At nearly 48, this is how I feel about not having children

I've had a revelation

Me, during a walk on Easter Sunday

A friend asked a couple of months ago how I feel now about not having kids.

I was deeply touched that she’d gently asked me this question while we were in her hallway, coming back from something or going somewhere, I don’t remember which.

I don’t think anyone has asked me that question before.

I know how I felt about not having kids in my thirties and early forties (lonely, sad, unheard, and then accepting - you can read more about that here), but rarely do I contemplate how this experience of being a woman who isn’t a mother feels at the moment.

And, as I write, I’m gently asking myself how I feel now, right now, in this moment, about not having children. I am closing my eyes, uncrossing my legs and breathing into that query…

…And the answer that comes, (and the answer I think I gave my friend in her hallway) is: ‘Thank you for asking. And I’m OK.’

And I have been contemplating a new thought this week.

For a long time, I thought that not having children was something that happened to me not by my own volition. I felt that I was childless not by choice.

And my new thought is this. I have been wondering whether there was something going on very deep in my subconscious or unconscious that somehow prevented me from having - or trying to have - children.

I sense that my body or soul somehow knew better than my brain that I should avoid procreation during my fertile years, and that my body and soul stopped me from meeting someone I felt the urge to procreate with.

And that’s because in my thirties, a time when I was searching for partner, I was really quite lost.

When I was 31, my father Roger died, which was an enormous loss. After he died, I spent some (probably all) of that decade of my life trying to find a partner who would look after me, just as my dad had, while all around it seemed like everyone else was getting married, getting mortgages and thinking about trying for children.

At the same time, I was at the bottom rung of a new career in journalism, and, while I know now that it is a career that was and is exactly right for me, going back to an entry-level salary was tough.

Bringing a child into the world among all of this, I now feel, would not have been right, for me or for the child at that time.

This is a revelation for me.

I know there are many ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’ around this, and you might be thinking that I’m still trying to reconcile the fact that I didn’t have children. That may be true. I don’t know.

If I had met a man able to hold me and understand me in all of my grief and lost-ness in my thirties then maybe it would have been the ‘right’ time to try for children. But, with increasing self-knowledge, I have a sense that I may have relied too heavily on that man to be there for me, that I needed to do more work around helping myself first.

Along with not meeting the right man, deep down I also had concerns about my body bearing a child. These were (or so I thought), driven by vanity and how my figure would be after children.

If I push a little further, I was probably worried about not being lovable with a body that might have changed, and of not loving myself in that body. And I think my subconscious was weaving its magic - what manifested as vanity perhaps went much deeper. Maybe my body, my vagina, might have found pregnancy and birth ‘too much’ somehow, and so my subconscious protected me in not allowing me to procreate.

At 38, I spoke to a therapist about my sadness that I hadn’t met the right person to have children with. And I remember her words so clearly.

“You’re 38, not 48,” she said. “I think you’re assuming that meet right man + marry right man + have sex with right man = kid/s with right man. There are many ways to have children in your life - and you have time to explore those.”

In a few months, I will be 48. In the nearly 10 years since that conversation with the therapist, I have not given birth to a child, fathered by a man I love, or tried other ways to have my own children.

Instead, I have learned to understand and love myself and what I need. While I have long been able to meet the basic needs of a human – food, water, shelter, employment, health etc – it has taken a while to focus on my other needs, the things higher up in Maslow’s hierarchy.

I have long known what I like, (Dancing! Gardening! Social connections!) but now I am getting to know how those things fulfil my needs, to do more of them, to ask for things I need and to trust that life will provide all I need at the time that I need it.

I am finding this a beautiful journey of self-exploration (I don’t mean this to sound smug).

I sense that if a child came into my life right now, I would, in my 48th year, be much more ready and able to understand what that child would need than I would have been during my fertile years.

In other words, I think I would make a really good mother.

Sometimes I feel sad that I’m not.

And I am OK with that.

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