A Childless Woman Approaches the Menopause
For Babyloss Awareness week
BabyLoss Awareness Week
It’s Baby Loss Awareness Week in the UK right now. A week dedicated to acknowledging this very specific type of grief, and also raising awareness around the reasons babies die, and what can be done to prevent these losses. It’s important that these stories are given light, it’s important to acknowledge these losses and I’m glad of the focus because people who have suffered miscarriage, baby death, stillbirth feel out of place even within the world of grief. This is not a loss you can ever really pass through. It’s a loss you live with. It’s a loss that changes you.
Our Story
In brief - my husband and I tried naturally for six years before our NHS IVF treatment that resulted in our daughter. Sadly (not a big enough word to encompass the entire world being destroyed, but it’ll have to do) things went wrong and she was delivered prematurely by emergency, crash section in 2010, but died during the delivery. An investigation showed that her death was, in part, due to clinical negligence. We had further IVF cycles - five in all- and suffered (again, if only there was a big enough word to explain how these smaller losses tunnelled back down to the death of our daughter) two eight week miscarriages, but were never able to have another baby. In the end, after thirteen years, we stopped trying. We made a conscious decision to walk away from that journey and embrace a childless future together.
This paragraph sums up thirteen years in which I had breakdowns, nearly lost my own life, changed career, lost myself, found myself. There will never really be a big enough way of describing this.
I am now forty five years old and have begin the arduous journey towards menopause. I’m glad to see that more women are writing about the menopause and the effects of it on a physical level, and an emotional level; the very final feeling of a door being shut behind you. I don’t see many childless not-by-choice, or childless-by-choice people talking about it.
I am in a strange hinterland in which I am childless not by choice, but also by choice as we chose not to continue fertility treatment or to go down the adoption route. I made a conscious decision to accept and move forward because I needed to survive and the emotional stress of years and years of being on the outside of the world had taken its toll. I couldn’t rejoin the world. I had to make a different kind of world and I have absolutely zero regrets about that choice.
And yet, here I am, able to recognise in my own body that things are changing, that my body, once again, is unpredictable, uneasy, causing me more anguish. I wrote a poetry collection, When I Think of My Body as a Horse a few years ago. It was about finding a way to be friends with a body that had let me down so badly; a body that had lost us all our children. The collection was about grief, but was also about recognising that my body was precious, my body had done its best.
But somehow, as menopause approaches, I find myself back to feeling my body is an enemy to me. What is there to say? The door is closing, the door is slamming, there is no going back. It is the finality that is daunting. I don’t want to go back. And yet, the well of sadness that is a part of carrying the death of your baby around with you is open again. I look down into it and I see the person I was, in the body that I was in, looking back up at me hopefully. There is no real difference, it is the same body, it is still doing its best, I am still doing my best.
What am I trying to say? That the loss never goes away, but that you fold around it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object, until it is a part of you, a part of your body and your story. I have stopped trying to fix myself, I have stopped punishing myself, and am embracing myself. I take time to recognise that things are still, thirteen years since I laid her to rest in the leafy cemetery, hard, things can still knock me down, take me out of life. That this is not uncommon, that someone you know is probably getting on with their life with a wound in their heart that keeps opening, that if you know someone who has miscarried, or had a still birth or lost a baby at birth, or a neonatal loss, use this week to acknowledge that, use this week to acknowledge the continued loss as part of their life.
I ride my body into a slow companionship
comforting it at the end of the day
and I say, Body, you are beautiful,
you are beautiful. Until next time
x
Such a beautiful, if pain-soaked, post. Thank you for sharing it. Your sentence about summarising something which conceals the absolute wreckage underneath the surface rang so true (I find myself summarising my experiences in a short sentence which I throw out there as if it weighs nothing, testing to see how it lands and whether this person is safe to be open with or not).
I also loved the description "That the loss never goes away, but that you fold around it, like scar tissue forming around a foreign object, until it is a part of you, a part of your body and your story." This is just perfect. As S says - thank you for continuing to share here.
I find myself thinking back to that evening when you first shared your story with me and others and I cried like I had never cried before or since. Losing the hormonal cycle in my body is, I now accept, one of the best things that has ever happened in my life, and the peace it has granted is in stark contrast to the experiences of many other women. My experience of motherhood is, the more I think about the process, a complex series of wounds in itself.
Without finding your work when I did, and learning the language you were so brave and strong to share, a lot of these feelings would have gone unexplored. You granted me an ability to walk outside myself. I am hugely grateful for this and so much more which has come from your wisdom and encouragement. Thank you for continuing to be here ❤️