The Quiet Grief of Being a Childless Mother
A love letter to the mothers who are never named, and the daughters who hold the line.
I want to introduce you to an incredibly gifted woman I met here on Substack not too long ago—within the last several months—named . In many ways, her maternal heart has mothered my own. Her gentle encouragement, sensitivity, compassion, and kindness have often served as a balm that soothed my aching heart.
Since it is Mother’s Day, and since this day tends to evoke a lot of big feelings for women, I invited her to share her story with you. As always, I know you will offer her your hand and heart in the generous ways you comment and support my guests.
My boobs hurt.
It’s that pre-period kind of ache, but far more tender. Last night, my dog Tosha stretched on me just wrong, and I yelped like her little paw had sliced me open.
This morning, as I get dressed, I hesitate. In that pause I almost remember what it felt like to nurse from my mother when I was a baby, and at the same time, I can imagine what it feels like to be a mother nursing a child…even though I’ve never been able to feel that. I never got to be a mother.
I thought I wanted children. I ended up having none.
I blink away the moment and finish getting dressed. But I can’t shake off the feeling for the rest of the day.
A half hour later, Tosha trips over her leash, and another tiny moment flashes through my memory. Twenty years ago, walking my four-month-old shiba inu, Sukha with my first husband. He has the leash, and doesn’t notice when she trips over it, and she didn’t recover. He keeps walking, dragging her by her neck, completely unaware.
“Hey! You’re dragging Sukha by the neck!” I holler at him.
“She’s fine. She needs to learn to keep up.”
I grabbed the leash from him. He huffed at me and continued walking. I let him go.
As I watched him walk away without looking back at us, I had a momentary existential crisis.
I cannot have children with this man.
I won’t ever be a mother.
But I swallowed the pain and grief of that loss, because that’s what mothers do. This was the best thing for my never-conceived unborn child.
Now, twenty years later, waiting patiently for Tosha to regain her footing, I get an odd familiar but physical twinge. How is it that I have never carried a child, gone through labor, or given birth, but somehow, some way, I know what it feels like?
Standing at the stove, waiting for my morning French press coffee, I catch my index fingernail on a hangnail of my thumb, and it rips. A tiny pain twinges through my thumb. A tiny death. Picking my cuticles. Something my mother does, too. I don’t know why I do it, except that it is a habit of hers that I couldn’t unlearn, just like how I stick my tongue out to lick my lips after every single sip of coffee.
I am my mother’s daughter.
That tiny death brings a flash memory to my mind: my second husband’s son getting out of our car, angry with us for refusing to drive him to his drug dealer’s home. How was I supposed to know we’d never see or speak to him again? Turns out parent alienation1 and adult child estrangement is a thing our society doesn’t talk about much. A secret treated as insignificant as my cuticle picking habit.
I pull off the hangnail and pour my coffee, returning that painful memory back in its tiny little box.
When I settle down to drink my coffee on this Mother’s Day morning, while reading a Substack article about Gloria Steinem, I notice my feet rubbing together just like my mom does when she reads historical biographies. Her father, my grandfather, did it too. An unconscious self-soothing technique we all employ when reading books and articles about the failings of society (subject matter that seems to have always fascinated my bloodline).
Grandpa Edgar was a good man, who upheld his patriarchal role in society. His three daughters, raised by his picture-perfect 1950s housewife, were to be seen and not heard.
As my feet rub against each other, I am not blind to the friction my mother faced to give me the things she couldn’t have. She took me to the bank to open my first checking account on my eighteenth birthday—a thing she wasn’t allowed to do herself until she was thirty. She drove me all over the Midwest to visit colleges, letting me choose freely, even though her own path was chosen for her. Her father told her architecture was a man’s job, so she earned the degree he picked out, then got married and became the stay-at-home mom she was expected to be.
Mom didn’t get her first full-time career job until her late forties, when I started college. She paid my tuition in full, in cash, with money she earned drafting blueprints for a local architect. She helped me move into my first house when I was twenty-five—just me, no husband, no co-signer. She scrubbed the floors with me, unpacked every box, made it feel like a home. When I opened my own business a few years later, she stood at the grand opening, proud in that quiet way she does. She never owned a home herself. Never ran a business. But she walked me through every portal—holding the doors she didn’t have access to long enough for me to step all the way through.
All the privileges she didn’t enjoy, she made sure I had.
And now, in this tiny moment as I feel my feet rub together to the words of Gloria Steinem’s speeches, I experience this whoosh of emotion.
I am my mother’s daughter.
She raised me to question everything, to speak clearly, to take up the space that she was never allowed to claim.
And I could not give her a granddaughter.
Does the foot-rubbing end with me?
Maybe, but the mothering doesn’t end with me. Because as the childless mother, I nurture the motherless children.
I was a stand-in mother for high school students whose own mothers couldn’t—or wouldn’t—be there. I’ve nurtured women who lost their mothers too young. I’ve supported lost, overwhelmed, over-feeling mothers to find their ways back to themselves.
Motherhood moves through me, not in one direction, but many.
Mother’s Day is a strange holiday to have birthed no children, but to have mothered so many.
Mom’s in her eighties. Still sharp, still steady, still doing her crossword puzzles in ink. I want to celebrate her.
I close my laptop and take Mom out to brunch, and buy her flowers at the local nursery. I give her whatever she wants, because it is her day.
And yet—I feel a grief so sharp it aches in my breasts.
I feel like a ghost mother. Real and present, but see-through.
At the end of the day, I curl into bed to watch TV with my husband and my dog, and the sharp edges of The Handmaid’s Tale don’t feel fictional anymore.
It’s like the world has forgotten who bore it.
Women have always been the ones to stretch and break and rebuild themselves so that something better might be born. We have mothered this society—breathed life into it, held it together, soothed its tantrums—and now we are being silenced. Again.
I turn off the TV before the show ends and roll into the warmth of my already snoozing hubby. He folds around me like a comma, and I lift his hand and place it gently onto my tender aching breast.
Because the mother in me—this soft, strong, invisible woman I’ve been all along—just wants to be held in the quiet, wordless way she’s always offered to others.
I’d like to offer you a poem I wrote about my thoughts and experience on motherhood:
See https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/parental-alienation for more information on this topic.
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Jeannie,
Your poem speaks to so many of the silent "ghost" mothers. I know a number of mothers who children fell to addiction and became criminals, some who have been in and out of the prison system and others who have been in and out of homelessness. The mothers all internalize and blame themselves to some degree, and still they love, no matter what. That's what it means to be a mother. to love, no matter what.
My bonus daughter is childless. Some kind of clock is telling her that the time is almost up. She has been pregnant a few times but lost all of them early. Her sister has two children along with grandkids. She gets depressed and has trouble holding a job. She has come to the realization that she may not have children. Sometimes she will walk up and want my wife or myself to get a hug.