A note about how things don't always go according to plan

As a child, I adored fairy tales. They were what my mother read to me every night before bed. And fairy tales almost always end with a happily married couple walking off into the sunset together to have lots of children. My fairy tale came true in 2017 when my Sweetheart and I were married on a blissfully perfect day in May. We had moved into our dream home six weeks earlier and hoped to start filling said house with children immediately. One year went by without my becoming pregnant. Then I conceived three times in seven months in the second half of  2018, but all our babies died without our ever hearing their hearts beat. We were devastated beyond words and our search for answers came up blank. No one could tell us why our babies died. We looked into adoption and got the process started before hitting a wall when the country we chose to adopt from began winding down their program. My Sweetheart and I will never had children. We have come to accept this, as painful as it is.

While being a childless couple is difficult, being a childless woman is excruciating. I never realized how incredibly focused our society is on women being mothers. I often feel invisible, cast aside, useless, forgotten. I am the only one of my group of friends not to be a mother, or trying to become one. I no longer gather all my girlfriends together for meals or coffee dates because without ever meaning to, they cast me out of their conversations when they begin discussing their children. I do not judge them for sharing their experiences with one another, it is a normal thing for them to do. I simply wish we still had enough in common that we could get together and have a conversation that centered on something we all share.

Enter my dogs, Skye and Darcy. They save my sanity, pretty much every day. The keep me company, make me go out for fresh air an average of an hour and a half to two hours every day and no one ever asks me if I have children when I am out with them. Who cares whether a woman has children or not when she is out walking her golden retrievers? 

The road travelled by the childless is long, twisting and widely misunderstood, but my Sweetheart and I are doing our best to navigate it.