The Oregonian writer and performance artist (and old WELL friend of mine) Tiffany Lee Brown, has a moving essay in the journal Oregon Humanities, on the painful private and public territory of childnessness, entitled Bubble of Silence. It’s a very well-written piece and deals with a neglected issue with honesty and depth. And this is an issue that more and more people now have to deal with.

It’s been a huge gaping hole in my life, the lack of my own children; a chasm of unfulfilled longing. Post-menopause I have more detachment, and see how that energy has been available for other uses. But the truth remains that if I could have chosen, in my heart I would have picked having children over whatever the compensations have been for not having had them. I accept that there is no point thinking about what might have been, and that one’s life has a rightness, a coherence that includes the pain and frustrations, but this rationalization doesn’t resolve the hurt entirely. Expressing it, feeling heard, knowing the complexity of one’s own truth can take us almost into resolution. In the end though, like any deeply-felt grief, it is with us for life, and we do best to accept it as a presence in the psyche that we can come, eventually, to love as a part of our wholeness. 

I find that in my own family and social life there is a deep divide between the haves and have-nots. People who have children are privileged with a depth of experience, a level of connection that I can never know. I know they sometimes look at me and think I am privileged with freedom, time, and energy. Courageous writing can do something to bridge this divide.

As we get older it can get easier: pace my short essay Choose Your Mantra With Care, republished beautifully at ZenMoments.org

Tiffany’s blog on being childless/childfree is at http://magdalen.blogs.com/nymphe/