How to survive Mother's Day 2023 being Childless.
How to survive Mother's Day 2023 being childless.
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Childlessness Grief Counselling. Coping with being Childless.
What being childfree not by choice looks like
When we talk about Childless not by Choice it's both important and necessary to make distinctions between the different terms you might see on social media and in general conversation.
There's always exceptions, but often Involuntary Childlessness and Childless not by Choice are used to describe someone's desire to have children and be parents. It's also important to understand the term childfree is often only used when a person wants to not have children and terms may be used differently over a persons life.
People's lives can't and don't fit into neat lists, many factors affect and play into childlessness.
The grief of being left childless after infertility
Infertility is an absolute beast.
I don't think anything can really prepare us for the train wreck of emotions we feel when the plan to become pregnant doesn't work.
I like to think of infertility like a box we carry around. In the beginning the box is small and light.
But month after month, cycle after cycle the box grows bigger and feels heavier.
The Grief of Being Childless after Infertility
Before we know it the weight of the box is crushing. We can barely cope with carrying it around, as well as trying to keep our heads above water in all the other areas of our life.
There's only one thing we can really do when it get's to this point... set the box down.
But what does that mean for my life?
How do I move forward with my life when it looks like my one dream, the dream I've been hanging all my hopes on looks like it won't be?
The journey to recovering and moving forward with our lives after heartbreak and disappointment isn't an easy one, but it's a valuable and do-able. Not only is doing the work of processing grief do-able but it's also the key to healing and finding freedom.
The grief of being childless after unsuccessful IVF treatments
For a lot of people, being told that IVF is their only option sets them on a path to try cycle after cycle until they either have a successful pregnancy or they run out of money, time and emotional resources. Sometimes everything runs out at once.
So many losses occur through the IVF process that people are often caught off guard about just how deeply and widely they're grieving.
Please note: *Many women (but not all) identify with the losses mentioned below. If you resonate with these losses you *may* feel that working through them could be the right step for you.
Many women (and couples) who start IVF treatment can feel that they weren't properly informed by their doctors (fertility specialists and gynecologists') about the scope of the losses that were likely to occur throughout all stages of the process.
This is not even to mention the fact that a lot of doctors don't or can't give any time of day to the emotional health of their clients. They don't seem to care that every failed cycle marks the end of hopes and dreams.
You might feel like you went into the process somewhat blind and the losses you've experienced have never been validated as real losses.
You might feel like your zygotes and embryo's weren't ever recognised as chromosomally complete human beings, either by your loved ones or by your doctors and nurses.
Maybe your fertility doctor and their staff were super positive that things would work. The thing is, they don't have to live with the grief and the pain, you do.
The losses connected to IVF are pretty massive, so it's no wonder that on top of everything else, this kind of grief throws us for a loop. There's several areas of the IVF/ICSI process where loss of human life often occurs is;
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the loss of zygotes/blastocysts during grading,
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the loss of embryos during grading,
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the loss of embryos during freezing and
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the loss of embryos during thawing.
On top of the trickly nature of become pregnant in the first place, miscarriage rates are really high, a lot of doctors fail to mention this reality. Why is that? Miscarriage is a living nightmare no matter how early it happens and it's yet another compounding loss with grief that needs to be processed and healed.
How circumstances of life leave us childless and grieving.
What the heck has happened in my life?
I don't know how I got here or how the time went so fast...but here we are.
Alot of things happen in life that we never plan for; we never met the right partner, or maybe we did and both or one of us was sick through most of our fertile years. Maybe our seasons of singleness lasted through our most fertile years. Maybe we escaped a bad relationship and we're actually happy it didn't happen with them.
But we're still grieving.
Maybe a disease ravaged our bodies and meant pregnancy was never going to happen. Cancer, endometriosis, stroke, heart failure and the list goes on because there's no end to all the ways life gets in the way of our plans.
Or maybe our plan was always to adopt, but when we got to that point the process didn't work; we couldn't be matched, or our age and income was against us.
The grief of Secondary Infertility. Not childless, but without the children hoped for.
The grief of secondary infertility doesn't seem to want to fit neatly into any box does it.
On the one hand people tell you, you should be grateful for the child you do have, they tell you to stop complaining because others have it worse.
Well it's time to tell them to stop.
Your pain and grief around the losses you've experienced are valid and just as real as any other losses, even if some people around you can't recognise them.
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