Childless mothers

i’ve used the phrase “childless mother” to describe myself in the past, and it is often met with “huh?”s and “what do you mean?”s. So I thought I’d take the initiative and explain it early on

What is a childless mother? Well, in this case it’s not anything you’d find if you Googled the term (which I just did). I’m not a bereaved mother who had a child(ren) that died. I’m not an incarcerated mother. I’m not a biological mother who gave her child up for adoption. I’m not an adoptive mother whose child was given back to its biological mother. I’m not a woman who has been pregnant and lost her baby to miscarriage or stillbirth.

Simply put, I’m a wanna-be.

I’ve never been pregnant- though not for lack of trying, believe me. I have buckets of baby clothes littering my living space, unused strollers and crib sets stored in boxes, lists of names that my husband and I have gone over and over and over again. I’ve read “What To Expect When You’re Expecting”. I’m a bigger expert on prenatal care, childbirth, and childcare than my sister and cousins who really DO have kids. I even own a single, sad maternity shirt, that I bought at a KMart like six years ago and immediately felt ashamed about.

To the average person, I am no kind of mother. There is no real word for what I am in the English language. Supposedly, I’m an “infertile woman”… but there is so much more to the experience as a person who wants children and can’t have them than plain old infertility. “Infertile” doesn’t begin to cover it! There is no word for that feeling that “I AM a mother, dammit, the kids just aren’t here yet!”.

In short, I’m one of the never-beens, the ones who “don’t really understand”, who “should feel lucky (we’ve) never had one”, or who “should feel lucky (we’ve) never had one and lost it” (I suppose the latter could be true, depending on who you ask and how you look at it). To the world outside of those experiencing infertility, we’re like little girls playing house, and they treat us accordingly.

I cannot entirely blame them, though. I guess it does sound a little strange to try to explain that sometimes your body and brain and soul don’t sync up, and you can feel like a parent without ever making a child or signing a paper to take custody of one.

So. I hereby declare that you ignore all the other uses of this term- “childless mothers”- for I am stealing it to exclusively describe ladies like me. It’s now for the women who’ve wanted yet never had so much as a false positive, or a blip on the pregnancy test. For those of us who have never spent even one wonderful, happy day wondering in whispers “am I? Could I be???”. For any woman who has cried hugging a babydoll, or literally felt like running away from your cousin and her toddlers, or who had to sit through one more relative’s baby shower and couldn’t explain that she was happy and sad and jealous all at once, or who had to suffer through yet another friend or family member’s well-meaning-yet-heart-ripping “enjoy your freedom!” speech. All the while feeling tortured by that weird maternal feeling that shouldn’t even be there. She feels so, so ready for it all- everything in her life is lined up and waiting with baited breath for those children. She already FEELS like a mother- she is a mother in her soul. And yet the children never come.

That’s what a childless mother is. If you meet one, be nice to her. And be nice to the childless fathers out there, too- they do exist.

Now we just need a secret handshake!