitches Book Tour, the annual Creme de la Creme list of our favourite blog posts from the year, and so much more.  

Mel responded to some of my early tentative comments on her blog -- and encouraged me to start my own, back in (gulp) October 2007 -- almost 17 YEARS AGO.  To get to finally meet her -- AND her family, after hearing/reading about them all for so many years (from the twins' first day of kindergarten (!) to their departure for college!) -- was a surreal experience.  

(The hugs, however, were very real.  :)  )   

Several days and even more emails back & forth later, deluging Mel with suggestions for places they might want to visit during their stay (lol), I trekked downtown via subway to the Toronto Eaton Centre for the first time since before the pandemic, and we had dinner together on the patio of one of the restaurants there. (I had warned Mel about all the construction, roadwork and repairs going on in the city -- never dreaming that would include SANDBLASTING the walls of the old church across from the restaurant where we were eating!!  What a racket!  Thankfully, they did stop work for the evening, after we'd been sitting there about 45 minutes...!)  And after dinner, we walked through the mall to the Indigo bookstore, where Mel and I wound up standing and talking for more than an hour in the Mystery aisle ;) before I reluctantly headed home again.     

The visit was far too short, but I'm so glad the stars aligned to make it happen. 

Are online friends real friends? You bet.  ❤ 

You can read Mel's thoughts about her Toronto visit here. 

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.  

Odds & ends from a busy weekend

• The second Childless Collective Summit is over, and I hope you had the chance to at least sample some of the amazing (FREE!) presentations offered! It was a pretty hectic & exhausting four days, trying to keep up with everything (and if *I* found it tiring, I can't imagine how Katy, the organizer, feels...!) -- but it was a good kind of hectic & exhausting ;)  and well worth it!  
• I actually missed most of the presentations on Saturday, because we were busy with haircuts and family birthday celebrations for BIL & SIL -- and I missed a few on Sunday as well -- but I bought a "Pace Yourself Pass" (again this year), which will give me access to all the presentations for a full year (as well as some other perqs).  If you missed the summit in full or in part, or want to revisit some of the presentations you enjoyed, the passes will remain on sale for the rest of this week, until Sunday July 24th. 
• This year's summit had 2,200 people registered, which -- as I noted last year -- is absolutely MINDBLOWING, when I think about what was out there when I first came to childless/free living 21 years ago (i.e., not a whole lot...!). 
• On a note related to the point above -- it was 21 years ago today, that I made my very first post to the Childless Living message board on iVillage (which no longer exists). This was my first tentative step towards accepting a childless life, and so I consider today my "childless anniversary."  I've written about it in the past several times, and you can find many of those posts tagged "iVillage Childless Living message board."  
• (Appropriately -- today is also Jody Day's birthday! -- happy birthday, Jody! :)  ) 
• Speaking of Jody and Gateway Women -- some major announcements were made at the summit about what Jody, Katy and Gateway Women will be doing next: 
• Jody has said she wants to focus more of her efforts over the next few years on her Conscious Childless Elderwomen project and -- once she finishes the novel she's been working on! -- a book on the subject! 
• To create more space for this, she's entrusted Katy to take on the leadership/stewardship of the Gateway Women online community. Jody will continue to be part of the community, serving as a mentor to Katy, and leading the NoMo Tribe and Gateway Elderwomen sub-groups. 
• Jody will be retaining the Gateway Women name for her own work, including her Reignite Weekends. As a result, the online interactive Gateway Women community she founded had to find a new name. Members were involved in the search, and at the end of the process, the new name is: Lighthouse Women.  
• In part, the name was inspired by this passage from the introduction to Jody's classic book, "Living the Life Unexpected":  

Hope is a light in the dark. It is my deepest wish that you find your place in this world again through the pages of this book, and that your dream of motherhood can be put to rest with the tenderness and love it deserves. Letting go of hope when you can’t see any other kind of hope ahead is terrifying, like swimming away from the shore in the dark without any idea when you’ll reach land again. Let this book be your lighthouse; let it be your hope in the dark. Those of us who’ve already made this trip are waiting for you on the other side, and many others are in the water alongside you, each feeling that they’re swimming alone.

 But you’re not alone. Welcome to your Tribe.

• In addition to her new role with Gateway/Lighthouse Women, Katy plans to continue organizing an annual Childless Collective Summit, and to continue offering some of the support circles and webinars she's been doing over the past several years.  
• As a Gateway Women member, I've known about these changes for a couple of weeks now, but they were not "officially" announced outside the group until this past weekend. I am looking forward to benefiting from Jody's continuing work, particularly in the "childless elderwomen" space, and to new ideas and inspiration from Katy, whose work I've also followed and admired for several years now.  We are so very lucky to have both of these inspiring women in our community! 
• In her presentation at the summit, another inspiring community leader, Karen Malone Wright of The NotMom (which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year), announced a new survey of both childless and childfree women, which will update the information from an earlier survey several years back. "We need to know more about what your lives are like NOW, and how we can serve you better," she writes. "As for potential sponsors, well, we're still here."  
• Take the survey here -- it only takes about 6 minutes to complete. 
• I loved this Washington Post article outlining "14 ways to get out of a reading slump" -- I've tried some of them myself!  :) 
• From The Globe & Mail recently: "People undergoing fertility treatments need greater flexibility at work."  I would agree with that. 
• A few commenters said something to the effect that "People need more flexibility at work, period, not just those going through fertility treatments."  Yes, that too! 
• After a couple of weeks of normal service, Bloglovin' went on the fritz (again!) Thursday night. I've been getting a few (very few) posts on the Bloglovin' app on my phone, but nothing on the laptop/website. SO. FRUSTRATING. 

20 years of childless living

Today marks a milestone in my life as a childless woman. Exactly 20 years ago today (!!), I took my first big step towards accepting and acknowledging that I was not going to have the children I'd hoped for, dreamed of, and risked my physical, mental and emotional well-being to (try to) create.  

As I've described several times previously in this blog, on July 18, 2001, I wrote a post to introduce myself on the Childless Living message board of iVillage.com (no longer in operation), where I'd been lurking for several weeks -- and then pressed "publish." (I have a printed-off copy of that first post somewhere! -- I should hunt it up and transcribe it for this blog someday...) 

I was 40 years old, living in a lovely little three-bedroom starter home with a big, kid-friendly back yard in a lovely, family-friendly neighbourhood in suburbia -- and I had just endured five years of unsuccessfully trying to conceive a baby (and bring it into this world) -- including one stillbirth at 26 weeks into a rollercoaster pregnancy; followed by a year & a half of failed infertility treatments, including several cycles of clomid + timed sex, followed by three IUIs using both clomid & a steadily increasing dosage of self-injected drugs;  followed by a near-nervous breakdown, including several rounds of terrifying, debilitating panic attacks (I thought the first one was a heart attack). 

We didn't know what kind of a future lay ahead for us -- but we knew that, sadly, it would not include children. We were done. We were exhausted, and we desperately needed a break. Shortly after that first post to the message board, my dh & I flew to my parents' home in Manitoba, and then headed out on a road trip with them, across the Prairies, over the Rockies to the west coast, where we spent time in the warm embrace of extended family in Seattle (none of whom had any inkling about the ordeal we'd just been through), and licked our wounds while taking long walks on the breathtakingly beautiful beaches of the Oregon coast. 

Back then, I'm not sure I could have imagined my life 20 years forward -- all the ups & downs and unexpected twists & turns: now 60 (!) years old, retired at 53 (pink-slipped by the company I'd served faithfully for 28 years), living in a condo in the same community as my BIL & his family (a place we all used to make fun of!), and a doting great-auntie to an adorable 20-month-old little boy.  I'd probably be surprised that we haven't travelled as much as I've wanted (yet!!) -- but then, nobody else has been able to travel much for the past year & a half either...!  (I'm sure I could never have imagined the pandemic!)  I'd also probably be surprised that pregnancy loss, infertility & childless living still remain such a big part of my life -- but in a different way. The hurt never entirely goes away, but it evolves, and it does become much more manageable.  I have learned so much -- about life, other people, my marriage, myself. 

It's not the life we imagined or expected. But on balance, it's still a pretty good life, and we're very thankful.  

Here are a few of the things I've learned in 20 years of childless/free living: 

• Childless does not mean less (despite what society tells us). I've always said and believed "I am more than my uterus."  Our childless lives are every bit as valuable as parents', even if it doesn't always seem that way. 
• Pronatalism is like the red pill in "The Matrix" -- once your eyes are opened to it, you see it everywhere!  (Credit to Jody Day* for this one!) Parents are privileged in ways that they're not even dimly aware of, and that we've only just begun to articulate. We need to start bringing attention to this inequity when we see and experience it.  
• The older you get, the easier it gets (in some ways, anyway). For one thing, people stop asking when you're going to have kids. (On the other hand, they start talking about their grandchildren...!)
• Childless life is a lot easier/more fun if you can find some childless/free friends, in "real life" and/or online. I could not have survived without the support of the warm, funny, angry, kick-ass, courageous childless women I've met over the past 20 years -- on that first childless living message board (and I am still in touch with some of them, 20 years later! -- you know who you are and I love you girls!), through blogging, through forums like Gateway Women, and (more recently) on social media.  
• Change is very slow to happen... but it does happen! (And, to paraphrase Gandhi, we need to be the change we want to see in the world -- or at least a part of it. ;)  )  When I think back 20 years to what it was like for me as a woman facing childlessness -- and then look at everything that's out there to support younger women facing the same scenario now -- there's just no question that things have changed for the better -- for me personally, and for childless women generally.  If you are new to the idea of a permanently childless life, I know it probably feels like you're all alone out there -- but trust me, there are SO many more resources to help you make this transition than there were 20 (or even 10) years ago. And hopefully, in another 10 or 20 years, there will be even more! 
• You'll find some suggestions for other helpful blogs, websites, podcasts, books, etc., in the links on the right-hand side of the screen, and in the "Book list" page at the top. 
• Finally -- 20 years goes by WAY faster than you can ever imagine. (I think this is true for life generally, whether you have kids or not.)  "Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?"  the poet Mary Oliver asked.  The older I get, the more this resonates. Life is not a dress rehearsal -- we need to try to make the most of it! 

*Fittingly, today/July 18th is also the birthday of Jody Day, founder of Gateway Women, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year!  Happy birthday, Jody! :) 

#MicroblogMondays: Farewell, Yahoo Groups

Figure skating season kicked off with Skate America in Las Vegas this past weekend, the first competition in the Grand Prix series. After watching the ladies & men's finals on TV yesterday, I went online to SkateFans, a Yahoo Group I've belonged to for eons, to check out other fans' comments. 

I hadn't been on any of my Yahoo Groups for quite a while, so I was surprised (and yet not entirely surprised...) by the pop-up message I found, which apparently went public a couple of days ago. Yahoo Groups is (essentially) closing down.  Not entirely -- group members will still be able to contact each other via email -- but seriously, they might as well be. As of Oct. 28th (one week from today), users won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of Dec. 14th, all previously posted content -- including Files, Polls, Links, Photos, Folders, Calendar, Database, Attachments, Conversations, Email Updates, Message Digest and Message History -- will be permanently removed.

As I said, I was surprised, but not surprised by this turn of events. Yahoo Groups has been in decline for years, especially since the advent of (cough) Facebook. Many of the groups I once belonged either disbanded, moved to Facebook or another forum or went dormant years ago -- but there were still several that continued to thrive -- despite increasingly unreliable service. More & more frequently over the past few years, I would try to access one or more of my Yahoo Groups, only to encounter technical difficulties, some of which lasted days or even a full week or longer. There was little to do except wait;  there was no apparent mechanism where we could complain or even find out when service might be restored. 

The sad thing is that Yahoo Groups was the place that several groups I belonged to went to, after other forums elsewhere folded. SkateFans began some 20 years ago;  it grew out a listserv I belonged to when I first started going online in the late 1990s (rec.sport.skating.ice.figure) -- although the number/frequency of posts there has declined dramatically over the years. The small, private Yahoo Group that's been my anchor as a childless-not-by-choice woman for 15+ years began in 2003, after we started having technical difficulties with the Childless Living board on iVillage where we'd all originally met around 2001. (The iVillage board closed in 2008, several years before iVillage itself disappeared.)

The D.E. Stevenson author fan group I belong to was on Yahoo Groups for something like 20 years (since about 1998), and still going strong, with 300+ members -- but the frequent interruptions to our discussion schedule there (because of Yahoo Groups' increasing unreliability) were becoming really frustrating.  A year or so ago, a group of members took it upon themselves to research alternatives. Very happily, we were able to transfer the group's entire posting history, as well as photos, files and databases of collected knowledge, to a new home on Groups.io (founded in 2014 by the guy who started ONElist, which eventually became... Yahoo Groups!).  My Yahoo Group of childless-not-by-choice friends also made the move to Groups.io shortly afterward, happily preserving 15 years of searchable posts my friends there & I have written about childless living (and life in general -- it's the closest thing I've had in recent years to a journal/diary, besides my blog).  So far, so good...!  (In case you're interested, here's a Lifehacker article explaining the advantages of moving to Groups.io.)

A SkateFans group member has set up a new group for members on Google Groups. I am not sure what is going to happen to another Yahoo Group I have belonged to for about 20 years (one that's listed in the resources in the sidebar of this blog), Mullerian Anomalies. The number of posts there has declined dramatically over the years, but it's been a fabulous source of information and accumulated wisdom for women like me who have an abnormally shaped uterus.

Change is one thing to cope with, but what really bothers me is thinking of all that accumulated knowledge and history (on my old groups, and others) disappearing into the ether with the click of some anonymous techie's mouse. But I guess it's the way of the Internet -- change and impermanence.  Blogging is still here, happily, but those of us who have been around for a while know it's not like it used to be. These days, many women who might have gone to message boards or blogs or even Facebook groups to find support for infertility & pregnancy loss seem to be flocking to Instagram instead. And is it just my imagination, or is everyone and his or her dog starting a podcast lately? 

Were/are you a Yahoo Groups user?

You can find more of this week's #MicroblogMondays posts here.

17 years of childless living

Aunties Day -- now in its 10th year! -- is this Sunday, July 22nd.  :)

Aug. 1 is International Childfree Day, recognizing those who have chosen not to have children.

World Childless Week, which raises awareness of the childless-not-by-choice community, is Sept. 10-16 this year. (Did you know there was one??)

So far, there is no one specific day devoted to those of us who consider ourselves childless vs childfree (although I believe some CNBC bloggers are looking into this) -- but from my personal perspective, today (July 18th), would be a good choice. ;)  I've written several times over the years about the Childless Living message board at iVillage (now defunct), where I first sought & found support after making the decision to end fertility treatments. (I've now tagged those posts with "iVillage Childless Living message board.") My first post to the board, a couple of weeks after my final IUI failed, was on July 18, 2001, 17 years ago today (!).  In the years since then, I have come to consider July 18th as the day when I took my first steps toward acceptance of my permanently childless future.

Beyond my personal case ;)  today is Jody Day's birthday (her 54th). :)  If you don't "know" Jody (and if you're childless not by choice, you should!), she's the founder of Gateway Women, an influential global friendship and support network for childless women. Today on her blog, she wrote:

...fifty-four has got me thinking about how different it was for me a decade ago when I turned forty-four. That was a pivotal year for me because it was the year that I realised that my childlessness was not some bad dream that I was going to wake up from on day; it was my permanent reality and I was going to be childless for the rest of my life.

She goes on to list "ten things I’ve learned in a decade of recovery from childlessness." (Have a read! & wish her a happy birthday!)

A lot has changed over the past 17 years. Today, we know that as many as one in four women born in the 1960s & 1970s will not have children (for a variety of reasons), and a growing number of us are speaking out and writing about our lives and experiences. Message boards (although they still exist) gave way to blogs -- many, many more since I started blogging almost 11 years now! -- and to online communities such as Gateway Women and Life Without Baby. So, whether you are 10 years or 17 years (or more, or less) on your journey down this road less travelled -- and especially if you are just starting out -- please know that you don't have to travel alone!

It takes a village

A Facebook friend recently shared this article/blog post, titled "In the absence of a village, build one." My friend added the comment, "We do not have do to it alone. Find your village, love them hard."  

The article is written from a mommy-centric perspective, for an audience of other mommies. (Which seems ironic from an infertility/childless perspective, because from where we sit, motherhood seems like a highly exclusive country club that everyone else gets to join and hang out with -- except us, of course.)(Scroll down to the comment from Jen on July 14th.) But I think that with a little imagination and some rewording, the thoughts shared here could apply to those of us in the adoption/loss/infertity community (or just about anyone, really).  

The author notes, "The time when you need a village the most also happens to be the time when it’s hardest to build one." She's thinking about her kids and their childhood, of course -- but I immediately thought about those awful days, post-loss, during infertility treatment, post-stopping, when I felt so completely alone.  (Maybe not in the immediate days after my loss, of course, when friends & relatives rallied round, called and sent flowers and cards, but in the weeks & months afterwards, when they assumed things were "back to normal" and got on with their lives, assuming I was doing the same thing. I wasn't.)  

*** *** *** 

First, let's look at the barriers to finding your village identified in the article. (Not all might apply to your personal situation.)

Barriers to finding your village   

1. The age of fellow moms in your life—and the ages of their children

The age you're at -- when you're going through infertility/loss, when you have children, or just going through life, period -- can make it harder to find your village. If you're in your 20s & 30s, some of your friends might be having babies, some might still be looking for someone to have babies with. The ones having babies might not understand what you're dealing with, if you're going through infertility & loss -- and even if they do, they're obviously busy with other things;  you and your problems aren't their priority.  If you're trying to get pregnant in your 40s while all your friends have already had their families (some of them even becoming empty nesters...!), you can certainly feel out of sync with them. Even if you eventually do have a baby or adopt a child late in your reproductive life, there might be quite an age gap between your kids and theirs. Your friends may have already found their mommy tribe and feel more comfortable talking about school PTA meetings with the other PTA members, rather than comiserate with you about your lack of sleep. If you never have children, by choice or by chance, you will most likely feel shut out of the loop while your peers build their families. Working (and working & commuting) can make it difficult to find new friendships and maintain old ones. And if you're like me, & retire early, you can sometimes feel isolated if most of your friends are still working.

2. The arrangement of work & life

"For example, mothers who work outside the home may have a hard time connecting with moms who stay home. There are only so many hours in the day…" the article says. And, I might add, both kinds of moms often have a hard time connecting with non-moms, and making room for them in lives that are now laser-focused on all things mommy & baby-related.

A little more about work and the role it plays in finding our village: for some of us, work becomes our village, or a part of it.  I met a lot of great people at work, and I've stayed friends/friendly with some of them. But there are barriers to cultivating friendships at work, too. I know a lot of the younger people in my office liked to go out together after work (especially on a Thursday night, for some reason)  -- I did too, when I was in my 20s and we lived in the city. But when you get older, your priorities change -- even if you don't have kids tying you down. You don't recover from a night out at the bar as quickly ;)  you start to value your sleep, and you have a husband (if not kids) waiting for you at home.

Also, this probably wouldn't be as much of an issue in a smaller community, but the people I worked with commuted to our downtown office from all over a huge metropolitan area. Distance & commuting time -- not to mention the need to adhere to train, subway & bus schedules -- can certainly be barriers to after-work socializing, and forming and maintaining out-of-office friendships. After a long day of work (8.5 hours including lunch, plus another two hours or so commuting, round trip), I often just wanted to go home.  (Especially on a weeknight -- since I had to get up at 5 a.m. the next morning & do it all again...!)

3. The courage it requires to reach out to another woman

Especially "in real life,"  even if that person has also experienced loss &/or infertility. Sometimes, it's easier to reach out to other women in similar situations online.

4. The feeling that the women around you already have a village in place

Thinking of that exclusive mommy club again. ;)  Although feelings don't necessarily equal reality. There are more women out there looking for villages, or new people for their village, than we might think.

5. A fragmented village

I have lots of different people from different parts of my life and places that I've lived, some that I rely on more than others, sometimes for different things. They don't necessarily know or know about each other, or about the different parts of my life beyond the part I shared with them. (This was one reason I was very leery to join Facebook at first -- I wasn't sure I wanted all these different parts of my life coming together in one place. I am sure some of my Facebook friends, have been surprised at some of the things they've learned about me there...!)  

*** *** *** 

6 Tips to help you build your village 

I think these tips from the article can apply to any village-building effort, not just if you're a mom. 

1. First, believe that you don’t have to do motherhood adoption/loss/infertility (or anything else)  on your own. 

There are people who are going through the same thing you are (both in "real life" and certainly online) who are also looking to build their villages and find support... and who are willing to support you, too. Start looking for them.  

2. Next, get comfortable (ironically) with vulnerability. 

"Vulnerability allows us to take friendships to a much more meaningful level, and in turn we find ourselves feeling happier and more comfortable in our own skin because of the authenticity we’ve developed in the safety of close relationships," the article says. 

If anyone knows about vulnerability, I think it's ALIers. :)  Infertility & loss are pretty isolating, lonely, emotion-laden experiences. Our hearts are raw, broken, tender.  If there's one thing that helps us survive, it's giving voice to our truth -- being honest, expressing our feelings fully and honestly (by talking about them, or at least writing them out) -- and to know that others are listening.  Not necessarily that they have answers for us. Sometimes the mere act of voicing what's in our hearts -- and having someone pay attention -- is comfort enough.   

3. Watch for women you can bring in.

"A village gets stronger with numbers. If you already have a support network, keep your eyes open for women... who might need what you can offer. Be a people connector."

We're everywhere -- even if we're not always upfront about it. 

4. Keep working on YOU.

"Your vibe attracts your tribe." 

5. Ask for help, and accept it when it’s offered. 

So often, the people around us don't know we're hurting. It's hard to open ourselves up and admit we need help. Sometimes it leads to more hurt (clueless friends & relatives who don't understand) -- but sometimes it can lead to new understanding & new, stronger connections. 

6. Offer YOUR help. 

"Being willing to help others—to be their village—is the biggest key to creating one."  Share what you've learned, comment on others' posts.  

What do you think?  Did the translation to the ALI world work here? What would you add?

*** *** *** 

Reading the post got me thinking (not for the first time...!)  about my personal "village" and how it applied to my own life, post Katie, post-infertility.    

Immediately after losing Katie (in August 1998), I found myself reading obsessively about pregnancy loss -- why it happens, what I could do to prevent it from happening again, and what I could do to help myself recover from such a horrible blow. Several older women in my life who had lost babies years ago -- dh's aunts, my best friend's mother -- called & told me it had happened to them too. Most of them told me "you'll have another baby,"  which I suppose is what they'd been told (and for them, it did happen, so why wouldn't they believe otherwise?). Most of the women my own age that I knew had not experienced such a loss, it seemed.  I was floored -- and so touched -- when a former coworker now living in the States called me out of the blue (after reading the mass email I'd sent out) and told me about her own miscarriage.  

The package the hospital sent home with me included some information on local support groups. Even in a city as big as Toronto, it was hard to find support: the hospital's own onsite group no longer existed (!), another wanted me to come to their midtown office for an interview (!) & then wait until they had enough people to form a group that would last for a certain number of weeks & then send us on our way.  Finally, the hospital social worker I was dealing with told me about another group where she was a board member.  I went to one meeting by myself;  dh joined me for the next one, and we stayed there for the next 10+ years -- first as clients and then as facilitators. Finding our tribe, real-life people who lived nearby and were going through a similar experience, was a huge part of our healing. 

But the group only met once or twice a month. The time between meetings felt like an eternity sometimes.  That's when I discovered the power of the Internet. We'd bought our first computer two years earlier, in the fall of 1996.  Early on in my pregnancy, one of dh's coworkers had given him the name of a website she thought I'd like to check out. It was Parents Place (now defunct), with week by week pregnancy information & tips, as well as message boards for pregnant women and new mothers. There were, I realized, post-Katie, also message boards for pregnancy loss -- but I was a little hesitant about putting myself out there publicly like that. 

Eventually, I found a private e-mail list that seemed a little "safer" to me than public message boards, and joined that. It proved to be my daily lifeline for the next several years. I would rush home to check my email for the latest digests and emails from my newfound friends, and pour my heart out onscreen, both to the entire list and privately to several members I'd formed cyberfriendships with.  

The list was for women (& men) who had endured pregnancy loss and hoped to try again. As you might imagine, many of them also had infertility issues, and they were a source of invaluable information and encouragement as we ventured down the slippery slope of infertility testing and treatment. But as more & more of them got their "rainbow babies" (and sometimes a second, and a third...) -- and I did not -- my postings to the group began to taper off. It was becoming obvious that the "subsequent pregnancy" part of the title was not going to happen for us.  

I didn't post regularly on any infertility message boards while I was going through treatment (although I did check some out). (Blogs were not yet a "thing" -- that came a few years later.)  But after my final IUI failed early in the summer of 2001, I started hunting for resources for living without children.  There was not much out there -- and a lot of what I did find was for people who never wanted children. But I did find a very few message boards (often attached to infertility websites) devoted to the subject, with a somewhat active membership. In particular, I found a home on the Childless Living message board at iVillage. Sadly, it is long gone now -- but this week it will be 16 years (!) since I introduced myself there. I always consider that date as as the beginning of my childless/free life after infertility & loss. And I am still in touch with several of the women I "met" there (and I have met two of them "in real life") -- on a different private forum we created a few years later, and (later still) on Facebook. 

I don't think I discovered blogs until about 2006, and I started following a few of them regularly. Most of the ones I found in those early days no longer exist. But one in particular still does: Melissa's Stirrup Queens, which has long been a community hub for those of us dealing with adoption, loss & infertility. I think I started tentatively commenting on some of her posts -- particularly the sessions in The Lushary (which hasn't creaked opened its doors in a long time, but which still holds a fond place in my heart...! ;)  ) -- sometime in 2007. Through her blogroll, I discovered Pamela's original Coming2Terms blog, which eventually morphed into Silent Sorority.

And so, with Pamela's example in front of me and Mel's encouragement (and to take part in her Barren B*tches Book Tour -- which was, at the time, getting ready to discuss Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" -- plus ca change...!), I decided to start my own blog. This fall, it will be 10 years (!!) since I hit "publish" on that very first post.  While many of the bloggers I used to follow (sadly) no longer write, I'm so very happy (& proud) that the childless-not-by-choice neighbourhood of our ALI village has grown by leaps & bounds in recent years!  

I know I've told this story before (and I'll probably tell it again & again) -- but I felt compelled to tell it again now... mostly because I'm so grateful to the Internet and to blogging for giving me hope, empathy and friendship at a time in my life when I really, really needed it (and found it hard to come by in my offline life).   
Thank you all for being part of my village!  :)  

Fifteen years (!) on this road less travelled

Mel at Stirrup Queens, who has always been a great supporter of the childless/free-not-by-choice corner of the ALI community, had a wonderful post today about us -- and how it's important for everyone caught up in the cyclone storm of infertility & loss to remember that procreation & pregnancy & parenting is just one part of your life -- that there are other things in life beyond parenting (really!).

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much our CNBC part of the community has grown and changed and strengthened over the past few years.  Partly this was inspired by a recent gathering of several childless-not-by-choice bloggers in Vancouver. Those who attended have already written several great posts about that meetup and what it meant to them to be there, including Pamela, Lisa, Kathleen, Cathy and Sarah (here and here).  (I was dying to go, but the rest of my life got in the way -- perhaps someday in the future...!)

Partly it's also because, right now, it's almost exactly 15 years ago (one of those "anniversaries" that seem important because they're divisible by 5, lol)  that I was licking my wounds after the failure of my third agreed-upon IUI, recovering from a series of debilitating anxiety attacks that threw me for a (further) loop in the wake of that failure, and wondering what the future held in store for me & dh. (You can read about my fertility treatment journey and the immediate aftermath in the series of posts I wrote in 2010, labelled "The Treatment Diaries.")  Neither dh nor I had the appetite (let alone the budget) to continue further fertility treatment -- or to begin the gruelling process of adoption. As I told the infertility counsellor we saw, I knew we could have a good life together with just the two of us -- because we already did! -- but facing the reality of a future without the children we had long assumed would be ours -- in a world gone nuts for baby bumps -- was scary stuff.  

Looking back, there was so very little out there in the way of support. Dh & I had been attending a "real life" support group to cope with our daughter's stillbirth;  there were a few local infertility support groups, but I understood they were geared towards couples who were still going through treatment, not those who wanted to move on. I had been somewhat hesitant to join an online loss or infertility group, but I knew they were out there and had been lurking on a few for awhile. Maybe there were similar online sites for women like me, who were facing a childless future? (Blogs, at that time, were pretty much non-existent.) 

Fortunately, there were. Not many, and even fewer that were very active, but they were out there. Just before we embarked on our family vacation on the Oregon Coast, I found a "childless living" message board on iVillage -- and it was there that I finally found my tribe.  :)  Sadly, the board no longer exists, but my first post there was July 18, 2001 (I still have a printed copy of it). I consider that post and that date to be the beginning of my journey on this road less travelled, towards acceptance of a life without children. (I've written about the board and the role it played in my journey several times in the past, including here. And I'm hoping to meet up with one of the women I "met" there during my upcoming summer road trip/vacation!)

This fall it will be nine (!) years since I started blogging. (Mel just recently marked the 10-year blogoversary of Stirrup Queens -- go congratulate her, if you haven't already!)  At that time, in October 2007, there were very few CNBC-focused blogs on Mel's gargantuan blogroll -- most notably Pamela's original blog, Coming2Terms. Gradually, other voices began to join ours. By 2012, I noted the growing momentum of our segment of the ALI community in a post titled "I am childless, hear me roar."  ;) 

While the ALI blogosphere has been pretty quiet lately, compared to when I first started blogging, I've noticed that the childless/free part of the community just keeps growing and flourishing. Pamela is still blogging and advocating for infertility survivors at Silent Sorority, and there are now several hubs on the Internet where women without children can gather and find each other, such as Gateway Women and Life Without Baby. Last fall in Cleveland, Karen at The NotMom organized the first-ever conference for women who don't have children, either by chance or by choice.  She's planning another for October 2017. And there have been several great new blogs launched in recent months (and while I've been adding them as I find them to my blog reader, I just realized that I badly need to update my blogroll here -- my apologies!).

Do we still have miles to go before we sleep? (Sorry, I think I'm mixing up my Frost metaphors here, lol.)  Absolutely. There's no doubt that we are finding our voices;  whether the broader community (outside -- and still, sometimes, inside -- the ALI world)  is ready to hear those voices and accept our message, I'm not quite so sure.

But just looking at how far we've come over these past 15 years gives me great hope for the future -- for myself, for my fellow CNBC bloggers, and for those who will come after us. :)  And of course, the journey is a lot less lonely and a lot more fun when you have company along the way. :) 

Thank you for being here for at least part of this 15-year journey. 

Golden Girls revisited

The Globe & Mail is running an excellent in-depth series this week about "The Boomer Shift" --  the baby boom generation (of which I am a tail-end member), aging and retirement. I've been watching with interest to see whether the issue of aging without children would be addressed -- so far, it hasn't.

However, one of today's articles was this: "Meet the new Golden Girls (and guys): How boomers are coming up with creative living arrangements."

For me, this is old news:  as I wrote on this blog five years ago, living together in a "Golden Girls" house has long been a private semi-joke among my longtime childless living message board chums. It's been fun to see this idea gaining more currency in the media lately, and not just among those of us without children -- although of course, creative living arrangements where residents commit to looking out for one another would be particularly ideal for those of us who are aging without offspring.

What do you think? Does the idea of a "Golden Girls" communal living arrangement of some sort appeal to you?

Red-letter days

Yesterday, I noted in my last post, marked 14 years since the day I took a home pregnancy test. Aunt Flo was late, but she'd been late in the past & turned out to be only teasing me, in the 2+ years we'd been ttc.

So I was not prepared for the sight of two bright blue lines almost immediately popping into view. Off we went on a rollercoaster ride that, in some ways, has never quite ended. Today is 14 years since I went to have my blood drawn at my family dr's office; tomorrow is 14 years since I went to payphone, hands trembling as I dropped the quarters in the slot, and heard the nurse telling me, "The news is good!"

It's funny the power these "anniversaries" can hold on our memories and our emotions. For years & years after Katie was stillborn, I used to circle the 5th & the 7th every month in my calendar in red ink -- August 5, 1998, being the date I learned her heart was no longer beating; August 7 being the date I delivered her, the "official" date that's on all the paperwork and on her niche marker at the cemetery. I would also write in the box for that date "8 mo" or "9 mo" -- and then, as time passed, "1 yr, 5 mo," "5 yrs, 3 mo" and so on.

I did that for YEARS. Without rummaging through all my saved datebooks, I'm betting I did it for well over 5 years & probably more like 10.

Eventually, I came to realize I wasn't really noticing the dates anymore. And even when I did take note of them, circled & written in my datebook, more often than not, I felt... nothing. I would pause, remember ("oh yeah...")... think a bit about my baby girl... and go on with my day.

I did feel a pang of guilt when, filling out a new calendar for the year, I finally made the conscious decision not to circle & note the 5th & the 7th of the month anymore.

But there are still certain dates that are forever engraved on my heart (& still noted in red in my calendar), including:

• Feb. 8th: first day of my last menstrual period, pre-conception in 1998.
• March 24th: positive hpt (1998).
• July 18th: the date of my first post to an iVillage message board for childless-not-by-choice women (which, sadly, no longer exists) in 2001 -- which I view as the start of my journey to acceptance of childless/free living.
• Aug. 5th & 7th (as described above).
• Nov. 14th: the first of many due dates I was given (1998).

Do some dates still have a certain power over you, even years later?

Aftermath, & hope for the future

Thank you for all your good wishes these last few days. The rest of the weekend was much better, thankfully. : )

For starters, one of my oldest ( = time I've known her, not necessarily age, lol) & dearest online friends, JuliaS., who lost her daughter Carena the same day I lost Katie, was the first to message me, as she always is.

Sunday, dh took our traditional bouquet of pink roses to the cemetery. I took a photo & posted it on Facebook -- only the second time I've done something like that. So far, I've had six "likes" and 26 comments. The majority are from online & support group friends, but there are some others too, which is nice to see. : )

Then, this morning, I discovered that another dear online friend -- from the childless living board I've blogged about -- (who has since moved on to adopt two beautiful children) had written a blog post about Katie, and what Katie means to her. I was floored, and dh is still raving about it tonight. Thank you so much (again), Karen! We will treasure your words always.

*** *** ***

One of the harder parts about childless/free living -- particularly for someone like me, who is into family history and treasures every photo and attaches meaning to all kinds of things associated with the people I love -- is the sadness I feel when I think that there will be nobody to pass these things along to, nobody who will appreciate them in the way that I hoped my own children would

Six years ago, when my one cousin's daughter graduated from high school, I decided (after much inner debate -- it is hard for me to let go of things like this that mean so much to me) that she should have my grandmother's high school ring as a gift. As I blogged here, three years ago, I was disappointed that the gift was never acknowledged.

Nevertheless, my other cousin's daughter graduated this year, & I felt that, to be fair, I should think of an equivalent gift to give to her.

Around the time I went to grad school, in the early 1980s, the "preppy" look was very "in," particularly at the school I was attending, which has a reputation as one of the more "American/Ivy League" universities in Canada. Pearls were back in fashion, & somehow, they came up in a conversation withe my grandmother.

"Oh, I have some pearls you can have," she said, and the next time I saw her, she gave them to me. She didn't remember how or where she got them, but said she never wore them & they were just collecting dust in one of her drawers. I don't believe they're real pearls -- my family didn't and doesn't have that kind of money -- but they were still nice, slightly yellowed with age. The string looked a little fragile in places, so I took them to a jeweller & had them restrung, knotted (so that if the string broke, they wouldn't all slide off) & a new clasp added. I wore them a lot over the next few years, including as the "something old" on my wedding day. But I haven't worn them in awhile, and I do have another, newer pearl necklace to wear if I want to.

So I packaged them up & sent them to my cousin's daughter with a card and a handwritten note, explaining the story behind the pearls & expressing my hope that she would likewise give them to her daughter or niece or cousin someday. This morning, her mom messaged me on Facebook -- the package had arrived, and her daughter loved it. She noted what a special gift it was, and added, "So glad we have someone like you to pass along family history and heirlooms."

Well, as you can imagine, that made my day. (I still hope that she'll eventually contact me herself with her own thank you, whether in a written note or online -- but this time, at least I know she got it!)

In a similar vein, we celebrated our nephew's 19th birthday on Saturday night, nephew's birthday. This fall, he'll be starting his second year of university and -- as we did last year on his high school graduation -- we presented him with a cheque to help defray some of his expenses. "THANK YOU!" he said, giving each of us a big hug. We are so happy that we're in a position to help him out a bit -- and his brother too, if/when he ever returns to school (or buys a house or some other such life goal).

Doing things like this -- and getting these kinds of reactions -- gives me hope for the future -- that maybe we'll actually have visitors at the old folks home now & then ; ) & people who will listen to (and actually be interested in) our stories -- who will know and value the meanings behind some of the things we give to them, and remember us when we are gone.

10 years childless/free

Recently, someone posted a link to a New York Times article about "The Decline of the Online Message Board." That prompted a discussion on our Promp-ly writing group around the question of whether message boards were still relevant & who still frequents them.

It was, as I noted on the group (which, ironically, is really a message board itself) a timely discussion for me. Blogs weren't around when I was going through ttc, stillbirth and infertility treatment -- but listservs and message boards were, and they were (and remain) an enormous source of support for me.

Ten years ago today, on July 18, 2001, I made my very first post on an iVillage Childless Living message board, for women who were childless not by choice. I had been lurking on the board for several days & while I hadn't had much experience with message boards, I decided to take a leap of faith, put myself out there publicly and join in the conversation. Not only was this one of the first message boards I had ever posted on, period, but -- after a long struggle with stillbirth and infertility treatment -- I was, essentially, admitting to myself and to the cybersphere that our ttc journey truly had come to an end, that we were not going to have children after all.

I've written about the board and what it's meant to me before -- most notably here, two years ago, and here, three years ago, when the board finally (sadly) disappeared from the cyberspace. Some people have drifted away over the years, for whatever reasons, but I'm still in touch with half a dozen of those women, on another (private) message board we set up, and on Facebook, and I've met two of them "in real life."

Admittedly, we don't post as often as we once did and, as time has blunted the sharp edges of grief, we write less and less often about childless living specifically. But on the days when an "anniversary" has us feeling emotional, when someone lobs an unkind or unthinking comment about our childlessness that cuts one of us to the bone, when something happens to remind us about the life we thought we'd once have and the experiences we are missing out on, we come to the board to vent our hurt and frustrations, and to give each other the cyberhugs and support that we can only get from each other -- from other women who have been there, done that, and truly understand what it's like to walk a mile or 10 in our shoes.

I simply couldn't let this milestone day go by without paying tribute once again to the board that brought me together with these women, and to the huge role they have played in my life these last 10 years. I can't imagine how I would have gotten through it all without them.

The Golden Girls & childfree living

I was sad to hear that Rue McClanahan passed away recently. I loved "The Golden Girls," & I also loved her long before that in "Maude" (also with Bea Arthur). Long before "Sex & the City," "The Golden Girls" formed a fab female foursome.

The older I get, the more I appreciate the example set by the show -- rarely seen, before or since on TV -- the message that older women can be funny and, yes, even sexy. And I love the idea of women banding together for reasons of both finance & friendship -- taking care of each other.

An inevitable fear of childless women, of course, is "What will happen to me when I grow old? Who will take care of me?" Statistics being what they are, most of us marry men who are older than we are, & women outlive men. While we hope that friends & relatives will look out for us, the fact is that (even if we do have children!), most of us will wind up living alone at some point in our lives.

One of the first Internet havens I discovered after making the wrenching decision to stop infertility treatments & live childless/free (almost nine years ago now) was a childless living message board (now defunct). Several of us moved over to a private board some years ago, where we remain in touch. I don't remember who had the original idea, but it became a standing joke (or maybe not so much of a joke?) that when we were old & grey and our husbands had gone, we would all buy a house together, hire a housekeeper (& maybe a hot young cabana boy, lol) & live together like "The Golden Girls." The gal who posted all the yummy posts about food was elected cook, the one who was renovating her house was the designated handyman/person & so on.

We voted on who among us would be Dorothy and who would take on the role of Blanche, etc. (I would love to be Dorothy -- I loved her snappy comebacks & caustic wit -- but I'm afraid there's too much Scandinavian/Minnesotan in me -- I suspect I'm thoroughly Rose, lol.)

It's not really a bad idea, though, is it?

Eight years of childless/free living

This weekend marks a very special "anniversary" in my personal history -- the day I consider to be the true beginning of my childless/free life. Of course, I've lived without children my entire life (aside from the six months I was pregnant in 1998) -- but July 18th was a special day, an initial milestone marking the beginning, or at least the earliest stage, of my journey down the road less travelled. (I'll be otherwise occupied on July 18th, so I thought I'd blog about it early!)

It was the summer of 2001. Our third & final injectable/IUI cycle had failed in late May: we had reached the previously agreed-upon end of the fertility treatment road, & were embarking on the new & scary path of permanent childless/free living. In mid-June, I began having a series of frightening, debilitating anxiety attacks. I went to my family dr, was prescribed some Ativan, and endured a battery of tests (at my insistence) to satisfy myself that I hadn't had a heart attack, as I had initially feared. We went back to see the infertility counsellor we'd seen earlier for some guidance on this new path we were taking, & started getting ready for a much-needed family holiday on the Pacific Coast.

As I had when our daughter was stillborn in 1998, I began searching the Internet for resources -- something, ANYTHING, that would tell me I wasn't alone in facing this scary situation.

And I wasn't. Blogs hadn't been invented yet (or if they were, they weren't very well known), but I found a recently created message board that seemed custom-made for women like me. Women who had hoped to have children but, for a variety of reasons, hadn't. Some were like me, with a history of lost pregnancies and failed infertility treatments. Some were married to men who had families with previous partners & didn't want more children. Some were still hoping for a miracle, but trying on childfree living for size.

I made my first post on the board on June 18, 2001. I immediately felt accepted and understood. I began to look forward to logging on every day & finding out what everyone was doing and how everyone was feeling. It was a virtual support group. We got to know each other by posting "Two for Tuesday," "Wednesday woes & woohoos" and a "Friday Five." I found a few (very few) other boards for women in my situation (some listed in the sidebar of this blog), but most of them were not very active, and the bonds among the members not as strong as the ones I had formed with these women.

In the spring of 2003, the site underwent an "upgrade." Suddenly, I couldn't access the board anymore. PANIC!!! I had e-mail addresses for a few of the girls, & one day, I received an invitation: one of the members had created a private Yahoo group where we could reconnect. Eight of us eventually gathered over there and picked up the conversation where we had left off before we had been so rudely interrupted. : )

Eventually, I was able to access the old board again. But things were never quite the same there after that. There were many people we just never heard from again. A few of us "oldtimers" hung around to answer questions from newcomers. While the number of active posters slowed considerably, our threads continued to receive lots of views, indicating we had a lot of lurkers.

Last year in June, the hosting site shut the board down because of a lack of activity. The archived board is still there (although not, sadly, the posts from its earliest days -- so I can't link to my original post from 2001), but you can no longer post or respond to posts there, & it is not listed on the main site index of message boards. I blogged about the board closing here.

Only four or five of us still post on the Yahoo group now, not quite as often as we used to in the early days, when childless living was still a new & scary thing. But there is a bond and a common history we share that I treasure enormously. I've met two of these women in real life & it was simultaneously a weird & wonderful thing, to have someone step off the computer screen and into your arms for a hug. We've joked that that when we grow old & grey & widowed, without kids to "take care" of us, we'll move into a house together like the Golden Girls and take care of each other. (Or maybe we're not joking.)

Girls (I know some of you read this blog), I've never met most of you, but I can't imagine what the last eight years would have been like without all of you to vent to, cry with, laugh with and celebrate with. Thank you, thank you, thank you. To the extent that I have "accepted" my childless/free life, you all deserve much of the credit. I couldn't have done it without you. : )

Bridges: Choosing to live childfree... for whatever reason

This is my first submission to the new Bridges site (which I wrote about earlier this weekend).

My husband & I set off down the road of childless/free living in the summer of 2001, after several years of trying to to conceive, both on our own & through fertility treatments, one surprise pregnancy that ended at 26 weeks in stillbirth, several rounds of Clomid, three IUI cycles using ever-increasing doses of Puregon & Gonal-F, and a prescription for Ativan to combat a sudden onset of anxiety attacks.

Blogs were practically unheard of back then -- but I did find a message board for women who were living without children, not as a first choice, that became my lifeline. The board opened my eyes to a whole new world of women who, like me, had once hoped and assumed they would be mothers, but found their lives heading in a much different direction. Together, we struggled to make sense of the new life we found ourselves leading.

There were women who, like me, had experienced infertility, loss, and even failed attempts to adopt before calling it quits and trying to move on to a different chapter in their lives.

There were some who had medical conditions that made it difficult, dangerous, or impossible for them to attempt or sustain a pregnancy, and also made them less desirable candidates as adoptive parents.

There were some whose husbands seemed agreeable to having children at first but, when the time came, suddenly announced that they did not want to have kids after all, sending the marriage into a tailspin. Or the husbands were clear from the start that they did not want any more children, which the wife accepted at first, and then (as her biological clock started winding down) gradually realized that she really did want one of her own. Their wives were then faced with a decision: do I stay in this marriage (which might still be pretty good in other respects), and try to accept never having children of my own? Or do I leave my husband and, in the few short years of fertility that are left to me, try to find a new partner who is willing to try to have children with me (assuming that we can)? Or do I attempt to become a single mother?

There were some who found themselves stepmothers to their husbands' children from previous marriages. Some of these husbands did not want any more children. Sometimes, the husbands were willing, but had vasectomies that could not be successfully reversed.

There were some who assumed they would be mothers whose lives were thrown into turmoil when their husbands suddenly left them, sometimes in the midst of infertility treatments.

There was another board for women who had made a deliberate choice to live childfree (with an emphasis on the FREE). (Our boards would refer people back & forth to each other, as appropriate.) Some of these women did NOT like children, and were not afraid to let people know about it. Others liked children a lot -- just so long as they were somebody else's. For whatever reason, they did not want to assume the responsibility of parenthood.

I already knew there were people like this (my own sister, for one). I grew up during the 1970s & 80s, when the feminist movement was in full flower and all sorts of choices seemed possible. I didn't think it was odd or wrong that some women might not want to have children. Heck, if you don't want children, then don't have them -- spare the poor kids. I actually have a great deal of respect for people who have thought these things through carefully and made an informed decision about their ability to be a good parent. I know far too many people who got pregnant, accidentally or mindlessly or far before they were emotionally or financially mature enough to handle the responsibilities of parenthood. Some of them even admitted that if they had to do it again, they wouldn't have children. (That was part of my reason for delaying pregnancy. I wanted children someday -- but only when I was sure I was good & "ready" for them.)

So there are many, many complex reasons why a woman might not be a mother. You would think that people would realize that -- but it quickly became obvious to me that childless/free (for whatever reason) people are a minority (in a society that currently seems crazy for all things pregnancy and baby-related) -- albeit a growing one -- and are susceptible to some of the same sorts of assumptions, misconceptions and mislabelling that other minority groups have experienced before us. And that it's very difficult to some people to think beyond the boundaries of their own experiences.

As I read the posts by childfree by choice women, I realized that, although we have come to this life from very different places, we actually have a lot in common -- certainly in the way we are viewed by the rest of the world (parents in particular) and pressured to produce children -- something we're either incapable or unwilling to do.

Many people assume that if you don't have kids, you don't want them (because of course, anyone can be a parent these days, with those miracle fertility treatments or through adoption!!) . If you actually didn't want children, it can be equally aggravating to have people think that it must be because there's "something wrong" with you (physically -- or maybe mentally). If you tell people you can't have children, it's sometimes assumed to be your "fault," because you "waited too long" or "put your career first." The word "selfish" is often used to describe childless/free couples, no matter what their story is or why they haven't reproduced.

There's a tendency in our "instant message" society to look for the simple explanation, the neat pigeonhole. If there's anything the last 10 years or so have taught me, it's that there's no such thing. I've learned not to make hasty judgments, at least until I've walked a mile in the other person's moccasins. I've learned that life is not always a black and white thing -- that there are endless shades of grey.

I've learned that life is a journey -- & you never know the twists & turns the road is going to take.

And I've learned that sometimes you have to make a hard choice -- and you find yourself wandering down the road less travelled.

Bye bye board :(

I'm very sad today. I just found out that the childless living message board I used to frequent is closing by the end of this month. (I don't want to name names, but it's one of the ones listed in my sidebar links.)

I found this board almost exactly 7 years ago, in June 2001, & started posting in July, after lurking for awhile. My dh & I had just made the painful decision to stop infertility treatments, & I was looking for other women in the same boat who could relate to the pain & confusion I was feeling, & tell me I was going to be OK. I had belonged to a private e-mail list for pregnancy loss & subsequent pregnancy, so I knew the power of the Internet to create healing communities, but this was the first public board that I had gathered up the courage to post on.

I found a home there. We had a wonderful, active, supportive group of women here for several years -- until some format/technical changes were made that made it difficult for many members (including me) to access the board for a long time (which sent me into a total panic!). Eventually, I was able to access the board again -- but by then, many of our former members had drifted away, and it's never been quite the same. I have stayed in touch with several past members (mostly through a private board that one of them set up for us, when we weren't able to access the old board where we'd all met), but often wonder about what's happened to some of the others.

Some, like me, were survivors of pregnancy loss & infertility, who had finally had enough of riding the rollercoaster. Some had husbands who promised them children -- then changed their minds. Some had husbands who had children from previous marriages and didn't want more -- or had had vasectomies, and later reversals did not work. Whatever the reasons, all of us had assumed we'd be mothers someday, and all of us were facing a much different reality. I know of one former member who is going through adoption right now, but the others I've stayed in touch with have remained childless.

The board hasn't been very active in recent years (I've found very few such boards that ARE active)(& I'm guilty of not posting there much lately), but a handful of oldtimers like me have stuck around to welcome any newcomers & answer their questions. Many of the threads have hundreds of views, which tells me someone is reading out there, even if they're not actively participating. Childlessness is such a painful topic -- it is very hard to put yourself out there & acknowledge that parenthood is not going to happen for you. (Just look at how the recent New York Times coverage featuring Pamela Jeanne had childless/free after infertility women coming out of the woodwork, on her blog & in the Times Well blog comments section, to share their stories.) There are so few resources out there for childless-not-by-choice women. I hate to see one of them disappear.

The thing that REALLY irked me was the suggestion from the powers-that-be that we could post on the childfree by choice board instead (!!!). I lurk on that board from time to time, and they're a pretty good bunch of women. We do have some things in common -- they have a lot to teach us about the good things about living without children, and I think both of our groups are often badly misunderstood & misjudged by parents.

But we are coming at living without children from very different places. They don't want to be called "childLESS" any more than some of us like being called "childFREE." This is a choice that most of them have embraced enthusiastically (some childfree people don't even like children very much), when most women in my shoes don't feel we really had much of a choice. At the very least, it was a choice we arrived at after a lot of heartache. And to have someone from outside our little community (& no doubt a parent) say that we can just go over to their house & play with them from now on tells me that our feelings & needs are not being heard or understood. :(

Someone once said that childless women were "the black sheep of the infertility community." That's certainly how I'm feeling today. :(