I used to start every year during my pursuit of motherhood thinking, "this is going to be my year". And it never was. Once I came to terms that my future was going to be childless, it started to look pretty dismal. And yet, I wanted to feel optimistic about the year ahead. What I didn't realize was that I had some obstacles in my way that needed breaking down. Consciously.
In this solo episode, you'll discover:
Join me, and let's step into 2024 with courage, grace, and the freedom to craft a life of meaning, motherhood aside.
If you are ready to create a joyful 2024, DM me "episode 91" on Instagram.
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
Other References from this Episode:
Awakening Worth Podcast Episode 73: Letting Go Of Your Childless Identity is Crucial for Embracing Your Future
Kate Northrup's Plenty podcast, Episode 17: How to Increase your Capacity to Receive Love
I used to start every year during my pursuit of motherhood thinking, "this is going to be my year". And it never was. Once I came to terms that my future was going to be childless, it started to look pretty dismal. And yet, I wanted to feel optimistic about the year ahead. What I didn't realize was that I had some obstacles in my way that needed breaking down. Consciously.
In this solo episode, you'll discover:
Join me, and let's step into 2024 with courage, grace, and the freedom to craft a life of meaning, motherhood aside.
If you are ready to create a joyful 2024, DM me "episode 91" on Instagram.
Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca
Other References from this Episode:
Awakening Worth Podcast Episode 73: Letting Go Of Your Childless Identity is Crucial for Embracing Your Future
Kate Northrup's Plenty podcast, Episode 17: How to Increase your Capacity to Receive Love
The beginning of a new year is, for so many of us, a time of renewal. You might be a childless person who is wanting to imagine this year as bright and joyful, as I'm sure most people do, but from your side of the table, you just can't imagine how that's going to happen. Maybe you're in the midst of the realization that becoming a mother may not be in the cards for you, or maybe you're even years beyond that, but you still just can't get past the grief and the triggers in order to allow a joyful future to come into view. Beneath the grief and triggers, there are likely some obstacles standing in the way of your amazing 2024. And that's the topic of today's episode. If you think you might have something standing in the way, stick with me. I'm going to identify the possibilities and of what might be standing in the way, that is, and show you how to break them down. Hi, I'm Sherry Johnson, and you are about to discover how to embrace your life as a childless woman who wanted to have a family and never could. This is where we combine mindset shifting tools with practical tips so you can break free of outdated societal norms that condition us all to believe that women without kids just don't measure up to the moms. It's where we take action on processing grief and accelerating the healing journey so you can feel free. When childless women awaken their self-worth, they transform from hopeless and inadequate to worthy, accepting and purposeful. Think of this podcast as your weekly dose of light bulb moments that will shift your perspective as a childless woman, about yourself, about your any power to change yourself, your future and maybe from the world we live in. If that's what you want, then keep on listening. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast and happy new year. Hang on.
Sheri Johnson:You might not be so optimistic about 2024 and some random person me telling you to have a happy new year isn't going to cut it. I remember when I was in the midst of my years of wanting to find a partner and then to have a family. I would be so happy to be done with the previous year and I had so much hope for the new year. I would tell myself this is going to be my year. By this time next year, or by this time at the end of this year, I'll be going home for the holidays with a guy in my arm or with a baby in them. I did finally find the guy, but the baby in my arms never happened, as you probably know if you've been listening for a while, and eventually I had to come to terms with the fact that I could either redesign my idea for happy life and, if not, the future would look pretty dismal year after year. I just wish that I had been able to identify these obstacles earlier so that I could have moved forward more easily and more quickly. So here they are.
Sheri Johnson:Today I'm going to give you five different obstacles that might be blocking your ability to redesign your life and your future and have a happy 2024. So number number one is that you might still be hoping to become a mom somehow. So of course, that's obvious. If you're in that state, that's an obvious option. If you're still hoping to become a mom, then you're not going to envision a future without kids. But then again, maybe it's not that obvious, and I'll tell you why.
Sheri Johnson:Let me tell you my story. When I was 44, my husband and I made the decision not to move forward with IVF for a variety of reasons that I've talked about on the podcast before, and we decided to try to be happy without children. And yet every month after that, the week before my period was supposed to come, I spent imagining that the slightest fullness of my breast, or pain in my breast, was because I must be pregnant. I'd imagine that I was more tired than usual and maybe I was, but I associated that with a must-see pregnant. And then I also had this spotting that had started to show up before the normal flow of my period and I imagined that that must be implantation bleeding. I still had hope as long as I was still getting a period. My brain was still or my heart. My brain knew that even fertility treatments weren't helping me to get pregnant. So how the heck was it going to happen without them? But my heart just hadn't let go of that dream.
Sheri Johnson:And as long as I was hanging on to that dream, my future, as far as my heart was concerned, had a baby in it, and that would really. It was really preventing me from allowing in any other dream, say, for example, becoming a snowbird. That's what we call the retirees who go south for the winter in Canada. They spend summers in Canada, they go south in the winter and escape Canadian winters and the potential to work in California or Mexico for the winter, as we've now done twice. I wasn't able to even see that as a potential future for us, while I still had hope. So I had to let that go and I would really ask yourself that question if you are still hanging on to that hope, be honest with yourself. It's totally fine to keep hoping for a baby, but know that that is going to stand in the way of other dreams. So that is number one. You're still hanging on to hope of becoming a mom somehow. Number two you can't let go of the grief.
Sheri Johnson:So this next, this number two is it might sound kind of controversial and you might not agree with me or maybe you're not ready to hear it. So, as I always say, take what you need from this podcast and just leave the rest. So first let me say that the grief and loss that you feel is real and it is worthy of mourning. You need to know that first, because I know a lot of women who don't even acknowledge that they might be feeling grief or a sense of loss, or maybe they do actually know it deep down, but they won't. They keep telling themselves well, I haven't lost a baby, I haven't lost a child, I haven't lost a father, mother or whatever. They're telling themselves that that grief is not worthy of spending time mourning and it is.
Sheri Johnson:But then there are two other things that come into play here. So first, in order to let go of grief, you have to feel it. Most of us have been taught to avoid negative emotions because it's uncomfortable, it's painful, and yet I say this all the time you have to feel the emotions in order to release them. So if you're numbing or distracting yourself from your emotions, or you're maybe trying to bury them or cover them up with food or working too much, or alcohol, too much wine, whatever it is Netflix, if you're trying to shove down your grief, you're going to hang on to it. When you feel it, when you actually allow yourself to feel it in your body, you will find that it shifts the emotion, the feeling. It shifts and it changes and it releases. And it all actually happens in less than two minutes and you will not die. Your brain will tell you that it's going to die if it feels these emotions. Your brain wants to keep you safe, but it is actually just uncomfortable. This is something that we cover in the Women of Worth group immersion. It's part of the first pillar of my Meaning Beyond Motherhood framework and within the group immersion, I show you the exact steps to release grief in a way that feels comfortable and it feels safe, Because that can sometimes be the hardest part is just finding a way to release that, to feel those emotions in a way that feels okay.
Sheri Johnson:The other thing, though, that you need to be aware of or maybe that you're less aware of already is that you may not actually want to let go of the grief. That grief can become a pretty solid and comfortable companion, and your brain and your body will actually think it's scary to let it go Because that feels unfamiliar and unsafe. It's somehow easier to be with what has been around for a while. Someone asked me a question once. That really was a really powerful question, and I want to ask you as well who would you be without your wounds? What does that person feel like? What does that person look like If you just let go of all of your wounds, not even just the grief that you might feel as a result of your not getting to realize the dream of being a mother? So ask yourself, who would you be without your grief? So that is number two. The obstacle is that you can't let go of the grief. Obstacle number three you can't let go of the identity the identity of being a mother, or the identity in, in your case or our case of wanting to be a mother.
Sheri Johnson:The society that we live in has conditioned women to believe that motherhood is the most important identity you can have and, by extension, having a partner in order to have children with has become equally important, and many of us measure our value based on these two identities being a partner, being a mother. Some of the things that I remember all too well from my past is the shame that I felt when I was 38 and still not married, though I didn't realize it. Not being chosen meant that there was something wrong with me and I'm not as worthy as someone who has a partner. I don't get to have that identity, so I must be of lesser value. And that measuring stick. It showed up again when I had my first miscarriage and then I had two more.
Sheri Johnson:I know that some of my listeners have had miscarriages and we take ourselves down a notch just because our body didn't carry that pregnancy through. There's something wrong with us. God must be punishing us. There's something wrong with our bodies. So there it is again. We must be of lesser value if we didn't carry a pregnancy to term. And even for the women who needed help to get pregnant the ones who actually do finish their fertility journey with a baby they will still take themselves down a notch on that measuring stick because they couldn't get pregnant quote-unquote, naturally. And then there are those who found a partner, but that partner didn't want kids or didn't want more kids. Maybe they had a child with them in another marriage or with another partner. Those women take themselves down another notch because, well, why doesn't he or maybe it's she in your case why doesn't that person want kids with me? So there must be something wrong with me and so I must be of lesser value than other people.
Sheri Johnson:So all of this is it's making ourselves of lower value than mothers, than people who have partners, and we hang on to the identity that we wanted by shifting to the identity of somebody who wanted that. So if I can't be a mother, then I at least need to be someone who wanted to be a mother. And what happens if we let go of that identity? If you become someone who is okay with not being a mother? What happens then? Will society judge you? Will you judge yourself. This can be a totally subconscious thing, but it is so important to let go of. When you are gripping the mother identity so tightly, you cannot be free.
Sheri Johnson:If you want to dig into this one a little deeper, go back and check out episode number 73 on the Awakening Worth podcast. This is where I really break down this letting go of the identity of being a mother and what it means to do that, what it means to hang on to it, how it feels, how to identify whether you're actually doing this. So if you let that identity go, everything shifts. And it's not easy. It's not just a matter of saying, okay, I'll let that go. There is so much subconscious stuff going on, conditioning from our society, beliefs that have been instilled in us values. It's going to take some work to unravel it and that is also something that we do inside of the Women of Worth group immersion. It's part of pillar two, which is totally different than grief, by the way, that's taking care of in pillar one of my framework. Pillar two has a lot more to do with self-worth and where all this conditioning and these beliefs came from and how to actually break it down. So that is obstacle number three You're hanging on to the identity of being a mother. Number four is you don't know what you want. That is entirely possible.
Sheri Johnson:How many years have you spent pining for the life that you imagined you'd have? For me it was gosh. Probably 15, maybe even 20 years. The constant search for a life partner through my 20s and 30s, and then the six years of trying to have a baby once I finally met my partner. That whole journey was so all-consuming. It was just it was my number one focus that I didn't even know what I wanted. If I didn't have those things, I couldn't even fathom another kind of life. Thankfully, my husband was able to get there a lot quicker than me and he actually pulled me forward. He was the one who talked about traveling and living in the south during the winter. He was the one who went and bought this little red sports car because heck, if you don't have children, then what do you need a minivan for? He was the one who really kind of started me thinking well, what could we do with this life of ours?
Sheri Johnson:And something that you will need to do is to start to identify what you actually desire. How do you really want to feel? And again, this is something that we do inside the Women of Worth group immersion. It's a key piece of the third pillar. We walk through exactly how to identify what you desire. So if that's something that you're struggling with DME episode 91, and I'll send you details on that I'm opening up a new cohort this next week, in January, and you might want to be a part of that. So that's number four. The fourth obstacle is you don't know what you want, and maybe you don't know how to identify what it is that you want. Obstacle number five, the last one Maybe you do know what you want, but your nervous system is preventing you from getting it. This is actually something that is a fairly new concept to me, so I don't know a ton about this just yet. I'm starting to learn about our automatic reactions and how the nervous system is involved in creating the reality that we see in our lives. Kate Northrup, by the way, did a beautiful job of explaining this on her podcast. It's called Plenty, and I'll link up the episode that I was listening to where she described it in the show notes. I think it's 17. So, yeah, I'll link that up in the show notes.
Sheri Johnson:The gist of it is this though you have an emotional set point it's almost like a thermometer point that you can't seem to change. So maybe you change it a little bit, but your, your brain, will keep bringing you back to that set point, because your brain becomes really comfortable with whatever is familiar and anything unfamiliar feels unsafe. So your brain and your body will not actually allow you to go very far beyond that set point before it brings you back. And if you've spent, say, the last bunch of years maybe in a state of stress because you've been doing fertility treatments, or maybe in a state of disappointment because you've gotten your hopes up for the life that you wanted and then it didn't happen, month after month, year after year, that disappointment or that stress or whatever that emotion is starts to feel very nice and familiar and comfortable in your body. And joy or bliss, or excitement, optimism, those things feel very foreign and your brain is hardwired to avoid what's unfamiliar. What feels foreign is unsafe. So even though you might be able to identify what you want, you will keep subconsciously self sabotaging yourself because your, your brain, feels unsafe when you enter that unknown territory.
Sheri Johnson:So that is number five.
Sheri Johnson:You know what you want, but your nervous system is preventing you from getting it. So let's recap the five. Number one you're still hoping to become a mom somehow. Number two you can't let go of the grief. Number three you can't get. You can't let go of the identity of being a mother or the identity of being a partner. Number four you don't know what you want. Maybe you don't know how to identify what you want. And number five you know what you want but your nervous system will prevent you from actually getting that.
Sheri Johnson:I so wish that I had been more conscious of these obstacles when I was coming to terms with my own childless future. At 51, I have removed them all. At this point I feel great. I love my life, but had I more awareness and support for breaking through these obstacles sooner, I would have been able to get here much faster. And you have a choice now to keep going it on your own or you can receive even more of that awareness and that support to get through the grief and triggers so that you can find meaning and joy and bliss beyond motherhood and so that you can have a happy 2024. So if you want that kind of support, send me a DM at Sherry Johnson Coaching. I'll link that up in the show notes at Sherry Johnson Coaching on Instagram with the word episode 91. And I will give you the exact steps to get to that. Happy 2024. That is all for today. Come back next week for another episode. Bye for now.