A woman in Australia anonymously shares her experience and many realisations on becoming a mother or not becoming a mother.
Growing up I never gave much consideration as to whether I would have children or not, it was just an assumption that I would because that’s what you do as a woman, well at least that was the way in the family and community I grew up in in Sydney, Australia. You find a man, get married and have children to complete your picture of what is considered to be a rewarding and meaningful life. Anything outside of this prescribed path and people would assume that there must be something wrong with you. It didn’t occur to me to question whether becoming a mother was true for me or not, as like many other women around me I had been heavily impacted by the pictures that it would somehow make me more of a ‘real’ woman.
As a young woman, I would observe older women who didn’t have children and automatically assume that they weren’t mums because they either didn’t have a partner, their partner didn’t want to have children, or they couldn’t have children because of an issue with fertility. Not consciously aware of my judgement at the time, I would look at these women and feel sorry for them, that they were missing out on such an important life experience. Afterall, many women I would talk to about becoming a mother described having their first child as the pinnacle moment of love in their lives, that they didn’t know love like that until they held their baby in their arms for the first time.
I was quite taken with this idea of unconditional love, the opportunity to pour my love and care into a little being that I could adore with all my heart. Having grown up in a household where touch and affection was sparse, and often feeling alone, I craved giving to another what I had missed out on as a way of trying to heal from my past. The idea of this ‘bond’ between mother and child was very appealing to me. For someone who had felt the absence of connection my whole life, the idea of having intimacy with another being who wouldn’t reject me, or up and leave, felt very safe and secure, and that no matter what, we would stick together as mother and child under the belief that ‘blood is thicker than water’.
As this was a very normal viewpoint on parenting, one that was shared by many other women around me, I didn’t appreciate at the time just how much expectation I was carrying at becoming one until at the age of thirty-seven I actually considered the possibility of not being a mother. For me, it wasn’t just about connection with another being, there was also this idea running in the background that being a mother somehow makes you more feminine and womanly, that you aren’t really a woman until you have gone through the experience of conception, pregnancy, birthing and in particular breast feeding, as if your body is redundant when not used in its full functioning.
What’s the point of having ovaries and a uterus if not for bearing children, or breasts for breast feeding?
At this stage of my life, I had no connection with what these parts of my body offered by way of my own relationship with them outside of their functional purpose of what they did for others.
Throughout my life, my focus had most certainly not been on appreciating the depth of beauty I hold as a woman but more so on the perceived lack – i.e. all the things I didn’t like about myself such as not feeling good enough, wanting to be better, trying to improve myself, constantly comparing myself to other women and continually seeking recognition to prove to myself that I was enough as I was. This emptiness inside led to a way of being and relating to people where I was often giving my power away by trying to please, to make people happy, to impress them, to get attention and a little bit of love and adoration for what I was missing in myself – love.
Whilst I appeared as a confident, charismatic, and an articulate young woman on the outside, I felt empty inside. I was desperate for people to see the real me and because I wasn’t seeing myself, I would of course take everything as a personal rejection whenever I felt dismissed, ignored, overlooked or invisible. By consequence of taking things personally, I would play this dance of being somewhat open to others and then closing up like a clam, withdrawing away from any intimacy with the justification that ‘everyone ultimately rejects you’. In short, I was completely ill-equipped to be in relationship with men. I did not have the self-worth to claim what I deserved, so I would often tolerate and accept abuse in its many different flavours of neglect, lying, cheating, dismissiveness, lack of commitment and most painful of all to feel – lack of true adoration. Whilst on a mental level I may have considered that I wanted the real deal, a man who truly loved and adored me for who I was, the reality was that there was nothing in me that was embracing of this, for as I have learned since, we first need to feel and normalise this love within ourselves to be able let it in from others.
There were men who had wanted to go there with me, but I of course wasn’t interested in those ones, as I seemed to have a preference for the ‘players’ that would casually commit yet never put both their feet into an actual relationship. There was one long-term boyfriend I had in my late twenties/early thirties who I considered having children with, but any time the conversation was raised it was always fobbed off as something that would happen way down the track and fortunately something that never came to pass, for I can see now, that it would have ended in a complete disaster. Looking back, how could I possibly have raised a child when I had not even learnt how to parent myself?
There was almost a complete absence of any true self-nurturing and care of me as a woman so what chance did I have at that point with a child?
I may have thrown myself into the role of what I believed being a mother entailed but at the expense of myself as a woman, something that I often see occurring amongst women where they completely lose themselves in the role of being a mum, often to the detriment of their relationships with their partner where they relate to each other as mum and dad, not as lovers first.
After separating from my long-term partner at the fresh age of thirty-one, I had to go back to the basics of learning how to love myself and that meant taking a serious look at how I had been living and especially in relationship with others. At a time in life where many women are either considering getting pregnant, trying to conceive, or having children, the first half of my thirties was dedicated to getting to know myself, healing and re-imprinting the old ways of not valuing myself; the woman. I learnt for the first time in my life how deeply sensitive, precious, and delicate I am and that I can speak up and express without holding this back. What was once tolerable in relationships was no longer acceptable nor appealing to me on any level. Why would I want to date anyone who loved me less than I loved me? What part of that would be remotely fulfilling just so I didn’t have to be alone? These were simple truths I was realising by being so-called ‘alone’ as a single woman.
Heading into my mid-thirties (read more about Turning Thirty) I naturally had to face some fears coming up about whether I would stay single or not and potentially miss the ‘fertility window’ to have children, a looming threat of approaching your forties and being on the flip side of a rapidly declining ‘bell curve’ of fertility. Whilst those thoughts could still grab me at times, I predominantly felt accepting of my life situation. I knew at some point that I would enter into a relationship again but the one I was developing with myself was so enriching that it quelled any sense of urgency to find a man and start having children.
Whilst people talk a lot about the ‘ticking biological clock’ I would say much of this sense of stress and urgency over becoming a mother actually comes from the outside pressure of expectation that women are under to have children, and within a certain time frame, not from an internal sense of the true timing, or if it is indeed the truthful way for a woman.
The shifts that occurred within me over those five beautiful and incredibly evolving years in my early to mid-thirties, the years of being single, prepared me very well to meet a man who could meet me on every level, a man that was as deeply devoted to a relationship and evolving together as I am. When I met my husband-to-be, it was like a glorious feeling of homecoming, that ‘finally someone is fully on board with me’ and not just that, a man who challenges me to be all that I am, which was very much a first for me. All previous men I had dated preferred me playing small and people pleasing, whereas this was most definitely not the case with this man. He calls me to always express the absolute truth and to not hold back from him.
When we got together, we both instantly felt the potential to have children, but it was very different to how I had experienced it before. It wasn’t a burning need to have children to fill an emptiness, but more so that we connected with the purpose of what amazing parents we would make and how much that is needed in the world. For starters, we had a truly loving relationship, one with deep care and total adoration for each other and one that was very steady and rock-solid, a foundation that we knew would offer a super supportive environment for children. At the same time as feeling this potential to be parents we equally felt that we would be totally okay if we didn’t have children and would happily embrace life as a couple, so it wasn’t something that we were overly attached to, but rather about where our focus needed to be.
Not long after our wedding we felt something change where there was a strong sense of a being with us that we had not felt before that we knew would become our child. With this new presence in our lives the impulse to get pregnant suddenly became very strong and clear that it was time. Up until that point we had been using contraception as we didn’t want to try to get pregnant unless we both felt the clarity to go there, which actually became so pronounced it felt like someone knocking on the door saying, ‘hey I’m ready to come in!’. The presence of this being around us was deeply felt and in fact incredibly beautiful, so much so that it brought me to tears to feel the purity of what was there with us. Without hesitation we answered the call and began the process of ‘trying’ to get pregnant. It feels so funny even using that word ‘trying’ because when we could feel the presence of another Soul with us, it was so abundantly clear that it wasn’t something we were in control of, but nonetheless we had to commit on a physical level to make this happen unless we wanted to twiddle our thumbs waiting for the so-called immaculate conception to occur.
What was very interesting about going through the motions of making conception a possibility, was that up until that point I had no idea the impact that the consciousness of being a mother still held over me.
I started out feeling quite relaxed about the whole process and within a few months of not having ‘success’, I started to experience the anxieties that many women talk about of worrying how long it will take, whether it will actually work, questioning if my eggs were okay, if I’m too old etc.
Only weeks before starting this process of trying to conceive I had been celebrating when my periods would arrive as there were often long breaks between them, but here I was in the opposite reality of feeling down and depressed each time I would bleed. I would see this as another ‘failed attempt’. I had lost touch with the beauty of having a period and instead become fixated on the outcome of wanting a baby and imposing a timeframe of wanting it to happen quickly, thinking that if it didn’t that there must be something wrong with me – right?
It was great to see all of this come up so that I could feel the impact that this way of thinking had on me and all other women. Rather than enjoying the process it turned the trying for a pregnancy into something stressful and not one of deep surrendering and acceptance as it needs to be. I have come to realise that how, why, when, and where are not ours to choose so why try and control the process when it makes absolutely no sense to do so? Over the period of the eighteen months that we were actively trying to conceive, I felt a lot of this drop away, where there was no longer a burning urgency to get pregnant, but a much deeper acceptance of the Divine timing required for it to occur. I could feel that my body was being prepared before the being coming in could arrive. I needed the healing and preparation time, not it. Once I connected with the beautiful unfolding on offer it was much easier to let go and focus on my responsibility of providing a body that was deeply settled, a body that could offer a nurturing space for a being to be held, grow and develop in.
Naturally my body responded to this deepening, and we fell pregnant much to my surprise after having been told I would find it very difficult to conceive given that I had been diagnosed with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS) at the age of fifteen years and had never had a regular cycle in my life. It was gorgeous to feel the changes happening in my body, similar to getting a period. My breasts felt quite swollen and my tummy a bit bloated, but the sensation was quite different – it felt like a stretching of my uterus more so than an ache which I usually experience right before my period begins, or on the first day of my bleeding cycle, but what was most noticeable of all was a feeling of aliveness in my womb, like an inner tickle. Once it was clear I had missed the bleeding, we used one of the home pregnancy tests which confirmed we were actually pregnant.
My husband and I were delighted at the news and booked our first appointment with the GP that day to get everything checked out and ready for what was ahead. At this point he had estimated we were at six weeks and whilst he was happy to hear of our news, he also warned us that it’s very common to have miscarriages at the age of thirty-five and over, so essentially not to get our hopes up. To be honest I was just impressed that my body had gotten this far so we didn’t hold back on sharing the exciting news with our closest friends and family. I know many other people wait until the twelve-week mark to tell people, but as I saw it if we had a miscarriage, they were the people I would want to talk about it with anyway.
Only five days or so after finding out we were pregnant I experienced the early signs of miscarriage. What started out as mild cramping in the afternoon turned into very painful, stabbing like cramps during the middle of the night. I was concerned about the risk of an ectopic pregnancy, so we decided to drive to our local hospital in the middle of the night to get everything checked out. What many would consider to be an awful experience, actually turned out to be one of the most deeply beautiful and healing experiences of my life. There we were in the middle of the emergency ward in amongst the chaos and my husband jumped onto the hospital bed with me and held me super close as if we were in bed at home, snuggling. The depth of intimacy between us was palpable, so much so that the nurses would come in and apologise for disturbing us.
I could feel that the miscarriage was bringing me to a place of immense vulnerability. I had never let myself receive this depth of love, devotion and care from my husband before, melting away layers of protection that had been there for a very long time.
Having run with the narrative of ‘doing it all on my own’, it left me in no doubt of the solidness of our marriage, that we were doing it together, as we do everything.
Those twelve hours in the hospital had a profound impact on me and were a new marker for embracing and accepting what is playing out. The miscarriage happened and there was nothing I could have done to prevent it, even though I could feel there were thoughts lingering at the back of my mind that somehow this was my fault and that if I had only rested more this never would have happened. But from the experience I had a very tangible sense that nothing had been lost, that I hadn’t lost a baby per se, but that this miscarriage was all part of the process of preparing for a pregnancy still to come. The hardening in my womb from all the protection I had been living in needed to be broken down and cleared from body. Whilst I did shed some tears of letting go of what could have been, I was quite amazed by how quickly I was able to accept and move on from the miscarriage. Little did I know at that point that the miscarriage would be the easy part of the process and that it was only the beginning of a much longer period of clearing that my body needed to go through.
Around the time of the miscarriage, I started to experience symptoms of vaginal soreness, itchiness and aching, something that I hadn’t had in a long time, in fact for eight years. In my early twenties I experienced an onset of an aggressive auto-immune skin condition called Lichen Sclerosis (LS) that affects the vaginal skin in different ways. It can cause skin fusion, thinning, tearing and thickening of the tissue so that it loses its elasticity. I spent most of my twenties trying to deal with this condition, one that made intercourse painful, if not near impossible, as the pain that followed certainly deterred me from even trying. The tricky thing about this condition is that the only treatment for it is the use of topical steroids which can also worsen the skin thinning, but amazingly I had been symptom free for over eight years, so it came as a shock when they re-appeared seemingly ‘out of the blue’ after the miscarriage.
At first, we thought it might just be a vaginal thrush infection but when it didn’t clear up with the anti-fungal treatments, we started to consider other possibilities – one being the re-occurrence of LS. By this point I was in physical agony, everything hurt, especially sitting for long periods of time at work and as you can imagine when your vagina hurts it’s pretty difficult to feel relaxed and settled in yourself. This brought all of our pregnancy plans to a halt as it was simply not possible to try whilst I was in pain, something that I found very difficult to accept at the time because I was very keen to try again, but at the time I had no idea how long the symptoms would last for.
The onset of Lichen Sclerosis was a significant stop moment for me to feel how I had been living, not just recently but over my entire life. How easily I had given myself away in relationships and allowed myself to be abused both emotionally and physically. Up until being with my husband, I had never made love with a man before where there was a deep honouring of each other’s sensitivity and absolutely no imposition of expectation on one another. Prior to that there had always been a need for relief, gratification or stimulation of some kind which may have felt pleasurable in the moment but left me feeling empty afterwards. I certainly hadn’t held my body as deeply precious, which is what the condition was now calling me to accept and honour. The illness asked me let go of the fight that I had been living in to protect myself from the risk of getting hurt, where I had been willing to reveal part of myself but not the whole, bare, naked in transparency.
There was much to let go of starting with the belief that if you don’t ‘please your man’ he’ll leave you, something that I had no idea I was holding onto. Yet I experienced thoughts of insecurity and doubt around the question of whether I would ever be able to be intimate with my husband again. Whilst there was zero pressure from him and nothing but pure understanding and space, I came to realise that this is something that many, if not most, women carry, that sex keeps a man interested in you.
I also had to let go of any need of having children which exposed my investments in it.
During this time, I could feel significant shifting in me and within our relationship. We often had conversations that we could no longer feel the presence of a being with us, but neither of us were clear whether this meant we weren’t meant to have children or that it was simply an offering of the space for my body to recover. But what was quite incredible was the level of detachment in which we would have these conversations, that it didn’t matter either way whether we were parents or not. We both felt absolute about our relationship, the fact that we truly loved and adored being together so if that meant being together and not having children that was totally okay as equally as it would be to have them. I no longer had that yearning to be a mum and felt far more open to the possibility that it may not be part of the plan for me this lifetime. With that came immense settlement and ease, that either way life would be beautifully enriching.
Ironically, by the end of the nine-month cycle since the miscarriage I reached a super clear and insightful realisation about pregnancy. I had a deep moment of connection with my Soul where I instantly sensed that it wasn’t for me to be a mum this life, that whilst the process of preparing to conceive, falling pregnant and having a miscarriage was needed for my own healing, it wasn’t what I was being called to focus on. This life is for me to focus on my marriage, my community of friends and family and on work, and whilst one could say that I would make a great mum, the reality is that through my work and in my relationships with community, I actually parent many people regardless of their age and I absolutely love this role of supporting others.
Connecting with the simplicity of this truth and the simplicity of the life that I am here to lead, brought an immense joy. I was surprised by how amazing I felt about the decision, given how much I had previously wanted to have children. It felt like this enormous weight had lifted off me where I could be in the full embrace of what was on offer without an ounce of feeling like I was missing out on being a mum and that somehow, I was less of a woman because of it. Since that moment of realisation there has not been a single moment of doubt as to whether it was the right decision or not which made the decision for my husband to get a vasectomy very soon after and close the door on being biological parents, a very simple and easy one that we have never looked back on. Ever since making that decision I have never felt an ounce of jealousy or comparison towards other women who do have children or have fallen pregnant, just full-hearted joy with their unfoldment which has been incredibly beautiful.
What I have come to realise through the experience of wanting to have children, trying to get pregnant, getting pregnant, having a miscarriage and letting go of needing to be a parent at all, is that it doesn’t matter either way, whether we are a mum/dad or not, so long as we are responsive to what is true for us. A life without children of my own, is no less meaningful and enriching, it is simply different and thus no better or less. The key is being in the full acceptance and embrace of this truth, rather than wishing or hoping it is different. This is the only factor that can bring in any sense of torment or anguish over what we think we are missing out on, as opposed to the joy that is actually available for us to live – the joy that my husband and I now live.
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