Love, Identity & Attachment Can All Be Part of Grief

When it comes to being single and childless-not-by-choice, grief is more than just love with nowhere to go...

A fairly popular description of grief that gets thrown around is that ‘Grief is love with nowhere to go.’

I see it written in books, I hear it on podcasts and I catch it on social media where I also read the comments afterwards that say, “Yes! Exactly! It’s all that love with nowhere to go!”

In coming to terms with permanent childlessness, my experience of grief is similar. I have loved the three children that I wanted and expected to have since I was a little girl. Now, having come into permanent childlessness, it feels that that love cannot find a place to land, because they are not here with me. They are not in this world. They never have been and they never will be. 

There’s more to it than that, though. The grief is not as clear cut as simply being ‘love with nowhere to go.’ For me, that is just one strand of the grief. There are two others: There is a crisis of identity and self, and there is the attachment system gone haywire. These three strands - of love, identity and attachment - are braided together. Interwoven like this, the strands become inseparable and it is as that single braid made of three strands that I can best understand my grief.

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We all come to childlessness (or parenthood) within the context of our own lives and each of us will have a few out-of-the-ordinary things that give individual shape to our experience. One of the biggest shapers for me has been coming into childlessness through singleness - specifically as a thirty-nine year old woman who had been single for sixteen years. The single experience has shaped the strands of identity and attachment that I carry. It has coloured them and given them their size, weight and strength. This is, I believe, what has given my personal braid of grief its own unique look.

I imagine that the feeling of love having nowhere to go would have felt much the same for me regardless of whether I had had a partner or not. In fact, I imagine it might look very similar for all of us who are childless-not-by-choice. Perhaps it is this strand - the yearning, the loss, the ache of sadness for the children that are not here with us - that truly unites us. But what of the other strands? What do they look like? They surely are vastly different for each of us depending on many shaping factors - our sexual preferences, the colour of our skin, our religions, our cultures, our physical health, our mental health, whether we are single or partnered, whether we have siblings and so many more things that would become tedious to read in a list. They all contribute to those strands, particularly those of attachment and identity, to make our own braids of grief completely unique. 

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I can only describe my own braid of grief, made up as it is of the three strands and shaped by my singleness. I don’t actually know what it might feel like to have been partnered through all this. It was such a long time ago that I was in something that felt like it might become a long term partnership. It ended after twelve months so I didn’t get to experience what it feels like to be in a long term partnership. Perhaps it wouldn’t have felt vastly different. I guess I may have teetered on the edge of feeling safely attached to another human being but feared the worst: that the relationship would end. I might have had imposter syndrome and never really allowed my identity to settle into the idea of a secure partnership or life as a married woman. I don’t know. All I know is how I have felt in the absence of partnership and in the absence of my children. 

I know that I have felt untethered.

I know that I have felt a deep existential loneliness.

I know that have felt a rumbling despair and panic, an inability to feel safe and confident. 

I know that I have felt like a small child lost in a crowd.

These feelings of wild terror weren’t present in the days when I felt like my partner and children were in my future. I felt safe then, trusting that one day I would have a family of my own and that they would anchor me in this world.

It is these feelings that have shaped the strand of attachment for me. They fuelled months and months of heart palpitations that other people have attributed to perimenopause. They created an agitation under my skin that got fobbed off as too much caffeine. They held me for too long in the confines of my small cottage, lacking the confidence to go out into the world to explore or to live. I wasn’t depressed, I just didn’t feel I had a safe base.

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Other things that weren’t present when I believed that partnership and motherhood were waiting for me also became present when I hit permanent childlessness. A deep shame and self-loathing surfaced, and an inability to show myself in the world. 

If you are familiar with the Harry Potter stories, you will remember the hat sorting scene. A magic talking Sorting Hat is placed on Harry’s head and determines which house he will be in. It’s a big deal. Harry’s identity relies on what the Sorting Hat decides. Harry desperately pleas with the hat not to put him in Slytherin. He wants to be in Gryffindor. He already feels like he is part of Gryffindor. He has friends in Gryffindor and he identifies as a Gryffindor student. He does not identify with Slytherin. In fact, he actively loathes the idea of being part of it. Anything but that, he begs.

Lucky for him, the hat sent him to Gryffindor, but can you imagine if he had been put into Slytherin? Can you imagine how he would have yearned to be with all his friends in Gryffindor, how he would feel ashamed that the Sorting Hat had seen something in him that aligned with Slytherin, that place that he didn’t identify with in the slightest? Slytherin, the place that all the bad ones were put? I think he may have been swamped by shame and self-loathing and felt the need to hide himself from the rest of Hogwarts altogether.

Becoming childless as a single woman felt like the hat decided that I was best suited to being a modern day spinster. I loathed the idea. I wanted partnership and motherhood. I identified with those things. I already felt like I was part of that world, the one that is made up of couples and families. All my friends were part of it. But here was the wretched hat, giving me no option and throwing me into a version of Slytherin. It wasn’t like it put me into one of the other less despicable houses that it might have done had I had a partner. I might have coped with Hufflepuff or Ravenclaw, even though they weren’t my preferred choice, but Slytherin? No thanks.

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When it comes to voicing things around the different strands of grief, particularly within the context of being single and the shape of my own attachment and identity strands, I feel the fear of disconnection. There is a nervousness that other people might respond with, “Oh, but you’ll meet someone,” which is a bit like saying to someone who is struggling with infertility, “Oh, but it’ll happen,” when in fact nobody can guarantee anything in the future and we all know that uncertainty can be utterly intolerable. Other comments that make me feel nervous about voicing things are, “Well, it’s not easy being in a relationship either,” or “Being in a relationship doesn’t guarantee security, you know - it could end at any time.” There are echoes here of comments like, “Kids aren’t all they’re cracked up to be,” and more than a hint of “The grass isn’t greener.” But I know that life in partnership is not akin to wandering barefoot on a perfectly mown, green lawn that is blissfully free of thorns and nettles, just as I know that life as a parent is not a walk in the park and is far closer to a terrifying-but-at-times-exhilarating roller-coaster ride. I also know all the advantages and benefits of being a single woman without kids because I walk on this grass every day. 

In grief, it doesn’t serve us to compare the colour of grass. What feels more helpful is to examine those things that become present through a loss or a life-changing experience. In my case it feels more helpful to explore the things that have become present through the absence of the partner that I never met and the children that I never brought into the world. It is these things that need to be tended to in grief. Each thread of each strand - of love, attachment and identity - needs to be seen, felt and witnessed, both individually and as part of a whole. This is something more readily done when we can describe each thread or each strand to other people and trust that we will not be shut down with reminders that the grass isn’t greener on the other side.

ps. I’m planning to explore these different strands further in my next few substack articles - if I’m honest, I’m still trying to familiarise myself with this platform and sometimes the clunkiness of it puts me off writing and publishing here which is why it has been so long since my last piece of writing. If you have any top tips for getting to grips with it, I’d love to hear them so that I can get in the swing of things a little more!!