As I mentioned in a blog earlier this week, Lesley Pyne has
written a book called Finding Joy Beyond Childlessness. I’ve talked
about Lesley on this blog before – I noted that she was a therapist who works
with childless women, when I flagged a feature of me on her blog. What I failed
to mention too was that she is one of us.
I personally love the title of her book. It shares my
philosophy that there can be, and there usually is joy when we embrace our No
Kidding lives. And it bodes well for what is inside.
In the Forward to the book, Jody Day of Gateway Women writes
an inspiring message. Her message reflects the message of the book too, and
again, of this blog. And that message is that you are not alone. You are not
alone coming to the realisation that maybe you won’t get the children you
wanted. You are not alone going through the grief and realisation that this is
your life, and you are not alone when you come through the most difficult
years, and look to the rest of your life without children. We are all there, as
Jody says, “your childless sisters.” And this is exactly what I love about our
No Kidding blogging community.
Lesley introduces her book by reinforcing her primary
message. To be brief, and not nearly as eloquent as either Jody or Lesley, it is
that she is okay, other women are okay, and you can be too.
When writing the book, Lesley interviewed 19 women from all
over the world. I am one of them – the only New Zealander (although there is an
English woman who now lives in NZ apparently who contributed, someone I’d love
to meet) in the group. Lesley looks for and brings out the commonalities of our
experiences, and talks about what helped her and what helped us. The point is of
course that we are all different, and so different things helped us all. But
there are always some commonalities in the steps we go through.
As Lesley is a therapist, her book is focused on helping people
through the process. There is, therefore, plenty of homework and lots of thought-provoking
exercises. There’s no prescriptive process, though, and the only requirement is
that you are prepared to think honestly. And maybe write this down.
I haven’t done the homework exercises, but I have made a
note of some of them, and once her book is out may blog some of my own results
of these exercises.
Lesley talks about her own experiences with infertility and
childlessness. She came from a family where emotion was not encouraged. I
completely recognised her experiences there in my own upbringing, remembering
falling off my bike, badly winding myself, and being told not to cry. My
husband came from the same sort of background. Stoic, stiff upper lip families,
where feelings were foreigners. As a result of this, Lesley says that she
thought she didn’t need to grieve. After all, she thought, “doesn’t time heal?”
I had to laugh at this. It’s such a logical thought – that if you hold it in
enough, and time heals, that eventually you’ll be able to emerge recovered from
grief. But we all know – now – that it doesn’t work like that. Fortunately,
Lesley had some friends who pointed out that “grief was not an enemy, but a
friend.” I love this. It totally reflects my own feelings – and is a belief I
follow in my own life, and that has subsequently helped me through the deaths
of both my parents. I didn’t know it before infertility though.
Another quote in this section that I love is her conclusion
that “Expressing your feelings is a sign of strength.” I’ve written about this
myself, both in terms of No Kidding women being
success
stories, and in terms of the different ways
women
and men process emotions. Feelings are really hard. Facing them, feeling
them, and expressing them is courageous. When we can do this, we should stand
proud and strong.
Lesley points out some of the things that helped her most
strongly. Facing her grief and her feelings was of course the primary issue,
but she has moves on to the issues of mindfulness, and of reconnecting with
your body. Mindfulness really helped me personally, and I’ve more recently
discovered the power of yoga and simple breathing to calm me and reduce stress.
Others I know connected with their bodies differently. It’s an important step,
I think, because I’ve seen many women come out of infertility
hating
their bodies. So I’m glad that Lesley talked about these topics too.
I wanted to cheer when I saw the chapter on Letting Go to
Let In. Because this is something we often talk about in the No Kidding community.
It is the opposite of giving up, and it is letting go of the grief, not because
it didn’t matter that we have experienced loss, but because our futures matter
more.
Love and self-acceptance, gratitude and reclaiming joy are, appropriately,
all given their own chapters in the book, leading to a conclusion full of hope
that you can get there, and a feeling of victory that so many of us, including
Lesley, have indeed found our own Joy Beyond Childlessness.
Lesley’s book is available on Amazon US and Amazon UK for
pre-order, formally out on Monday 18 June, as both an ebook and a paperback.
