Childlessness and The Genius Groove

As mother’s day is approaching in the UK at the time of writing, I would like to do something I have never done before and come out in public as a person who is Childless not by Choice or CNBC. For the first time, I am going to sharing my personal journey and also be reflecting on childlessness and The Genius Groove.

Some of you may have noticed that my website was absent from between 2015 – 2017. There is a myriad of reasons for this but one of them is that I was on a journey of grief due to childlessness. This has led me to lots of realisations as to who we are as human beings and what our purpose is on this planet so I thought I would share.

The assumption of family

I have always wanted to be a mother. I grew up with two sisters and a working mother and father. Ours was the sort of house where we would gather around the kitchen table and chat. We also went places as a family to visit other families, as is the norm for Asian culture, so I always expected this family-centric life to continue.

I did get married quite young at 21 years old, but I was still a medical student and because I had a working mother who was away for long hours, I didn’t want to have children during my years as a junior doctor. I wanted to be in a position where I could focus on my children.

So, in the late 1990s, I envisaged a future for myself where I would travel the world as a speaker and author, earning enough to also have time for my children. My future children were always at the heart of my career plans.

To juggle or not juggle?

I went on to train as a GP and this is when a lot of my colleagues started to get married and have babies. I looked at them juggling their breast pumps and their bleeps and I thought again that I did not want to put my own children through all that. I thought it best to wait until I could take a career break.

But as many of you know from my book The Genius Groove, by the time I had finished my training as a GP, my marriage was on the rocks. I would not dream of bringing a child into a relationship that was not stable and about to collapse so although my long hours had diminished, I was no longer in a suitable relationship.

My marriage ended and after a few years I found my new partner and looked forward to starting a family with him. To save our privacy I will not go into the details of what happened next, but suffice to say that we did not have a child together. All the while my career as an author and speaker took off, but it was a lot more work than I envisaged back in the late 1990s.

There were many times when I would travel with very little notice. Looking back, hand on heart, if I had been a mother at that point I would have had to say no to all those dream opportunities. And I would be sitting here now without that sense of achievement.

Reaching the end and reaching out

It all came to a crashing halt when my body went into menopause a lot earlier than expected whilst still in my early 40s. That same year no less than eight of my friends were in various stages of pregnancy, some of them for the first time. So not only was I facing a future of childlessness, some of my friendships would never be the same again.

I had an uneasy feeling growing inside me. I was happy for my friends. I love children and babies and even did a conference about indigo children so I am delighted to spend time with children. But the uneasy feeling would come to me at times.

I looked online for discussions about women without children and only found articles about people who were adamant that they never wanted children and were happily childfree. Or I found sites discussing infertility. But what if the fertility journey had come to an end? I did a google search for ‘childless and don’t want to be’ and at last, I found Jody Day and Gateway Women.

A new gateway

Jody Day is a British author and psychologist who found herself childless by circumstance. She has broken down barriers in this taboo subject and is doing a lot to get the subject of being childless not by choice into the public eye.

Crucially, she realised that people who are childless not by choice, feel grief. Grief is normally only assigned to parents who have lost children but those who have never had them also feel a type of grief that is often not recognised as such.

She has founded an online community called Gateway Women. They also have in-person meetups around the world. This subject is still so secret and taboo that I had to go through various checks before being allowed in.

Healing the healer

So here I was, an international speaker, Amazon best-selling author and even TV host. I had written books on the subject of emotions and had been a holistic therapist for some years not to mention having been a GP. But I had no road map for these emotions. I needed help to navigate the torrent of feelings that were going through me about not being a mother when I so badly wanted to be.

Being part of the community for some years now has helped me so much to heal the grief I feel. Along the way, I have come to learn a lot about the dynamics of having children and also where we get our sense of purpose. So here are some of the things I have learnt.

Children and Purpose 

This is one of the biggest lessons I have learnt on my healing journey. It is sometimes an unspoken tenet of society that your children are meant to be your greatest purpose in life. Otherwise, why would you be working at a job you hate to bring in money if it wasn’t to build a life for your family? Having children makes it all worth it.

It’s been said straight to my face – what is your purpose if you don’t have children? Luckily for me, such comments are rare as I have a public life. My sense of purpose is out for people to see. It has amazed me that in all the time I have spent travelling the world speaking when I was on my own, nobody asked me if I was married or if I had a man in tow. My work spoke for itself.

I found my Genius Groove but people don’t always find theirs. Our education system is designed to numb out our creativity and funnel us into jobs that pay the bills instead.

So if the children that your life was supposed to revolve around do not manifest then what are you supposed to do after that? People stay in jobs that they do not love where they don’t feel a sense of purpose and not having children compounds these feelings.

Excusing our dreams

But what does that say about wider society? That to some degree, we have substituted having children for having a purpose and fulfilling our creative dreams. For some, having children and being a parent might truly be their creativity. But we are also individuals and part of our inner journey and our path in life is to discover who we are in our own right.

But this can be hard work: to stand up and be counted for what you really want to do and who you really are. It feels much easier to cover all that over and children give the perfect excuse to not fulfil your true potential. You can point to your children and your responsibilities.

A lot of children are not planned so it cannot be said that they are consciously brought into the world as an excuse to not face ourselves. But once they arrive they can take on that role.

So this gives another double whammy for childless people. They not only haven’t had the child and have all that readjustment to do, they also have to face questions that people with children may put aside such as why am I here and what is my purpose?

Moving on

With childlessness from all causes on the rise and about a quarter of women in Europe and the USA reaching menopause without having had children, these conversations are only going to become more prevalent. Thanks to Jody Day and Gateway Women and others for getting that ball rolling. They have helped me immensely.

As time goes by I feel very different. The grief, although it never entirely goes away does diminish as I do the work of processing my feelings. I realise now that I could not have fulfilled so many of my dreams if I had been a mother. Although it has been a tough journey, I understand and even now celebrate why I chose at a soul level not to have children.

It is mainly the work of Jody Day and her community that gave me a map to understand my own feelings that I could not articulate that has moved me forward into this place where I feel whole again.

At this unprecedented time in human history when childlessness from all sorts of reasons is so prevalent, we can gain new insights into our dynamics around parenthood and our sense of purpose. Together we can greater insights into parenting and The Genius Groove.

I leave you with a list of resources
Gateway Women
Childless Not by choice 
Childless Mothers Connect 
The Not Mom and Not Mom summit 

I know this is a controversial post. Please do not leave suggestions in the comments as to how I can adopt or some other solution that you think is being helpful. I would welcome your thoughts on the main points though.  

Image: Pixabay