The Process of Changing
The in-between stage of change can be desperately uncomfortable - not being our old self and not yet being our new self can feel awkward and painful. But we are still us...
Close to my cottage, a stream runs through the woods. On a more-or-less daily basis, I walk along the woodland path to the right of it, the water on my left audible at all times but often hidden from view by thickets of green. Sometimes I am above the stream, catching sight of it running deep in the ravine that it has carved, and other times we are at the same level, separated only by a small bank of earth held fast by tree roots and bamboo clumps.
We move in the same direction, the stream and I, winding through the trees down towards the river, and out into the estuary. The stream has followed this same path my whole life, and presumably for several lifetimes before me.
My younger sister was in her early twenties when she decided to stop eating meat, and a couple of years after that she did her best to cut out dairy, too.
“I’ll have oat milk,” she declared one morning while I was boiling the kettle to make her a cup of tea. She slid a beige tetrapack of oat milk in front of me and dropped a round teabag into her mug.
“What’s that?” The left side of my top lip curled upwards in a sisterly sneer.
“Rooibos tea,” she said.
I distinctly remember rolling my eyes and sighing.
For several weeks, I found it irritating to make her a cup of tea. It might have been months, but I am reluctant to admit to that level of pettiness. I was utterly indignant. How dare she inconvenience me like this? She was clearly going through a phase and was just trying to be difficult. She had no right to make me do the extra work of consciously remembering to open a whole different jar to get one of her special tea bags, and then get her stupid oat milk out of the stupid fridge as well as the actual milk. Why couldn’t she just have her tea the way she always had before? The same way as me? The way I knew?
Some years ago, the stream broke through the bank just ahead of a newly fallen tree trunk that blocked its flow. The water now divides, forking in two different directions. Some squeezes past the tree trunk and carries on downstream, the rest spills steadily onto the path. The human path. ‘My’ path.
For several metres, the flooded path demands wellies, even on a hot summers day. When my niece and nephews were energetic and enthusiastic children rather than boredom-filled teenagers, I would bring them here to build a dam. We’d gather stones, earth and fallen branches and build up the bank as best as we could. We had mixed successes. Sometimes, the overflow onto the path would dry up and wearing flip-flops was feasible for a few days, possibly weeks, until the next rainfall. At other times, we’d have only partial success and it would be easy enough to wear trainers and step to the sides along the path without getting too wet.
Any success was success; we’d managed to control the stream and put it back in its place.
At some stage over the last three and a half years, I changed.
My sister changed too. She became a mother. I’m not even sure when it happened.
Did she change the minute she conceived? Or in the moment when she briefly wondered to herself if she might be pregnant? Perhaps it was when she looked at the positive pregnancy test held in her hand, or when everything was declared ‘fine’ at the twelve week scan. It might not have been until her bump began to show, or when she went into labour or when she heard her newborn baby cry and take her first breaths.
Whether we become a mother or become permanently childless, there can be a huge identity shift that means working out who we are as women now, who we are as individuals, how we fit with those around us, how life can never go back to what it was and how we can never go back to who we were.
In recent months, I have read several books about the early stages of motherhood and the transformation that a woman goes through as she becomes a mother. I have nodded along, as a childless woman, with each of the writers as they described the metamorphosis and the feelings of being unseen, of being alone, of confusion and struggle and all those other things that come with a life-defining, identity-changing experience. I have thought, “Yes, me too!” and realised that I am simply looking at the flip-side of a coin.
I stood in the stream this morning, wearing my wellies and watching the water follow its two different paths simultaneously. Along the old path, the tree has been gathering more and more debris each autumn. Sticks, leaves and silt have plugged the gaps and this sends more water forking off to the right, carving shallow banks along the human path now.
The stream’s new way of flowing is becoming more established.
I don’t know how long it will be until its redirection is complete. Big transitions take time. It takes time for a stream to find a new flow just as it takes time for the psyche to adapt and catch up. But while the stream is flowing in two different directions and the psyche is straddling the two identities, they still need to be loved and accepted exactly as they are.
It is dangerous to withhold self-acceptance until we have completed our transformation. We need to accept ourselves while we are in the process of change, and we need to find others who will accept us while we are in the process of change as well.
When did my younger sister’s friends adapt to the change in her? Was it when they hugged her and squealed their excitement at hearing her news? When they stopped offering her alcohol and asked her if she wanted a soft drink instead? When they first saw her bump? When they asked her how she was feeling and if she had morning sickness? When they received a photo of the baby? When they sent her flowers and gifts to welcome the baby into the world? When they first saw her holding her baby in their arms?
I wonder when friends and family begin to adapt to the change in those who become permanently childless, if ever.
“You’re becoming more you,” my acupuncturist told me when I whinged my frustration at her that friends would not accept that I no longer wanted to actively look for a partner, “It takes other people a while to catch up.”
These are some of the ways that I have changed since becoming permanently childless:
I no longer feel delight when I hear that a friend is pregnant. I no longer feel eagerness to meet their new babies. My response to those things has shifted.
I no longer feel obliged to think positively. Expressions like ‘it’s all in your mindset’ and ‘manifest your dreams’ make me squirm, as if someone is trying to inject poison into my veins.
I no longer imagine a future with children or grandchildren.
I no longer anticipate finding romantic love or partnership.
I no longer expect to form deep attachments with other people.
I no longer hope to one day be someone else’s priority.
I no longer find a sense of belonging in society, and I don’t even seek it out anymore. I find a sense of belonging in the woods, within my cottage, or on my own in the middle of the moors in a shepherds hut with only my dog and my words for company.
Joy feels different to me now and it comes from different places.
Connections that once sustained me now feel shallow. The same is true of work and play. I seek more depth and meaning in things than I used to.
I know how loneliness really feels now. I know what deep grief feels like now. Those two things are a part of me, even when I do not feel them. They occupy a place in my soul where they were absent before.
I no longer believe that medicine has the answers.
I no longer believe that therapy has the answers.
I no longer believe that there always are answers.
My body hasn’t changed. My posture hasn’t changed. I do not wear different clothes. I haven’t got a new hairstyle. There are no visible markers providing evidence of my changes. I look the same as I would have looked if none of these things had changed.
I wonder why it ever bothered me that the stream had deviated from its original course. I wonder why I always tried to put it back in its place. I wonder why I didn’t simply allow it to take its new direction and find its new flow. I wonder why I have found it annoying that it is neither one stream nor the other, that it is in the process of changing. I wonder why friends and family seem unable to accept us in our state of changing, of being neither who we were, nor who we will become.
Why do we find the process of changing so difficult to be with?
The worst of the grief of childlessness is behind me now, and it shows. I am more present when I am with other people. I laugh more easily. I find joy more easily. I have shed my old skin and, although the new skin still feels fragile, I am beginning to feel more comfortable in it.
“You’re back!” a friend said the other day. “It’s so great to see.”
“Thanks,” I said, glad that she had recognised a shift, “But I’m not ‘back’ as such. I’m not the same person that I was, so if anything, I’m forward.”
"Whether we become a mother or become permanently childless, there can be a huge identity shift that means working out who we are as women now, who we are as individuals, how we fit with those around us, how life can never go back to what it was and how we can never go back to who we were."
-- It took me a long time to appreciate that involuntary childlessness (and perhaps voluntary too) changes us in ways just as profoundly as motherhood potentially can. And yet, because our experience is disenfranchised and othered, it perhaps takes us time to accept that. For me, there is no 'going back' to who I was before my dreams of motherhood ended... she has been burnt away by grief and transformation. I miss her naive hopefulness sometimes, but I love the deep, soulful version of me that the fire of loss revealed.
Thank you Henri for your words xx
I’m long since reconciled to my involuntary childlessness and when I think of my younger self, I feel so sorry for that young girl/woman because she was hopeful and didn’t know the pain that lay ahead. I feel it’s so important to bring compassion to our own experiences and to know that we did our best to muddle through 💕