Why writing a novel helped me come to terms with being childless-not-by-choice

Letting feelings flow through the pen and onto the page helped novelist Annie Kirby to heal

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As a writer, words are my trade, but I find it difficult to describe the sense of devastation that swept over me the day I finally relinquished hope of ever becoming a mother. I had clung onto that hope for almost two decades, maintaining it through a decision not to bring children into an abusive relationship, an extended period of being single, followed by infertility and early menopause, and then withdrawing - at a very early stage - from an adoption process because of poor mental health. Even after all that, I still had hope, but one day when I was in my early 40s, I discovered that the hope - which had been both a lifeboat keeping me afloat and a prison preventing me from conceiving of the possibility of a happy future without children - had departed. I was faced with the sudden and unwelcome transition from a mother-in-waiting, a persona I had inhabited for most of my life, to a permanently childless woman.

My mental health fell off a cliff. Family and friends were puzzled when I tried to explain my emotions. It seemed strange to them that I could grieve for something that never existed, something as abstract as a never-conceived child. But, to me, my never-to-be-conceived children, and the life I thought I would lead as their mother, felt tangible, even though they had only ever existed in my hopes and dreams. I felt very alone - although, statistically speaking, I wasn't. The Office for National Statistics reports that around 18 per cent of women born in the same year as me (1971) remained childless at the age of 46 (deemed by the ONS to be the end of their child-bearing years). Objectively, I have never thought that women need to have children to be fulfilled, quite the opposite. There are numerous incredible childless (not by choice) and childfree (by choice) women living happy, purposeful lives to which many, including me, would aspire. But knowing that truth didn't seem to help.