Not on your road

Found this on Facebook & it seemed highly appropriate for those of us living without children. ;) 

#MicroblogMondays: Happy Thanksgiving!

It's Thanksgiving Day here in Canada -- a day for gratitude.  Here are a few of the things I'm thankful for in my life right now:

*  A wonderful extended family who love and support us (including a great BIL & SIL, who had us over for turkey yesterday :)  ).
*  The safe arrival of a new little Princess to spoil!! (Yes!! The Princess has a new baby sister!!) (Henceforth to be referred to as Princess #1 & Princess #2??).
*  Early retirement in relative comfort (despite the involuntary/earlier than expected way in which it came about). 
*  No work to fret about or stress over (this was our busiest time of year).
* Being able to spend extra time enjoying the beautiful fall colours, just coming into peak season right now.
*  A supportive online community that's helped me through some of the roughest times of my life.
*  The gift of words and being able to write out my thoughts & feelings.
* An abundance of great reading material. :) 

What are you thankful for right now?

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

Guest blogging

I was honoured when U.K. therapist Lesley Pyne, who has focused her practice on helping childless women, recently asked to profile me and my blog on her own blog.

She's previously profiled other childless/free writers & bloggers, including Pamela Tsigdinos (Silent Sorority), Karen Malone Wright (The Not Mom), Tracey Cleantis (La Belette Rouge), Enza Gandolfo, and Lisa Manterfield (Life Without Baby) -- so I feel like I am in excellent company. :) 

You can read more about my story, as well as more about Lesley, here.

"So, what do you do all day?"

Laura LaVoie at The Not Mom recently flagged a Washington Post article by Lauren Knight, a stay-at-home mom who recently saw her last child off to school -- and now finds herself being asked "So, what do you do all day?" She found herself trying to come up with an answer that was "good enough," justifying how she spent her newfound time.

And then a good friend, who happened to overhear my 700th answer to the same question, approached me. She looked me in the eyes, smiled, and said, I know everyone is asking you what you are doing all day. And you feel like you have to say something profound. But I think they’re just asking because you are the light at the end of the tunnel. You are entering the place we [with young children] are only dreaming about. I think people want to know what it’s like because you give them hope.

Laura notes that it's not just moms who are asked (or feel the need) to justify what they do with their time:

Shortly after I quit my full time job to write, I had multiple people ask me the same question: “What do you do with all your free time?” 

Well, yes, it was true that working for myself offered me a newly discovered freedom with my own schedule, but that didn’t mean I was sitting around all day pondering my belly button. I was resentful at first. I was frustrated that they thought that I just sat around eating candy and watching TV. 

All of those stereotypes apply to anyone who doesn’t have a traditional job. Stay-at-home Moms for generations have heard them. And is it really a judgment on what we are doing, or is it jealousy on the part of those asking the question?...  

Why are we so fixated as a culture on what everyone else is doing with their time?

Good question. I think it's because time (and leisure time in particular) has become such a precious commodity in our chaotic world these days, we are curious & perhaps envious of anyone who appears to have more of it than we do, or at least a better controlled schedule.  This is something that Brigid Schulte writes about in her recent book "Overwhelmed," which I reviewed here. 

I could relate to both Lauren & Laura's posts.

The first time I had to deal with the "what do you do all day?" question was when I was 24, newly married and unemployed -- looking for a job, but mostly just setting up housekeeping in a small midtown Toronto apartment and getting used to my new life and new surroundings. I was a bit lonely at times -- the few friends I had in Toronto worked, of course, so I could go for days on end without talking to another adult besides my husband, when he got home at night -- but I was never bored. I did the housework, I had dinner on the table when my husband got home, I went to the library, I read, I went shopping, I went to the occasional afternoon movie matinee by myself.  I took long walks, I learned to navigate the subway system, I went to museums and art galleries and explored what my new city had to offer.  I am glad I had that time and was able to start my marriage in that way.

Then I went to work, at a high-stress corporate job with long hours (that got longer once we moved and I had to add up to three hours of daily commuting into the equation). But as a childless woman, I felt like I had to shut my mouth while the moms around me vented about how busy they were. (Even the ones who had also lost babies.)  No matter how exhausted I was, I felt like I didn't have the right to complain. As moms, they held the trump cards (i.e., kids). How could I possibly be as busy as they were? 

Now, almost 30 years later, at age 53, I am unemployed again -- retired (albeit involuntarily). I may not have been raising children, but I came to realize that I was busy -- not in the same way that a mom is, but "legitimately" busy enough in my own right.  And I feel like any leisure time that I now enjoy, I've more than earned.

Lauren Knight acknowledges that some of the pressure she feels to justify how she spends her time is self-inflicted, "with the clear knowledge that staying at home is a luxury to many, and something I feel humbled and grateful for on a daily basis. It is a beautiful gift."

I too am grateful, that I don't have to work anymore, unless I want to (even if the decision to leave work was made for me). I realize that not many people get to retire in their 50s these days.  But I don't really think of this time in my life as a "gift." It's something that I worked hard and saved diligently for. As I said a few paragraphs earlier, it's something that I earned.  For me & dh, early retirement is something that only really became a possibility once we realized that having children was not in the cards for us. It became the new life goal we set for ourselves, the silver lining in the dark clouds of infertility and loss -- something we could look forward to in the future. 

And now our future is here.  Perhaps some people look at our early retirement as the light at the end of the tunnel, a ray of hope for the future, as Lauren put it -- but the cynic in me is more inclined, like Laura, to wonder whether there's a bit of jealousy there. As Schulte points out in her book, we’ve developed this culture where we feel we have to be busy (or at least appear to be busy) all the time -- and I sometimes think people are just envious when they see others enjoying some downtime, no matter how hard-earned or well deserved it might be. They don't realize, or forget, the price (the heartbreak of stillbirth and involuntary childlessness) we paid. They don't really consider that the life we have today, however appealing, was not our first choice -- that we might have wanted a life that looks more like theirs, even if we did wind up working until we were both 65 to pay for it. 

So I try not to let those questions about how I'm spending my time now bother me (too much), or worry about giving the "right" answer. As Lauren Knight put it:

What kind of value do we place on a day with nothing planned? On a day not filled with lists of accomplishments, but with peace and quiet: a long walk to a coffee shop to enjoy a book, a phone conversation with a family member with whom we’ve lost touch. Will we tell those stories, or leave them out?  There is value in both the busy days and the slow, reflective ones. There is value in finding time for oneself.   

When the next person asks me what I do all day, maybe I will simply say, “Enough.”

#MicroblogMondays: Uncharted territory

It's approaching mid-October and I recently realized I'll soon be entering uncharted territory.

Sixteen years ago, I headed back to work in early October after being off since our daughter's stillbirth in early August. (Three days later, my grandfather passed away, & I didn't return to work for more than week afterward.) Over the years, I've often taken a few days or a week in October to paint the house, entertain my visiting mother, go to New York City, enjoy the fall colours, use up my vacation time before I lost it.  And then returned to face the particular madness that was year end at my workplace. 

Now I'm unemployed/retired, and in a few weeks, October will segue into November. This will be uncharted territory for me:  since I started working almost 30 years ago, I've rarely had more than a day or two off in November or pre-Christmas December.  Will I be crawling the walls with cabin fever, once the weather turns cold & grey, or will be I happy to curl up on the couch with a cup of tea & my laptop or a good book?  Will I still be writing my annual "I hate November" post??

I guess I'll soon find out. :)

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

"The arrogant thinking of the healthy majority"

I have mentioned before that I don't always like Leah McLaren's writing in the Globe & Mail -- and yet this is the second piece of hers that I'm highlighting in this blog in less than two months. ;)

In her latest column "The hardest thing about having an invisible illness," McLaren confesses to "the arrogant thinking of the healthy majority."  A  bad ear infection that has impaired her hearing in one ear -- perhaps temporarily, perhaps not -- has given her new insight and empathy for others living with illness. An excerpt: 

It’s strangely unpleasant, this process of being forced into the ranks of the invisibly unwell. But it’s made me more aware of people whose lives are constricted by ill health, whose struggles we generally ignore because they aren’t bleeding or limping or anything. And most of them learned long ago to keep their suffering to themselves.  

“Never, ever, speak publicly about illness,” a very WASPy family friend once advised me. “No one’s actually interested. Unless you’re dying – but in that case, why bother?” 

I always agreed with this advice, though being a healthy person, I’ve never had cause to heed it. In truth, I was a callous and unfeeling member of the healthy majority. Because I was so rarely ill, I found it hard to take people’s unseen illnesses seriously. If a friend cancelled for the second time because she was “still feeling under the weather,” I’d make sympathetic noises and think, “What a wuss.” I took stories of what I considered to be “real” illness seriously – cancer, stroke, heart failure, MS, traumatic childbirth and car-crash-related spinal injuries – but mention the words “chemical sensitivity” or “chronic fatigue” and I’d inwardly roll my eyes. 

Just as it sometimes serves the rich to believe the poor are really just lazy, it sometimes suits the healthy to believe the sick are actually weak. 

If you’d accused me of this, I would have denied it, but looking back I think that’s what I secretly believed: that invisibly ailing people should really just suck it up and get over themselves. And if they couldn’t, the least they should do was shut up about it.  

Curled on my office sofa for days, fuzzed on decongestants with a heating pad flung uselessly over my head, I realized how very wrong I had been.

This really resonated with me -- after all, is there any illness/disease that's more invisible than infertility?  Until & unless you have faced pregnancy loss and/or infertility yourself, they are topics that are generally not on your radar, and that you're not comfortable discussing.

(I remember a meeting of our pg loss support group, where a regular attendee, D., brought a friend, V., who had sadly just experienced a stillbirth of her own. "I thought I had been a good friend to D. when she lost her baby. I had NO IDEA,"  V. confessed to us, laughing wryly through her tears, while D. gave her a huge hug.) 

Likewise, I never gave too much thought to food allergies, & secretly thought some parents were overreacting by demanding nut-free schools and the like -- until I started breaking out in hives and getting a scratchy feeling in my throat every time I put a piece of tomato in my mouth. My reactions have been far less serious than what some people experience -- but they have been scary enough. I have gained a whole new respect for what these families go through.

While experience is obviously -- sadly -- the best teacher, and we might not know how to make things better when the people around us are suffering, we can certainly try not to make things worse by minimizing the situation they find themselves in or avoiding them all together.

A little empathy can go a long, long way.

Marriage, parenting and what "family" looks like

I ran across two interesting and tangentially related articles via Facebook one morning this week, and have been pondering them ever since then.

First, on Salon, I read Brittney Cooper's article, "The American family is a myth."  As the child of a single black mother who has reached her mid-30s with neither the husband nor the children she had expected to have, Cooper mourns "the extensive ways that our societal structure only rewards one type of family configuration – heteronormative, middle class, property-owning and generally white."

I could add, "and one with a father, mother and at least one child."  Because in far too many people's eyes, your family is not REALLY a family unless it includes a child.  In a recent post on Life Without Baby, Kathleen Guthrie Woods pointed to a Huffington Post article that purported to show "33 Photos That Prove There Is No One Way To Be An American Family."  "I mean, come on. Out of 33 photos, they couldn’t put in one that showed a family without children?"  she complained. 

Cooper touches on this in her article: 

...having spent most of my young adult life trying to make it into the middle class, which also meant making sure I didn’t have a baby, now I’m supposed to spend the remainder of my young adulthood trying to figure out how to have one. Perhaps I planned too well.

[Ed. note:  Boy, do I hear you...]

If I don’t have children or I don’t ever partner long-term, am I destined to be a woman without a family? What does it mean that I might need a “Golden Girls”-type arrangement with my homegirls by age 45?  

And what do we – professional, overachieving chicks – do with the sense of failure? On most days, being a feminist both helps and affirms the rightness of my quest to think more expansively about what it means to build community and family.  

But there is often still that gnawing, nagging feeling that if I just hold on a bit longer, the (beautiful) man will come, and the baby – just one, no more than two – might come, too. How to hold a desire for this version of a life and a fierce and intense commitment to my life of independence and scholarly solitude is not something I’ve figured out.

I also could relate to this thought: 

Last week, I explored with my feminist theory students what polyamorous relationships might look like, what it might mean to consider that we can’t get all we need from one person. They – young feminists – only balked, the incredulity palpable, their eyes trained on me as if attempting to stab me, killer of their dreams.

Substitute "childless" for "polyamorous," and that's how I feel sometimes -- especially around young women who have lost a baby & desperately want another, or who are just starting out with fertility treatments. I'm their worst nightmare come true -- the "killer of their dreams" -- the dream that everyone who wants a baby gets one, eventually, somehow, some way -- aren't I?

But I am heartened by her conclusion: 

On those days when the family I planned so hard to have seems wholly out of reach for me, when for yet another year I must mark a tax form, “family of one,” I choose to remember my mama’s moxie: “You and me – we are a family.”

*** *** ***

Sometimes, though, having the ideal family -- mom, dad & kids -- isn't all it's cracked up to be.  Especially these days.   

"Sometime between when we were children and when we had children of our own, parenthood became a religion in America," begins the second article, from a site called Quartz, titled "How American parenting is killing the American marriage."

They had me at "hello,"  lol.  Maybe it's my "outsider" status as a non-parent (of a living child), but the idea of "parenthood as a religion" these days seem pretty obvious to me.

The gist of the article is that, when we're single, we obsess over finding our "soulmate" -- and yet when children arrive, the relationship is put on "pause" while parenting takes over. Indeed, it's expected that we will transfer our obsession to the children -- and anyone who dares admit to putting their spouse/marriage first (hello, Ayelet Waldman!) is roundly condemned.

But there can be a price to pay:  "Couples who live entirely child-centric lives can lose touch with one another to the point where they have nothing left to say to one another when the kids leave home."  Sadly, I have seen this happen to some of my friends & relatives.

I like to think that one of the "silver linings" in the dark clouds of pregnancy loss and infertility has, for me, been a stronger marriage -- although these things can most certainly take their toll on a marriage too, and I will acknowledge that my marriage is far from perfect. 

I've had some thoughts on this issue in the past.  Back on Valentine's Day 2008, I reflected on my marriage & had this thought to offer: 

I've read that people who have children often focus so much on the kids that they neglect the relationship -- only realizing it, perhaps, when they become empty nesters & refocus on each other again after many years. For those of us who don't have children & have been empty nesters all along, the relationship is all we've got to focus on -- so perhaps we expect too much and depend on each other too much and obsess too much about it. Somewhere, there must be a happy balance between the two models.

The impact that children can have on a marriage is something I have thought about for many years, before & after Katie.  In pondering the issue of marriage equality in 2013, I wrote:

Children are one reason why people get married, of course. (And, of course, a lot of people these days are having children without getting married.)  But there are many others. I wanted children and I expected that dh & I would have them, someday. But the chief reason we got married was that we loved each other and wanted to spend the rest of our lives together. We promised to love each other for better or for worse, and when we were walloped by stillbirth and infertility, I realized that this must have been "the worse" they were referring to in the vows -- it doesn't get much worse than that, does it?

Before we got married, we went on an Engaged Encounter weekend. It was a Catholic church program, recommended by our (Anglican) minister.  Even though the Catholic church is a big fan of procreation ; ) I distinctly remember the couple leading the session advising us to put our marriage at the centre of our family, and make time for each other amid the chaos of family life.

A few years later, anticipating the family to come, I bought a book called "Childbirth and Marriage: The Transition to Parenthood" by Tracie Hotchner. It went into the Goodwill bin some years ago, but I remember it had a big impact on my thinking. From what I remember, it, too, advised couples to stay focused on their marriage and not let their new roles as mom & dad overwhelm their original roles as life partners. I came to believe (and still do) that the base, the core, of any strong family is a strong partnership between spouses. Children are the icing on the cake -- but the cake, the core of the family, is, or should be, the marriage.  

It's funny to think that a book about "the transition to parenthood" has helped me make the transition to a permanently childless future, but that's essentially what happened.