No Kidding Healing Project: A revisit

Almost five years ago I began writing a series of posts under my Healing Project title. It was early 2020, and I didn’t realise the irony of the title, just when healing was about to become so difficult as the pandemic took hold across the world. We still haven’t healed from the changes that were wrought – societal, biological, political – during that pandemic, and covid still takes lives.

I tried to look back, see what had helped me heal, and move through each concept methodically. Yes, I have it marked here in a separate page on this blog. But frankly, if you read this on a mobile device, you won’t see the links easily, and any new readers might be completely unaware of the project. So here is a summary post, with links to each original post:

Day 1 - Show Up. Showing up is halfway there. Acknowledging that there is healing to be done, and that you are ready to be open to the idea that you can, in fact, heal from the grief of childlessness, is a major step.

Day 2 - Feel. There’s no healing without feeling. What you resist persists. Feel what you feel – that honesty is valuable.

Day 3 - Delight. Delight and joy show that life is always worth living, and they are signs that we will be okay. Let it find you. Let yourself feel it.

Day 4 - Surrender. Surrender. It so often is not a sign of weakness, but a sign of resolve, a sign of hope, and a new beginning.

Day 5 - Love. Love yourself. It brings compassion, empathy and comfort. To yourself, and then to others.

Day 6 - Forgive. Forgive yourself, your body (or your partner’s body), your emotions and decisions (and your partner’s emotions and decisions) and limits. It’s a gift to yourself, and brings new opportunities.

Day 7 - Honour. Honour yourself, honour your partner (if you have one), and honour those you have lost. Honour them all by living well. Honour. It’s so much more productive than guilt.

Day 8 - Write. Writing saved me. At the very first, it simply released me from having to remember, allowing me to sleep. Then gradually became the way I figured out what I thought, how I felt, and how I could move forward.

Day 9 - Appreciate. Learning gratitude is one of the first steps in healing. Appreciating the tiny joys in life, and then eventually seeing the benefits of a No kidding life, help us appreciate the life we have, rather than the one we lost.

Day 10 - Balance. Balance and perspective are what help us know we will be okay.

Day 11 - Dare. The beginning of acceptance is being brave. Shrugging off what hasn’t worked for us. Daring to be positive about our lives. Beginning to hope for something new.

Day 12 - Accept. We need to accept what has happened to us, accept our reality. That brings us to the second step – taking acceptance, and making it part of us. Because when we can do that – without self-recriminations, without judgement, without cringing – we can put an end to the battle. Sure, we carry everything we’ve been through with us, but with acceptance, we carry the lessons, rather than interminable pain.

Day 13 - Connect. You are not alone. Connections – whether in real life or online – help us feel normal, teach us wisdom, encourage us as we develop, walk beside us, and hold us when we fall.

Day 14 - Enquire. Asking questions, challenging assumptions and stereotypes, can silence those negative voices in our heads, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. But we can also challenge the assumptions of those people around us, their thoughts of the childless, as well as challenging our own thoughts about others. It’s my favourite technique of all, I think.

Day 15 - Admit. Admitting the truth to ourselves, the realities of our situations, our thoughts, our expectations, all help us to navigate our lives.

Day 16 - Experience. Living each of our lives is a unique experience. When one choice is taken away, maybe we don’t know what to anticipate. But perhaps we don’t need to. Experiencing life, day by day, can bring great joy.

Day 17 - Speak. I try to choose my moments. I speak here, and I speak up from time to time around family and friends and acquaintances who sometimes resort to false stereotypes or assumptions, and I speak more publicly when I can. Most importantly, I speak these truths first to myself. Maybe that's all some of us might need. I refuse to feel invisible, or diminished, and that prompted me to speak, and feel more truly myself.

Day 18 - Remember. Remembering is not dangerous. It helped me learn from everything I went through. Most importantly, it reminded me of the love I set out with. My memory has to be focused on the love – for my losses, for my husband, for myself. The pain has diminished, and now I can simply remember and feel the love.

Day 19 - Liberate. Liberate yourself from your own expectations, from society’s limitations, from stereotypes and judgemental voices, from guilt and pain, so that you can embrace yourself and your life. Liberation. It’s both the result of, and the penultimate step to healing, living and enjoying our No Kidding lives.

Day 20 - Celebrate. Celebrate your survival, your wisdom, the connections made, your new life and its unexpected joys.

No Kidding 2020 Project: Day 20 - Celebrate

When you think about living a life that was not your first choice, you might find it odd that I encourage you to Celebrate. But synonyms of celebrate include mark, commemorate and honour. I know many of my fellow No Kidding bloggers have reached this stage in their lives too.

But many of you who might be just saying good-bye to your hopes of building a family will be aghast at the idea of celebrating the end of their dream. I am not suggesting that’s what you should celebrate at all. We need to remember to be kind to ourselves when we fail. But we should also praise our achievements, and congratulate ourselves, not just for the big things, but for getting through life – for each time we recognise progress, or realise we did something hard, or wince and move on when something hurts or someone said something hurtful, or speak up against stereotypes, or remind people of our situation, etc. And as time passes, I think we all realise that there is, in fact, much to celebrate.

• Celebrate surviving a long, hard, and disappointing quest that did not deliver what we wanted.
• Celebrate our resilience, and our ability to adapt to new situations and make the best of them.
• Celebrate our hope for something new.
• Celebrate the progress we have made since the time we first knew that we would be living a No Kidding life.
• Celebrate that we kept taking all those tiny, small and often painful steps towards healing.
• Celebrate the relationships we have that have come through this.
• Celebrate the relationship we have with ourselves!
• Celebrate the wisdom we have developed, and the people we have become.
• Celebrate your new life.
• Celebrate the unexpected joys.
• Celebrate the networks you have built or are building amongst women who are not mothers.
• Celebrate all those other women who are blogging and writing and working to help us all know we are not alone, and to try to change the world to make it easier to navigate.
• Celebrate!

I also celebrate all my much-loved readers who motivate, encourage and support me here on No Kidding in NZ, who write me little notes, who challenge me to think about other perspectives, and keep me going.

And today, I’m also celebrating the 20th post and end of my 2020 Blogging Project, where I’ve laid out a path to healing, looking at the key areas that helped me move from that day when I first knew, definitively, that I would never have children, never be a mother, never make my husband a father. It has made me think about the process, about what helped, about what was hard. Thanks for reading along with me!

And next week, No Kidding in NZ will resume normal transmission. See you back here. I hope that's cause to celebrate too.

No Kidding 2020 Project: Day 19 - Liberate

I’ve never wanted to wholly conform to society. As a little girl, I groaned when I was given a doll for Christmas, because even then I liked playing outside and other active things (until I learned to read). I was shy and obedient, but I never wanted to be judged or have my activity proscribed by others’ views. As I’ve probably said before, I think I was a feminist from the moment I was born, so when I got married (which was quite young), I didn’t change my name, despite not knowing any other woman personally who had kept their name. (Though when I moved to Wellington I met a number, and in fact almost all my best friends who have married have kept their names too.) I certainly didn’t want to have children the moment I got married, and resisted all that initial pressure. So it was a surprise to me when I decided I did want to have children, and then of course, a surprise when I couldn’t.

Now, as a woman without children, I am by definition a nonconformist. Especially when I am a woman-who-wanted-children who loves her life-without-them. Or perhaps not? Because if there is one thing that life teaches us, it is that most of us have to learn, at some stage, to love what we have (or don’t have, as the case may be). Perhaps I’m just doing the predictable thing?

The truth is there is real freedom in not having children. The obvious things are freedom from sleepless nights, from early morning wake-ups, holidaying only in school holidays, expenditure on children and their activities, freedom to follow my own interests, spontaneity, travel when and where I like, etc. The list is endless.

But there are other freedoms too. When we learn to accept and experience our No Kidding lives, we break free from society’s norms, from our grief and our past and our what-might-have-beens. We are liberated from our own more limited expectations of ourselves. Perhaps we break free from our own stereotypes?

Personally, I know I broke free from stereotypes when I was forced to confront the question of what is “success” and what is not. I did this in terms of infertility, where “success” stories usually mean those who end up as a parent, rather than a broader definition of those who survive and go on to live a happy and meaningful life.* But I also did it elsewhere in my life.

My values didn’t change – they had always been the same. But I found that, in breaking free from stereotypes, I was able to fully recognise how important my values were to me. I could choose to embrace them without feeling that I was letting anyone (including, perhaps especially, my younger self) down. None of this might have been obvious to anyone else, but they made a world of difference to me, my thoughts, my level of contentment, my authenticity. I let go of a lot of things. But in doing so, I was able to begin to fully embrace myself, and my No Kidding life.

Liberation. It’s both the result of, and the penultimate step to healing, living and enjoying our No Kidding lives. Liberate!

* See The Real Success Stories