Disney lied. Hollywood lied. For some of us, even our churches lied to us.
Part of learning to live a childless life, for me, is wrestling with the idea that some fundamental truths I absorbed as a child were simply lies. There simply isn’t always a happily ever after or a miracle at the end that makes the pain and suffering worth it. Sometimes life just sucks and bad things happen to good people.
My mother loves to repeat the story of how she explained the facts of life to me at five, in detail, because I kept asking questions. At the end, when I had absorbed all a five year old could, I asserted that when I was grown up and married that I would have two children, a girl first and then a boy. It was just a given that I would be a Mom. And my own mother didn’t contradict me and say ”if you have children;” even in her adult mind it was just a given that you grow up, marry and have kids. But that assumption was just another lie.
I grew up, got married. My first husband turned out to be Prince Charm-less so I started over. I found Prince Charming and we quickly tried to start a family. But after five pregnancy losses (including one from my first marriage), we are learning to accept the inevitable truth that our family will remain just the two of us.
I feel cheated. I feel betrayed by my body. I feel lied to and I am angry.
During the last few years I have been active on infertility and loss support boards. I have found that even the loss community will often perpetuate the lie with platitudes like “you will get your rainbow,” “your time will come,” “keep trying and it will all be worth it”, and of course lots of success stories about someone’s cousin’s best friend’s hairdresser who had x number of losses and then had a healthy baby with no medical intervention at all.
Sometimes the success stories are the worst. People forget that the reason stories like that are told is because they are the exception—they don’t happen for everyone. And in some support groups it can become almost taboo to talk about the other side of the coin, the people like me who don’t get their rainbow. When women express fear that they might just keep having losses, their fears may be dismissed and invalidated. I cringe whenever I read fellow loss mothers telling each other to “keep your chin up” or “just keep swimming,” instead of allowing each other to express their very real feelings and fears.
Not everyone goes on to have a living child after loss. Sometimes we lose all of our babies and the doctors don’t know why. Sometimes we pray and pray but God still lets our babies die. And we aren’t prepared for this result because we believed the lie; we believed that everyone gets a happily ever after. I’m still struggling with being childless. But I think acknowledging the lie is a good place to start.
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so very sorry for your losses. 24 years married, 12 years fertility treatment (male factor infertility), no live birth, menopause. everyday is a decision that i will not give in to depression, but live to honour the lives of my babies.
Thank you for sharing Anna. It sounds like you’ve been through a very difficult journey, and I know that the pain of it never ends. I think that we all try to live the best lives that we can so we can be the mothers that our babies deserve, whether they are living or not.
“Sometimes life just sucks and bad things happen to good people.”
That is exactly the truth, and I have accepted that. But unfortunately others don’t.
My husband and I have lost three children. Our daughter was stillborn at 28 weeks. Our sons were born alive and healthy but died at ages 7 weeks and 3 days respectively. Their deaths are put down to SIDS. No causes were found for our children’s deaths.
Yet people find that incredibly difficult to believe. They have to believe that someone, somewhere did something wrong. That the doctors were wrong. That the investigations following the deaths missed something. That we did something wrong. Or the religious ones in our families (of which there are many) believe that the deaths of our children are all part of god’s plan. That our children are growing up in heaven. That we should take comfort because we will see them again. That we should not grieve because our children are with god and because “at least we have each other”.
I feel cheated too. I feel angry too. I feel lied to every day. I feel like hitting my sister or my mother when they give me more heaven and god speeches. Why do my sisters both have healthy, living children (3 and 4 respectively) and I have only 3 dead ones? I have no “happy ever after”. I have only “sad ever after”. I have only “grief ever after”.
Despite what most of the world seems to think, I will not bounce back after burying three children (it’s been 9 years, 7 years and 6 years since the deaths of our children). In fact, I now also suffer from PTSD. Hearing that your daughter died inside you, and waking up to finding your son(s) died in the night is not conducive to good mental health.
Yes, life sucks and bad things happen to good people, sometimes for no known reason.
So very sorry for your losses. People always want someone or something to blame; it’s part of their thinking that the world must be just and bad things can’t happen for no reason. The religious platitudes can be especially painful. How can we not grieve the loss of those we love?
After 9 losses now, I am getting to the point where I feel I might have to accept this for myself. I do want to try at least one more time, but I have no delusions of the happily ever after I imagined for myself with a big family. When I was a teen I always said I want to have 10+ kids, but I never imagined they would be angels.
((((hugs))) Jessica. I am so sorry for your losses. No one ever imagines this is how our future will turn out. And we just aren’t prepared. I wish you the best of luck for that next try.
Thank you. I am glad Still Mothers has made this platform to make this discussion possible. We really do need to break the code of silence on this so that others in this situation don’t feel so alone.
Thanks for posting this, Reen. It’s important to start the discourse about this because it is a taboo thing to discuss and people aren’t prepared for it.
She hit the nail on the head, didn’t she?