Dear Souseh: Sometimes I Feel Like a Childless Mother

Dear Souseh, 

I am in my mid forties, and got married for the first time a few years ago. My husband, who is older, has a child from a previous marriage — a teenage son with special needs. I have been welcomed into their family and home, and I not only love my partner, I appreciate and respect him. I’ve developed my own relationship with his son, which has challenges but also rewards; we’ve grown very close. I’m writing not about that but because I can’t seem to shake my sadness over not having my own children. I’ve always dreamt of being a mother, and even though I married late, I carried that hidden hope inside of me. Life intervened however: age, mainly. Conception didn’t happen naturally and we don’t have the financial resources for fertility treatments. My husband has made his peace with this; I say that I have too but not really. It’s hitting home that I won’t be a mother, after all. I’m struggling to balance a very profound grief at that reality, and appreciation for what I do have.

Do you have any advice for me on how to navigate this?

Signed,

Grieving a Child that Never Was

Dear Grieving a Child that Never Was,

Many years ago, I remember reading an interview with the writer Vladimir Nabokov, in which he describes how every time he chooses a new place to settle, he hears the great rumble of an earthquake, the sliding away of every other place, of every other lifetime unchosen. I can’t find the interview any longer, but that image has remained vivid in my mind, and I find myself referencing it often. There are many metaphors about the choices that decide our lives, usually to do with forks in the road, paths taken or untaken. They situate the idea of choice in space: each choice changes not only the trajectory, but the landscape of our journey. Nabokov’s metaphor, also situated in space, uses the idea of landscape to illustrate the consequences of choice. But it has stayed with me because, unlike Robert Frost’s roads quietly diverging in a yellow wood, Nabokov’s metaphor captures the tectonic, earth-shattering quality of such transformative choices. A whole continent sinks into the ocean; a mountain rises out of a plain; a sea floods in where there was none before. Your entire world is reshaped. And often it feels just that violent.

I’ve always dreamt of being a mother, and even though I married late, I carried that hidden hope inside of me.

This applies even, or rather perhaps especially, to those choices that we don’t make ourselves. Which is how most of our lives are shaped, through the interventions of life itself. Finances, age, geography, political situation, obligations, physical ability, opportunity, even just luck itself — all of these define the circumstances of our lives far more than active choice does. Every time we run up into one of these limitations, every time they deposit us in a new world not of our own making, we must contend with the resulting grief. Because of course you’re grieving. You’re grieving the world from which you feel you have been exiled; the future you hoped for but cannot reach.

And so, how do we grieve the dream of who we thought we might become? And how do we hold and honor that grief without letting it spoil the future that we will have instead? I feel it helpful to begin by parsing the feeling into its component parts. Because it seems to me that the grief here is about two closely related, yet different things. Firstly, you are grieving the child you hoped to have. Second, you are grieving the fact that, as you say, you “will never be a mother after all.”

The special grief of not having a child when you wanted one is that time itself is a reminder not so much of the child’s absence as their anticipated presence. What I mean is, when you’re grieving the loss of a specific person, there is a very specific absence they leave behind. You know exactly who and what has been lost; the grief has edges, it is attached to sense and memory, and it keeps pulling you back to specific moments situated in the past. But you’re grieving the loss of an idea. Not a specific child but the prospect of one. It’s a much more formless grief, localized nowhere, a kind of diffuse mist dulling the colors and contours of the present and obscuring the pleasures of the future. It can form around anything, at any time. It is not tied to specific dates or anniversaries; there are no days that people around you can anticipate will be harder than others, days when they might gather around you or think to pick up the phone and call or help you commemorate. Grief is always private; always impenetrable from the outside; always manifests unexpectedly. But it helps to be able to name it. To be able to talk about it, or to call upon others to help you grieve. And so, who can you turn to? Your husband might not be the right person to give you solace in this case, for a number of different reasons. But I would argue primarily that is because he’s a man.

As women, we learn and understand our gender identity first as our body’s potential for creating life. We are taught, in ways implicit and explicit, that our bodies were designed, if not made for, the explicit purpose of bearing children. Women who cannot conceive often describe feeling like “less of a woman.” And even women who don’t want children sometimes find themselves suddenly and inexplicably grieving the fact that they have aged out of the possibility of bearing a child — there is an animal, biological drive to the body that is so powerful it can sometimes blur or even obscure conscious desire. There is an ancient script from which it feels almost obscene to deviate. This is a very unique grief, and I would urge you to find another woman with whom you can talk about this. It helps to be able to talk about it; to connect with other women who have struggled with this feeling. The way other people deal with and logic through their own disappointments is not just a balm; it’s a learning opportunity. It gives us the possibility of imagining other ways through the darkness, ones that may not have occurred to us in the first place.

Now, the other part of your grief is that of not being a mother. The reason I say that these are two separate griefs is because being a mother is not always connected to bearing or not bearing a child. Is a woman who gives up her child for adoption at birth a mother? She has borne a child, certainly, but she has elected to give up her role as a mother. Conversely, is a woman who adopts a child not a mother? What about a woman who acts as a surrogate for someone else’s child? What about a woman who conceives a child with a donor egg? What is being a mother? Is it bearing a child with your own body and your own biological material? Or is it the nurture that happens afterwards? The commitment one undertakes to raise and care for someone?

I understand absolutely that you had a certain idea of motherhood, the one that seems so simple, so easy, and common. Finding yourself pregnant one day, gestating a child you can actually feel growing inside you, building a connection to that child before you even know what they look like. Picking out their clothes, arranging a space for them inside your home, preparing for their arrival, and experiencing birth. And then, once they’re in the world, watching them grow, identifying the ways they look like you or members of your family, the ways they look like your husband and members of his family, the way they are themselves and themselves alone. It is your right to want all of those things and to mourn their lack. Your grief is warranted. We are told time and again that there is no love like that of a child; that there is no feeling like giving birth; that one is exempt from an entire range of emotions until one has a child and can finally understand. It’s such a common script that women who don’t immediately experience these things — instant connection with their child, complete fulfillment in motherhood, unconditional love and bliss — come to feel that they are lacking and deficient in some way. And so, you are mourning the traditional idea of motherhood, what you thought it might look like because this is what you were taught it would and should look like. But reality is always so much messier and complex.

For I will remind you, very gently, that you are in fact a mother. Your husband’s son is your son, even if his biological mom is still in the picture somewhere. Being of special needs, he has an even greater need for love and nurture, for the warmer embrace of a bigger family. It’s very clear from what you write that you do love him deeply and have a close relationship with him. Perhaps, however, you haven’t fully accepted, or given yourself permission to accept the role as his mother? I don’t mean that you haven’t chosen to accept him; it’s rather about accepting yourself as his mother. Accepting that motherhood doesn’t look like what you thought it would — the landscape around you is foreign at first glance — but somehow you’ve arrived at the territory you set out for. And so by all means, grieve the child you thought you’d have, mourn what you thought motherhood might look like for you. But don’t let it obscure from you the child you do have, or have you deny the mother that you indeed are.