Jody Day Quotes

I had a hint of what's to come during the depths of my grief when my then teenage goddaughter walked up to me with a mutual friend's baby on her hip and said, 'I can't wait till I have my own baby!' With a sickening lurch I realised, 'It's all going to happen again one day - watching everyone but me become grandparents.' The vision of this beautiful young woman at the very beginning of her childbearing years was so archetypal, so full of promise and joy, and yet so coloured by my own loss. A bittersweet tear popped out of the corner of my eye and joined my genuine delight in her excitement, as well as my fervent hope that 'her' dreams of a family come true. 'May she never know the taste of these tears,' I prayed.

What we, and others, often fail to realise is the depth and reach of our loss: that not only will we never have children, but we will never create our own family. We will never watch them grow up, never throw children's birthday parties, never take that 'first day at school' photo, never teach them to ride a bike. We'll never see them graduate, never see them possibly get married and have their own children. We'll never get a chance to heal the wounds of our own childhood by doing things differently with our children. We'll never be grandmothers and never give the gift of grandchildren to our parents. We'll never be the mother of our partner's children and hold that precious place in their heart. We'll never stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our siblings and watch our children play together. We'll never be part of the community of mothers, never be considered a 'real' woman. And when we die, there is no one to leave our stuff to, and no one to take our lifetime's learnings into the next generation.

If you take the time to think about it all in one go, which is more than most of us are ever likely to do because of the breathtaking amount of pain involved, it's a testament to our strength that we're still standing at all.

For many of us who are still adjusting to the very real way that our friends becoming mothers often means 'losing' them as friends, yet another announcement can feel like a bell tolling on that friendship. We've heard our friends say to us, 'It's not going to change anything,' and we know that they mean it at the time, but they're probably going to move towards a new circle of friends who are mothers, and that's how it needs to be. And we're not mothers.

Wisdom is precious because of the price we pay for it.