Do Women Have Grief over Childlessness?

[Scottdmw]

There was an interesting editorial in the Huffington Post recently:

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melanie-notkin/my-secret-grief-over-35-s_b_1202808.html?ref=women

 

It's a single childless woman's account of her grief over not getting the chance to have children. She feels like this is a grief she's not allowed to express. I'm curious if other women have had a similar experience. It does seem sometimes like there's pressure in society for women to put career first, if the children thing doesn't really work out they’re supposed to be comforted with the idea that they made the right choices. I've had the impression that some women do put pressure on other women to downplay unhappiness over lack of children.

 

She also mentions that people sometimes assume she has “been too picky” because she wanted children but wasn't able to make a relationship work. I struggle with this a lot myself. I'm a 39-year-old man who's always wanted children too. I’ve had several relationships that could have led to marriage but didn't due to the other person's choices, but I've also made a lot of choices myself about who to date which in retrospect I could have made different choices on. It's hard for me to reasonably deny that maybe I have been “too picky” and that I could have done things differently at some points. I read a story about a woman like this, and I think that while her choices are legitimate she should take responsibility for them and realize that her choices had a major role in the way her life turned out, rather than just perhaps believing she was unlucky.

 

Thoughts?

 

Scott

[stillafool]

If this woman or any woman truly wants children she can have them with or without a relationship. Unless of course she has problems with fertility. I know plenty of successful women who adopt or have their own.

[Stung]

Well, most of the women I know in their late 30s or 40s either have children, or chose not to because they didn't want to. I do know two women who don't have children who grieve over it. One of them accepted it and is now in her 60s and really delves into her role of favorite aunt. She's wistful sometimes and went through a period of bitterness (she never had children because her husband didn't want them, and then he divorced her and had kids with his second, younger wife, so I think some bitterness was understandable) but as far as I am aware she is mainly at peace with how things turned out. She's in a very active retirement now, has a boyfriend, is in some sports leagues, travels a lot. The other one is really struggling. She's 39 and with a loving partner, but she suffered a series of miscarriages in the last few years and is beating herself up because, rightly or wrongly, she's afraid she miscarried because she waited too long to start trying. It's a sad, hard situation. However, she's living a pretty fantastic life in a lot of ways, very rich and interesting, so it's not like she's empty if this never works out for her. Also, she and her partner are starting to look into adoption.

[FitChick]

There are plenty of women who chose to remain childfree (I am one) and plenty of mothers who regret having children. Like anything in life, you have to make informed choices and take responsibility for those choices.

[Cypress25]

I hail from the childfree camp, so I can tell you that there are plenty of women who don't want children. Those women would have grief if they wound up pregnant, lol.

 

But I assume you're talking about women who do want children and, for some reason, don't have them. Some of them probably do grieve about it and suffer from a real sense of loss, but I think an equal number are satisfied with the way their lives turned out. They've found a way to be happy without children.

 

It does seem sometimes like there's pressure in society for women to put career first, if the children thing doesn't really work out they’re supposed to be comforted with the idea that they made the right choices. I've had the impression that some women do put pressure on other women to downplay unhappiness over lack of children.

 

Actually, I think the opposite is true. There's pressure in society for women to put their family first, and they are often judged negatively if they don't. There is definitely a cultural expectation that all women want children. When I say I don't want children, people either think I'm weird or I'm lying. When they realize that I'm serious, they accuse me of being selfish, cold, unnatural, abnormal, etc. They act like having kids should be the most important thing in the world to me, otherwise I'm some sort of freak. Then they assure me that I'll regret it when I'm older, I'll want kids when it's too late, and I'll never be happy without them. I think women who don't have kids are actually encouraged to be unhappy about it.

[carhill]

Perhaps as an indicator of emotional style, my exW was childless through three marriages and about 26 years total of M and never to my knowledge expressed any grief about that reality, even though she apparently tried with each husband, and I know with me. Perhaps she hid it, IDK. She was a wonderful aunt/great-aunt, as her sister had her first child at 17 and became a grandmother during our M.

 

As a marked example of a different emotional style, a lady with whom I had a relationship in the past was demonstrably emotional about not being able to give me children, as she was already in her mid-40's and, in her words, 'my time has passed'. She was already a grandmother at that point and had two daughters. I remember her being emotional about that; specifically how seemingly innocent words by myself about how I felt about children triggered her. Interesting what one remembers.

 

So I'd say it's a mixed bag. It depends on circumstances, choice, and personal psychology.

[anne1707]

Actually, I think the opposite is true. There's pressure in society for women to put their family first, and they are often judged negatively if they don't. There is definitely a cultural expectation that all women want children.

 

I very much agree with this.

 

In my twenties I did not want children - fair enough at that age - and actually thought I would probably never want them. However that did change when I met my husband. But that has not worked out for us and now because of my age, it is extremely unlikely.

 

Even now, over ten years after I began to realise that it was "not happening", I still can feel sad that we do not have children. Our thoughts on adoption etc were that we did not want the marriage to become all about children and the battle to go through all the scrutiny etc to adopt and then lose sight of us. What we had was still more than enough to make us happy - children would not have filled a void, they would have added to something already good.

 

As for attitudes to me - because I have a successful career, people automatically assume that I did not want children (note, not that my husband did not want them - they see it all as me making that choice). These comments are usually along the lines of "so you chose to have a career instead" and are definitely judgemental in nature. In fact a SIL spread all kinds of rumours amongst my husband's family about how much of a "selfish cow" I was for not having kids and how I was depriving my H of pretty much the one thing that would make him happy. They very much saw children as the norm and a career as secondary.