Can I ask you something really personal? I’m having trouble coping with infertility and I was just wondering, since you’re so open about your relationships with your step sons and never mention any biological children, did you choose not to have biological children? I just spend basically every day off crying and hating myself for being barren and I’ve been trying to learn how to accept it an I was just wondering how you have accepted or chosen not to have children. If you don’t answer, it’s ok.
I’m so sorry that you’re struggling and feeling sad. I don’t know if any of this will help, and I strongly encourage you to talk to a professional who can help you work out why you feel the way you do, because you deserve to feel happy.
My wife and I chose not to have biological children because our lives were intensely complicated back then, her ex was making us miserable, and we were having a hard enough time keeping our blended family together as it was.
The thing is, if we had chosen to make a child, we would have a teenager in high school right now, and OMG am I glad we don’t because that sounds like an exhausting nightmare.
I never made an emotional distinction between raising children who didn’t carry my DNA and children who did, because love makes a family. I understand that our society puts a lot of weird and ambiguous rules around families, and that women who can’t or choose not to have children are treated as somehow less than women who do. I think that’s stupid and illogical. Your worth in the world isn’t defined by your ability or choice to get pregnant and have a baby.
I have friends who tried for twelve years to have a baby, but it just wasn’t happening for them. So they adopted, and they are as happy and loving with him as my other friends who made a baby.
So I guess what I’m saying is: I can’t tell you how to feel. I can’t tell you that you should or shouldn’t feel the way that you do, because we’re different people with different lives. What I will tell you is that I don’t think you’re less of a person because you aren’t able to get pregnant. I don’t think you would love a child you chose to raise any less, unless you made a deliberate choice to do that (which doesn’t sound like something you would do.)
Love and commitment make a family. If you want to be a mother, you can still be a mother and you can still have a family, even if you’re unable to biologically incubate a baby human. If you choose to adopt and raise a child, that child is going to be your child because you will be her mother. Please don’t beat yourself up or hate yourself because of a biological process you can’t control at all.