On the last day of World Childless Week 2021 we are focusing on moving forward.
When you are childless-not-by-choice this means facing that grief head-on. Getting to a stage where we are not so overwhelmed by the rollercoaster of emotions that we can hardly function. There were times when I was so engulfed by grief that I was hardly existing. How could I go from “surviving to thriving” because even surviving felt beyond my reach?
There were rare occasions when the grief lifted slightly, and I got a glimpse of a happier life.
The moments were fleeting and quickly disappear again as my grief descended and shrouded me like a thick fog.
Defining progress
One major turning point in my grieving was joining some on-line support groups it was a double-edged sword. I certainly felt less isolated. Yet I was also petrified when I compared where I was in my journey to other members of the support groups I belonged to. Their level of healing and acceptance seemed out of reach. My inner demons whispered that this brighter future was not within my grasp because my situation was vastly different.
The multiple bereavements I had already experienced had left me an empty shell not capable of navigating this grief. All my strength had been spent grieving for members of my close family. Others found a way to thrive whilst I was destined to retreat further into my shell and remain there for the rest of my days.
There is a huge amount of benefit gained from the insights that others share. However, you should never compare your progress with that of other people who are also childless-not-by-choice. Experiences are different, people are different, timescales are different, beliefs are different. We also share different levels of details. What you see and read on Facebook is only part of the story.
Instead of looking to other people I realised that I needed to define what progress meant to ME. How would I know when things were improving? Would I be able to recognise success when it happened? Could I be moving forward without realising it?
My eventual definition was that progress was reaching that lofty stage where the deep, black, darkest days were not has deep, black and as dark. They weren’t as frequent and didn’t drag me down for as long.
Having a clearer idea of what I meant by progress meant that I could actually start moving forward. I could move away from the brink of overwhelming despair.
The abyss of grief
You see for years I had been paralyzed. I’d been standing at the edge of a huge abyss of grief. Fearing that moving one inch would send me hurtling into a bottomless chasm with no way out from my prison of grief. Up until this point moving forward had not been possible.
Yet it wasn’t all doom and gloom. Sometimes things were a little easier and there was a little glimmer of hope that life COULD get better. Don’t ask me how this happened, it just did.
So, when those rare, better days appeared I grabbed them with both hands. Sometimes I would simply enjoy LIVING again. Feeling whole, normal, happy, (human?) I could only do this because I could actually see that I was making progress.
At other times I would make use of feeling fractionally less vulnerable to be proactive. I would write about my grief. The gamut of emotions I’d been experiencing recently would tumble out onto the page. When I was feeling even stronger, I would examine my emotions to discover which were more pressing and threating to explode around me. Emotions would be analysed and prioritised. (You can take the girl out of the Business Analysis world yet can’t take the Business Analyst out of the girl!)
Grief and juggling glass balls
Stress is often explained as juggling with glass balls which represent all your responsibilities. The build-up of stress makes it impossible to cope. We juggle faster and faster until the inevitable happens and we drop one of the glass balls. It’s luck of the draw which ball drops. One of the less important responsibilities and you scrape through by the seat of your pants. If the ball was a “showstopper” the ramifications can be major.
Sometimes the stress is so overwhelming that we become startled rabbits. Paralyzed by the headlights we stop juggling and all the balls crash to the floor.
One way of reducing stress is to identify which of those glass balls you can put in a safe place to return to when you are able. Adapting this technique to focus on emotions rather than stress gives you a great way to proactively work through the grief.
Putting some of the emotions to one side makes moving forward a little easier: there are fewer glass balls to juggle which means less risk of dropping one. It’s important to remember that we only talking about putting some emotions to one-side for a short time. We’re not talking about ignoring them completely. The emotions cannot be worked though if they have been supressed.
So I would identify if there were any lesser emotions that I could “put down” for a while. Emotions that needed to be worked through yet weren’t at the core of my current cycle of grief. This enable me to identify which emotions threatened to engulf me the next time I slipped into that deep, dark and black place. I also realised that I cried different types of tears. Tears are a huge indication that this is a main pain point. As I explored the emotions I “followed the tears” and they often guided me to the most overwhelm and pressing emotion.
Anger, anger and yet more anger
Of all the emotions I explored the one that kept on returning was anger.
I would work on the anger. Identify what caused it THIS TIME. Decide on how to process the anger. How to lessen its grip. More importantly how to forgive myself for feeling anger because, more often than not, I would feel guilty about its presence.
While I was going through this, I also noticed that other members of the childless-not-by-choice community struggled with anger too. Members of support groups would share being angry at themselves, angry at partners, angry at siblings, parents, friends and work colleagues. Then there’s the BIG ONE. Angry when a friend who had struggled for years to conceive announced their pregnancy. Jealousy too: WHY HER NOT ME!
Lots of anger, followed by lots of guilt, shame, disgust, confusion, and loss of self-worth: A downward spiral leading us to believe that I must be a terrible person to feel angry and jealous of someone who is pregnant. Afterall my grief is because I cannot have a child. The hypocrisy of it!
Give it time I hear you say.
Unfortunately, in this case, time isn’t a great healer. On the one hand time plays a minor role in childless grief because of the cyclical nature of that grief. There are aspects of being CNBC that you simply don’t realise exist at the beginning of your grief. When you’re feeling overwhelmed by another deluge of pregnancy announcements amongst your family, friends, and work colleagues you are focused on that aspect. You are praying that the grief triggering announcements will stop.
JUST LET IT STOP
You don’t realise that once the excruciating pain of pregnancy announcements has become less raw, that you’ll be thrown a curveball. Make that a builder’s wrecking ball swung with full force at your gut and heart.
Time, that great healer, has now thrust you into the grief of “Granny Announcements”. Rather than playing a minor role in the healing process, time is now a bigger player.
I believe that it’s the cyclical nature of CNBC grief that is so hard to withstand. You process your grief and don’t let it fester. The grief becomes less raw. You’re moving forward towards healing. Real, tangible acceptance is within your reach. After years, even decades, you feel that you have made progress and are at peace and …
WHAM.
Something unexpected happens and you’re grieving all over again.
This is a grief like no other that I’ve experienced. I’ve worked through the pain of my father dying whilst I was on honeymoon with my first husband. The grief has receded of being by my stepfather’s side as he died following a kidney transplant. For the most part, the loss of my mother following a very tragic accident is a thing of the past and only happy memories remain. I say “for the most part” because I was hit by an unexpected wave of grief only last week. However, that is rare. I;m also so familiar with all the different aspects of my grief that I know why I am feeling my mother’s death more acutely at the moment.
What a heart-breaking statement that is …. I am also so familiar with all the different aspects of my grief ….
Sometimes progress doesn’t really feel like moving forward at all!
Peeling the onion
Grief is like peeling an onion. As you work through the layer of grief there are lots of tears. Finally, you think the worst has passed. There is a period of happiness, acceptance, and balance. A trigger happens. It causes a dent in the next layer of the onion. The dent because a “sore spot”. Triggers are drawn to the sore spot, which becomes larger with each hit. Eventually it becomes so big that the grief has returned. The cycle starts again. More emotions, more pain, more tears. Another layer of grief to work through.
With it, the return of the anger.
Why is this happening again? I thought I had dealt with this. Does all the work I did before count for nothing? When will this stop?
WILL THIS STOP?
If only grief were as linear and compartmentalised as the Kubler-Ross curve suggests. An easy transition from Denial to Acceptance via Anger, Bargaining and Depression. If only moving forward were easy. A neat, step-by-step process to follow, forever making progress until you reach the “Upward Turn and begin to Reconstruct your life in the lead up to Acceptance.
Moving forward through the not so neat grief curve
However, childlessness is very different. It doesn’t fit into that neat curve. It’s chaos. There are U-turns triggers force us back into shock, denial and guilt. We are grieving for so many different things and some of the grief doesn’t become apparent until years later. The realisation and associated grief about not becoming a granny is one prime example of this.
The iterative nature of the grief is not constant or logical too. It’s far more irractic as we jump from Denial to Bargaining missing out shock and anger only for those emotions to hit a little later.
The unexpected wall of grief I recently experienced about my mother was basically the same grief that I have always expericenced. I MISS HER. This new wave is because of the adventures that Andrew and I are having. I want to share this wonderful new life we are exploring with my mum. Just as I wanted to share the adventures of living in France. The root cause of the grief is the same.
The waves of grief over my childlessness are different. Each time they happen there is a new element. This year the daughter of one my closest friends has passed her A-Levels and she may well attend Cambridge University. Open the door to greiving that my childlen didn’t have the opporunity to follow in their grandfather’s footsteps: my dad studied at both Oxford and Cambridge. I’ve been working through my CNBC grief for nearly 13 years now and that element has never been present before.
Time doesn’t always heal. Sometimes it adds another layer to the onion of grief. The only constant being the tears shed when working through the pain.
Unfortunately, I’ve come to the conclusion that we never get over this grief completely. We simply keep on moving forward through it, year after year after year. The raw edges of our grief may be blunted over time: however, they are still lurking in the background waiting from a trigger to hit us out of the blue.
That doesn’t mean I will give up striving for more healing and more acceptance. I spent far too long standing on the edge of the abyss staring into the deepest, darkest, blackest days of grief to want to ever return to that place. Perhaps, that means, my definition of progresses is actually to always be moving forwards, no matter who small the steps.
If anything I have written resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you in the comments. I appreciate that this can be a difficult subject to speak openly about. If you don’t want me to publish your comment on the website, simply include “NOT FOR PUBLICATION” in your comment and I will keep your words private.
In Canbace friendship
Leave a Reply