Breaking Down Barriers Between Parents and Non-Parents
Having the difficult conversations brings us closer together
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Ever since I’ve known I’d be permanently childless, friends have been wary when announcing pregnancies. I’ve had conversations which should be happy and joyful begin with, “I was so scared to tell you this…” which makes me feel like a steaming pile of shit.
I never want my loved ones to feel like they have to dampen their own joy to protect my feelings, even if I can appreciate why it happens.
I’m grateful to loved ones for taking my feelings into consideration, but it doesn’t feel good to be told happy news with the caveat that I’m going to make them feel miserable about it. It’s part of the reason so many friendships disintegrate when paths diverge into motherhood and non-motherhood — a phenomenon Jody Day, well-known and generally wonderful childless writer and creator of Gateway Women, calls the Friendship Apocalypse.
How can we ensure that these tough conversations between mothers and non-mothers aren’t the catalyst for friendships ending or strained relationships?
Hard conversations help us understand each other
During my first week at university studying to become a social worker, I stood up in a packed lecture hall and told my professor and colleagues I didn’t think disability discrimination was a real problem in our society.
Even now, many years later, it makes me blush at how ignorant I was back then. I wasn’t listening to the voices of real-world people; I was only seeing life through the lens of my own experiences.
My professor and fellow students respectfully educated me to the contrary, and thus began three years which deconstructed many of my internalised and unconscious biases and rebuilt me with empathy and compassion. It was probably the most significant period in my adult life.
It can be the easiest thing in the world to assume everyone thinks the way you do and knows what you know, but what an absurd mindset that is, when you really think about it. Every time I struggle to understand someone else’s point of view, I remember my embarrassment and take a beat to consider what I might not be seeing.
It’s hard to put yourself in someone else’s shoes; especially when those shoes are uncomfortable or painful. But to be supportive of the people we love, and to show empathy, we have to.
We’ll never experience the world from the other perspective
As a childless person, I’ll never know what it’s like to be someone’s Mum. I have stepkids, and I worked with children for many years before infertility made it too painful. I even fostered for a while. But none of those things are the same as being someone’s mother, and I’ve come to understand that even though my experiences and feelings around motherhood might be welcomed by some close friends and family, in general, my opinion is pretty worthless on the subject of parenting.
However, on the other side of the fence are many mothers who often feel like they “get it” — “it” being childlessness — because they experienced it in some form before their children came along. A mother who went through IVF to get her miracle baby, for example, might still feel a kinship, or at least resonance, with the childless experience.
Recently, British comedian Sara Pascoe talked about how she still feels more like an infertile woman than a mother, even after having two children in her 40s.
While I appreciate the intention, this viewpoint can be hurtful because it diminishes the experience of permanently childless people. Not being able to have kids for a stretch of time is not the same as never being able to. It’s a lifelong outcome that impacts every area of our life, and in the same way I can never truly understand the journey of motherhood, a mother can never really understand a life without their child.
And this puts us on two sides of a conversation, coming from very different places. It can cause serious distress, especially when one or both sides thinks — or even just suggests they think — they know what the other person is going through.
Whichever side of the conversation you’re on, the first thing to recognise is this: you don’t understand, and that’s ok.
Founder of Life Without Children, Ali Hall, often says:
There are those who think they know what it is like to be childless or childfree. But they don’t. Because life before children is very different to living intentionally childfree or unintentionally childless.
Whether it’s childlessness or any other deviation from the “norm”, unless you’ve lived through an experience, you can never properly know what it’s like.
And in those scenarios, the default position should always be to listen first.
The threat to the self
In his book, Supercommunicators, Charles Duhigg explains the idea of an identity threat. When someone, especially a stranger, says or does something which threatens your deeply internalised view of yourself — your identity — it can feel primal; the most deeply held sense of who you are is being attacked.
When my friend told me she was pregnant with the “I was scared to tell you this…” prefix, she was (unwittingly) putting me into a box labelled people who can’t take bad news or, worse, people who’ll make me feel bad about my joyful news. That hurt me. I was truly happy for them, but I’m also allowed to feel however I feel about it. Two things can co-exist.
By starting the conversation with a worry about my reaction, she was trying to control what that reaction was going to be. What she was really saying was, “please don’t ruin this for me”, and do you know what? That really hurt, too.
There’s a similar process and dynamic at play when people offer commentary on lives they aren’t living, such as the backlash received after Chappell Roan’s innocent and supportive comments about friends who are parents having a difficult time. This put parents in boxes they didn’t want to be in, like the box labelled people who are miserable mothers.
This might be the reality for some mothers, some of the time, but Chappell’s comments were taken as a sweeping attack on the identity of parents, who fought back by showing everyone on the internet just how much they didn’t identify that way.
Childless and childfree people will never be parents, so what right do we have to weigh in on their lives? None.
And it works both ways.
We don’t need parents telling us how to feel about our childless or childfree status, and when either side raises their head above these parapets, it gets sticky and prickly, and friendships can suffer irrevocably.
How can we close the gap?
Despite how fraught it can be, nurturing friendships with the people we love gives us a sense of connection, a feeling that someone really sees us and knows us, and that appeals to the herd/pack mentality with which we’ve evolved. Feeling part of a community is literally crucial to our survival as a species, and a diversity of experiences adds a richness to life that it’s difficult to replicate in any other way.
This could be applied to many types of conversation, but for the purposes of this article, I’m talking about conversations between parents and non-parents, entered into with empathy (not sympathy, which evokes pity). Here’s some things to think about before talking to your loved one about what’s going on for them.
Really listen to what they’re telling you— even if you don’t agree with the particulars, this is their lived experience and has value. It’s not a competition, so don’t feel like you have to one-up each other. Just listen.
Share stories — empathy is activated when we recognise someone else’s actual experience rather than vague commentary on social issues at large, so get close and tell each other what’s true for you. Understanding the depth of another person’s experience can be impactful and enlightening for both parties.
If possible, prepare for a conversation beforehand — what do you hope to achieve? What obstacles might emerge and how might you overcome them? What are the benefits of having this conversation? Reminding yourself of these will help you feel strong enough to continue, even if it’s difficult.
Preparing for tricky discussions makes them more likely to go well and can be as simple as rehearsing what you want to say beforehand.
Don’t diminish others’ experiences by offering unsolicited solutions. Don’t try to fix anything if they’re not looking for that. If you’re not sure what a loved one wants to get from the conversation, find out rather than assume. Ask directly: Do you want advice/solutions, or do you just need to get this off your chest? And crucially, listen to their answer, and respect it.
Acknowledge when something feels painful to say or hear; being honest with our own emotional inner life can make it easier for the other person to open up about theirs. You might find there are some shared emotions, even if the experiences around them are wildly different.
Friendships matter, regardless of where life takes us
I’m childless-not-by-choice (you can read about more about this terminology here) but I rarely talk about this with my closest friends and family, many of whom are mothers.
It’s always been an awkward topic we swerve around, and that’s mostly ok. I can go to the childless community to air my frustrations or ask for support on the particular challenges I face as a childless person, and other areas of my life where not having had children can come into play (like medical practices or how to navigate a difficult personal issue).
Just like parents can go to Mum or Dad groups to find others who share their worldview, it’s important to me to have people to turn to who get where I’m coming from.
In my family, I think we’re past the weirdness — everyone knows I can’t have kids and it’s not a big topic for us generally. I’m in a different place too; I don’t need to wear my grief like a cloak anymore and I can be around babies again which has been very difficult for me at times.
But if I could change one thing about how the last few years have played out, it would be my friend’s words, which changed the dynamic of our friendship: “I was so scared to tell you this”.
At the end of the day, we’re all women and we have so much to learn from each other, regardless of the specific paths our lives take, which often chop and change before we have a chance to figure out what’s going on.
When you've shared so much of your life with a loved one, diverging paths could lead you away from each other for a little while, and that can be ok if you’re prepared for it and treat it as the gentle break you both might need.
By talking about the hard things, you’ll make your paths much more likely to reconnect when you’re both ready.
By Lisa Kissane. I’m not online much, but you can keep up to date with my ramblings by joining my email list.
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Thanks for the shout-out Lisa! Something I've noticed in my own life, as I've got older (I'm in my 60s now) and also my potential-parenthood years are long behind me (and my heart has healed) is that I'm able to be much more open to empathising and understanding the struggles of parenthood, without it triggering me. However, I'm sad to say that I still meet very few parents who are willing to extend the same level of empathic, respectful curiosity to what it's like to live a childless life... They do exist, but even if they 'try' to understand, I often feel like they still default to 'pity', which is an empathic dead end. So I rarely share very much about my inner world and private life with them, apart from the occasional gentle comment to point out how different things might be for me, for example, around Mother's Day. I drop these remarks gently, like snowflakes, expecting them to flutter unnoticed to the ground and melt away. But once in a while, a parent catches them, and 'sees' me. Like you, I save my deepest reflections for my childless/free friends and colleagues. And my writing. Thank you for this piece. Hugs, Jody x
Thank you for writing this. It is so hurtful to hear things like “I was scared of sharing this because I didn’t know how you’d respond!” Especially when coming from a long time friend of who you’ve only been happy for. I don’t really have any friends anymore (mostly because of chronic illness, but also because I’m permanently childless) but I’ll definitely be saving this article for later if the occasion of friendship and bridging the gap between mothers and non mothers comes up again :)