Melanie Notkin

Lesson I’ve learned….

When a woman is over age 30, single and childless, people want to know why. Not just her doting parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Not just the college roommate whose bridal and baby showers she threw ten or fifteen years earlier. Not just her married mom friends chiding her to get on the bandwagon. Not just her co-workers. Not just the nosy neighbor down the street. Just about everyone is just dying to know: What is she waiting for?

Single women who yearn to be mothers go through their own heartache. They are waiting for their future life partner to come into their lives before they can even begin to try to conceive. While their infertility is circumstantial, it can be just as difficult as each month passes. But because their grief is not commonly understood, it’s often brushed aside with comments that, while are often meant to help, are hurtful.

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In a new report published last month by Springer Science+Business Media, LLC: ‘Unnatural’, ‘Unwomanly’, ‘Uncreditable’ and ‘Undervalued’: The Significance of Being a Childless Woman in Australian Society, authors Stephanie Rich, Ann Taket, Melissa Graham, Julia Shelley Published studied the experiences of childless women in contemporary Australia. The study revealed five recurring themes: woman = mother; notions of ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’; childlessness as a discrediting attribute; feeling undervalued; and the significance of being childless.

With the recent New York Magazine cover story making hoopla out of the growing age of first time moms, a recent study out of the department of human genetics at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands, shows that men get too old to have kids sans-risk to their offspring too.

Why is it that the modern mom can love children and her career but the childless woman can only love her career? In America today, has feminism morphed into mommyism?

I admit I’m guilty of looking in the mirror and feeling grateful that there is not a wrinkle on my 42 year old filler-free face. I am even more thankful for a cluster of monthly zits, a possible sign that some of my more youthful hormones are still functioning…

All reasons this generation of women are not bearing children at the same rate their mothers did are valid. Some young women and just not at a point in their lives where motherhood is choice they’d like to make. Some are ‘fence-sitters,’ not sure about whether or not they want children. Some are childfree by choice. Some are gay and need to take a potentially longer and less traditional route to motherhood. Some are suffering from biological infertility. And some, like me, are what I call “circumstantially infertile.”