Welcome back and thanks for joining this episode on The Awakening Worth podcast. If you are feeling grief as a childless woman and you feel like you can't talk about it or you hide it or you don't get any support or empathy from your friends, your family, maybe you're even telling yourself that you're being ridiculous and just move on, then you might be stuck in disenfranchised grief. And if that's you keep on listening in this episode, I really want to dive into the disenfranchised grief around never being able to have kids when you really, really wanted to. It's disenfranchised grief, and I'm going to unpack what that means. It's something that most childless women feel if they're feeling grief, and we're going to unpack it, how to know if you're stuck in that and how to get out of it. So what I really want to dive into first is what you're feeling. I'm finding that my group coaching clients, they grieve a number of different things as they begin to walk the childless path, and I want to sort of get some of those out in the open because you might be feeling some things that you can't even recognize as grief.
So let's talk about that first. We think of loss and grief related to losing a person in our lives. We all know how that feels. I'm sure you've lost somebody in your life, maybe somebody close, maybe someone not so close, maybe a pet. We miss them. We miss all the conversations or experiences that we had with them. And we also grieve the future that we expected to have with them. And when you grieve the loss of a dream, there's actually a lot of similarities that you might not even realize.
So here are some of the things that you might be grieving the future you lost. So in the same way that you would miss all the things that you would have done with the person you lost as a childless woman newly on this path in grieving, you're going to grieve all of the firsts and a lot of other things that you expected to experience in your future. Your baby's first step, their first day of school, all the graduations, maybe their wedding, your first grandchild. And if you, say lost a parent, you would also grieve all those things that they will not be around for. Walking down the aisle with your father, holidays, with your mother, all of those things that you expected to do. If you, say, lost your father before your wedding, you would grieve him not being there on your wedding day. So it's very similar in that we're grieving a future, a lost future also within that kind of same vein. Also in the future, you might grieve the whole spectrum of opportunities that you would normally get to participate in as a mother.
So Mother's Day, watching soccer games, being there for your daughter when she gets her first period. These might not be major events per se, but they're opportunities. They're part of being a mother. Then there are also the opportunities that you might grief. So the ability to break a family pattern, the do over, or maybe even just to raise a family in the way that you would want to raise a family. That's something that I felt even now. I see how other parents parent their kids, and I think, oh, that's something that I would have done, or that's something that I definitely won't do, and I don't want to see that anymore in society. So I'm not going to be one of those I wouldn't have been one of those parents.
I see things that my mom does or my dad, and I think to myself, oh, I'm going to change that when I have kids. And now that I don't have that opportunity, I grieve the loss of that opportunity. Here's a big one. Childless women grieve the identity of being a mother. You don't get to be the someone that you thought you would be. A parent who loses her only child also grieves that identity. She's no longer a mother. She was a mother.
She still is a mother, but she's no longer the mother that she thought she was going to be. This happens all the time when you lose a parent, you're no longer a daughter. Maybe that happens when you lose both parents. Your identities change when you experience a loss. This can happen even when you lose a job. If you are really invested in a job in a company and you're let go, laid off, whatever, for whatever reason, you no longer get to be an employee of that company. You no longer identify as whatever director of such and such at that company. My husband, when he had his spinal cord injury, he talks about having grieved, being an athlete.
He was a strong athlete, and at the time, when he was a teenager, he thought that was one of his few identities. And so he had latched onto that. And when he lost that, he also felt very lost and grieved not just the loss of the youth of his body in the same way as he was able to before, but the identity of being an athlete. So there's a bit of a difference there. It's subtle, but it's also a big difference. You might also grieve the person you used to be. There's always a before and an after. There was the time when you still thought that you'd be a mom, and then there's the time after you knew you wouldn't be.
And I think it's in our nature, human nature, to just keep trying to go back to being that other person. We keep wanting to go back to the person that we were before, that person who had hope, that person who assumed she would become a mom. We want to be that person. This one I think goes really highly unrecognized. But it happens when any major and uncontrollable change happens in your life. I really noticed it when I had my first miscarriage. There was a very distinct before and after that happened. Huge shift in a moment.
And I kept wanting to go back to the before. I wanted to not know what a miscarriage was like. I wanted to keep knowing what it was like to not have that kind of pain. I wanted to be that person who didn't know. So you might be feeling that too. And then there's the legacy that you thought you'd leave. So you might grief that, especially if you assumed that your children would be your legacy or your mark on the world, then you will grieve that as well. This one's also a bit nuanced, but could be involved in other types of grief as well.
So going back to say, the professional athlete who has an injury always thought that they would leave that. Like that would be their legacy in their sport to go down in history, the Hockey Hall of Fame, whatever the case may be. And so you might lose so you may be grieving the legacy that you thought you'd leave. The last one I have for you is relationships. So whenever you experience a big change, there can often be a change in your relationships. And you might be grieving the relationship that you had with some of your friends or your family. You might have lost some friends through the process. Your friends change, especially once they start having children.
You really notice a shift. You're sort of pushed down the priority list and they might also relate to you differently. As I said, you might lose some friends altogether. I lost a few friends even when I was single. And one of my married friends, she just couldn't seem to figure out that you could invite a single woman to a dinner party with other couples. It didn't seem right to her to have an odd number. I don't know. She couldn't figure out how to fit me in to her life anymore.
I lost some other friends when they started to have children and their lives simply filled up with other moms that they met at daycare and then at school, and then at sporting events, their kids sports. And so there just wasn't room for me in their life anymore. We grew apart. This is also not unique to childless grief. This is something that is similar to other types of grief. Divorce is an obvious one. When you separate from a partner, your friends are going to shift. You may not be able to hang out with or may not.
Yeah, your your friends might take sides. You might not be able to hang out with couples that you used to or family, your ex's family. You might lose your relationship with them altogether. Losing a job is another instance of this. Relationships change once you leave a company, you grow away from people. Or maybe there's animosity if you were laid off or if your friend was laid off or any kind of change like that. Losing a spouse. When my brother in law passed away, I watched his wife really sort of back away from us.
Her friendships changed. She found new friends in support groups and other places. So your relationships can really shift and change through this process, and you may find grief in that. Okay, so these are some of the things that you might grieve as a woman without kids. So what exactly is disenfranchised grief? If you haven't heard that word before? It is grief that is experienced as a result of a loss that is not openly acknowledged or socially mourned or publicly supported. So you may run into people who minimize the loss of a job, a pet, maybe a friendship, for example, as things that are not worth grieving over. Miscarriage is a big one. Stillbirths, those are losses that are disenfranchised.
They're losses that are not recognized by society. They're not openly mourned infertility. And childlessness are definitely not recognized forms of grief in our society. They might be in some cultures around the world, but definitely not where I live. Not in the North American culture. Likely that extends to Western society. This is what it looks like. Our culture has so much discomfort around grief and death and pain that we try to rush people along.
If someone's said, it's time to move on or maybe told you to get over it already, maybe not in those harsh words, but if they've said something to the effect of, you know, it it's time to move on. Let's move forward, they're trying to minimize your grief, or they might be trying to disassociate from it because it's just too uncomfortable for them to see you in pain. There's also a real lack of understanding that there might even be grief associated with this kind of loss. There's just it's almost a vicious cycle. We don't talk about it, so other people don't know that there's grief. And because people won't acknowledge the grief, then we don't talk about it. So which came first? I don't know. But if there isn't any acknowledgment or support from the people who you'd expect support from, you know that there's disenfranchised grief there.
Now what do we do to fix this? Childless women tend to do these things. We might hide our grief. We try to be strong. We put on a happy face even when inside. We just want to hide out in the bathroom and cry. Or we might bury our grief, distract ourselves, try to move forward without actually processing the grief. And that can take many forms. It could be distracting yourself with work, keeping yourself busy, your social calendar full, or it might be numbing yourself through Netflix, Binges, wine, food, drugs.
Illicit or not, there's a multitude of ways that we bury, numb, distract, and try to move forward past grief without actually taking the time to process it. Another way to know that you might be a victim of this disenfranchised grief is you're avoiding any situation that might remind you of your grief. So you're avoiding social media, you're avoiding kid friendly events, family gatherings, all those things that will remind you that you have some grief in this area, maybe a lot of it. And ironically, these are all mistakes that deepen and perpetuate the disenfranchised of our grief. So when you don't talk about it, no one knows you're grieving. And that reinforces the assumption that there is nothing there to grieve. The second one, when you bury or numb or distract yourself from your grief, it doesn't actually go away. It simply sits in your body waiting for an opportunity to resurface.
And usually that is at the most inopportune time when you're not prepared or you're out in public or somewhere where you definitely don't want your grief to resurface and when you avoid everything. The third mistake avoiding all those situations that might remind you of your grief social media, the kid friendly events, the family gatherings you actually isolate yourself even further as childless women, there's not as many of us as there are mothers on the earth, and so we already feel like we don't belong. You're going to isolate yourself even further when you avoid all of those kid related situations and gatherings and events. So how do we deal with this? I have a whole process for this that my clients follow in my group coaching program. And I'm going to give you the most important step, the first step today. And here it is. Honor your own grief. Acknowledge it, allow yourself to feel it, and stop telling yourself that you're fine.
Give yourself permission to grieve. This is the most important thing that you can do for your emotional well being, is just to allow yourself to grief. Stop getting caught up in the disenfranchised of your grief and acknowledge it. If you're ready to hear more about this, I recorded a secret podcast that is not available to the general public. It's going to explain my whole process that I mentioned that my clients get inside of my group coaching program. So if you'd like to have a listen to that secret podcast, download it. Have a listen. Put in place some of the easy steps that I described there for designing your child free future and allowing yourself to process the grief.
You can find that secret podcast at sherijohnson.ca/secret-podcast/ and I will link that up in the show notes. Once again, it's sherijohnson.ca/secret-podcast/ and I would love it if you haven't left me a review already, I would absolutely appreciate and love it if you did rate this podcast. Follow me to get more episodes and I'll see you back here for the next episode. Bye for now.
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