108: The Hidden Things You Didn't Know You Were Grieving

Many childless people don't even realize they are grieving.  Who would have known you can grieve the loss of an imagined future?   What I find is that many women without kids, even those who choose not to have them, feel some sort of grief and it's not always the loss of that future.  Identifying what specifically you're grieving is key to processing it.

In this solo episode, I'm giving you the first step of the Grow Through Grief pillar of my framework: identify what hidden grief might be lying under the surface.   That is, after you realize or admit that you are feeling grief.

I'm sharing 7 different less-obvious things you might be grieving and didn't even know it.   Many of these will resonate even with those who chose not to have kids, or those who are sort of ambiguous about it.  So have a listen no matter what your circumstances.

If you are ready to fully process and release the grief AND get the rest of my framework for creating Purpose Beyond Parenthood, click here to sign up for one of my free focus groups.

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

If you are a childless woman looking to up-level her life in a major way, join the Love Your Beautiful, Unconventional Life Retreat, coming up at the end of February 2025.  Book a Retreat Call with Sheri here if you have questions or want to know more!

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Transcript

You probably already know that you've felt some grief around the loss of the future you imagine you'd be living right now, maybe one that is filled with children, maybe one child, whatever that might be.

You imagine you'd be a mom or maybe it's maybe the fact that you're feeling some grief might be new to you.

I do have clients who didn't even realize that what they were feeling in relation to their childless circumstances was in fact grief.

But I think there is a misconception that if you weren't someone who desperately wanted kids, if you were maybe someone who felt a bit ambiguous about it, or that you even didn't want kids, that what you might be feeling is grief.

Because even women who choose not to have children can feel grief around that circumstance. The thing is that grief might not actually be recognizable, especially if you were someone who was feeling ambiguous about having kids.

You don't expect to feel any grief because it wasn't, you know, you weren't desperate to have kids. So it might not be recognizable.

And there might be other kinds of grief or grief stemming from different things that might be hiding under the surface that you don't even know are there.

So if you want to find out if any of those other things, those other things you might be lingering inside of you, keep on listening.

Okay, welcome back. And welcome. If you are not. new here. This is the Awakening Worth podcast. I'm Sherry Johnson.

I'm your host. And I am a woman who does not have kids. I was someone who I didn't really realize it, but I was pretty ambiguous about having kids.

I didn't have this deep yearning as a kid. Like, I wasn't one of those kids who had a deep yearning to be a mother as a kid.

didn't play with dolls. I didn't love to babysit. I didn't really feel the longing when I was in my 20s and even 30s.

You know, other women talked about this desperation, this wanting to have kids. And I longed for a partner in my 20s and 30s, but I didn't have this deep yearning to be a mother.

And yet, I did feel grief, lots of it. I just didn't understand what exactly I was grieving or that it was even grief that I was feeling.

So, I want to shed some light on this today. I'm going to identify exactly what you might be grieving.

And this is not an exhaustive list because I think there's lots of different things. We all have a different experience of this, but identifying what you might be grieving is actually the first step to healing from it.

But if you don't even know what you might be grieving or don't even know that it's there, how can you consciously heal from it?

And by the way, side note, you do need to consciously take care of your grief. It doesn't just go away.

That whole notion that time heals all wounds, it's false. I talk about that another podcast, so I'm going to glaze over that today.

What I am going to do today is give you the first step of one of the pillars within you.

in my purpose beyond parenthood framework, and that first pillar is grow through grief. And the first step to doing that is to identify exactly what it is that you're grieving.

And by the way, if you want to find out the rest of the pillars, you'll have to come to one of my free focus groups, just go to sherryjohnson.ca slash focus group to find out when the next one is.

And I'll link that up in the show notes as well in case you want to join. So let's get into it.

Now just by sharing these with you, something might click for you and you'll realize exactly what it is that you need to heal.

But there might be other things, so I would encourage you to explore, get a journal out, you know, start writing, am I feeling, what needs to be healed.

Sometimes things come out on the paper that you don't even realize are in your head. Okay, so let me start by saying that many women who come to work with me actually come to me after they've processed some of that grief.

Or like me, maybe they even felt rather ambiguous about having children, but they still have a lot of emotion coming up anyway, just like I did.

And the reason, or this is, this is what I think is the reason that these women are still feeling a bit stuck, or like there's still something missing.

And that is because I think they actually haven't fully processed or completed their grief. So I have a list of seven different things here, and again, not exhaustive.

There's probably tons of other things. These are just some of the things that I really didn't think about, or didn't recognize when

and I first started working in this space when I first started working with other other childless women and even during my own experience as I mentioned.

So the first one that I want to talk about is that you might be grieving is changed relationships. So, you know, maybe you're thinking about your grief as the loss of your imagined future.

But within that can come relationships that change or even before that. Because before I even really, you know, I was looking for a partner while all of my friends were getting married and having their first one, maybe two kids.

And what I initially grieved was like, I was looking for a partner. I wasn't even thinking about kids yet.

I just wanted to get, let me find the partner. So, What I was grieving was how much the relationships with my friends were changing, and that started with them finding their own partners, you know, they obviously are going to spend a lot more time with them, and so I felt sort of left behind and left in the dust, and when they and every time somebody had their first kid, I'd just think, oh, there's another one that bites the dust, and it really felt like I was left behind, like, there was that, but there was also this, like, now our relationships are going to change, because they always did.

Most of them did. You know, they, a lot of my friends went on to find out, other friends, so friends that they had more in common with friends who also had young children and then friends that they met through their kids sports and then later on more sports or different sports.

So they met other people that they ended up spending a lot more time with than they did with me and they also you know they they started to travel together and you know just do other things there were other things occupying their minds they they're especially in the early years their minds were full of no sleep babies bottles diaper changes it was all consuming and so we didn't have the same death in our relationships as we maybe did before and these change relationships obviously can come with this feeling of social exclusion.

So, I did have, you know, I had always envisioned traveling as with other families. This is something that I did as a kid and it was one of my fondest of memories.

We used to ski at a resort in Quebec and we pretty much took over the whole resort, it was a small resort, there was, I don't know how many families, like there had to be 15 families and we all went together.

We skied together, we played together in the evenings after we finished skiing. It was just, it was so much fun.

And then we did it again as a teenager. We stopped skiing as much and started going south, spent a week in Myrtle Beach over our spring break with a whole bunch of other families.

And so I always envisioned doing this when I had kids. And I learned that my friends were doing this, but I wasn't invited.

partner and I weren't invited when I finally did find a partner and I don't even know that I really wanted to be invited.

I didn't necessarily want to be around whole bunch of little kids, but I did want to be invited. I did feel excluded by not even being given the opportunity to have those experiences.

And by the way, when we went skiing as kids, there was another childless couple, in fact there might have been more than one who came with us.

And I think they did have just as much fun as the parents did. So maybe that is something that you're willing to do, but I wasn't invited and I did feel some exclusion from that.

So that's number one, changing relationships with your friends and could also be your family. Number two, my relationship with my mother.

So I guess what I grieved myself was the relationship that I thought I would have with my mother. I watched my siblings who both had children go through kind of a change in their relationship with my mom.

And I didn't get to experience that. So I think that I grieved that. Now in hindsight, as I look back not having kids actually allows me and my husband to have a different experience with my parents.

We will sometimes get together just the four of us. And of course our conversations are different than if my nieces and nephews were around.

And also just even if my my siblings were around. So we, we have also been given a gift and my relationship with my mom, we have been able to do some healing that I don't know that I would have done or spent the time or energy on if I had kids, kids who were in the picture.

So that's something else that you might be grieving is a relationship with your mom, that a relationship that you thought you would have with your mother or father as the grandparent of your children.

A third one is, I don't really know how to describe this one, but it's really that other losses might feel tougher.

So the first things that come to mind here are something like a divorce. If you are a a childless woman in a relationship and a divorce or separation from that person can really feel like a huge loss because there isn't a family there.

So that partner can feel like your only family. so separation can really feel like a loss and there might be more fear of a separation from your partner.

And there also might be a bigger fear of that person's death, the fear of the loss of that person.

Sometimes I wonder whether and actually my clients have talked about this that there might be this, I don't know, more pressure on that relationship because it is your only family.

Some of the other things though that might seem tougher. is the loss of a pet. And I don't know, I'm just kind of ruminating or not ruminating.

I'm just kind of thinking out loud here that maybe we get closer to our pets as people who don't have kids.

I don't know if that's true or not, but that the loss of a pet might feel deeper than it does if you have on this.

I don't know if this is true. So maybe just take it early that the loss of an Easter nephew.

So this came up on a on a on a sales call actually with someone who talked about how she had lost a niece that she was very close with.

And I do, you know, one of my sister, both my sisters actually, you know, I have talked about this, the fact that I have a little bit of a different relationship with my nieces and nephews, because I don't have kids.

of my own. And so part of me wonders whether I would grieve a little bit more the loss of that relationship because I'm a little more invested in it.

And again, that may or may not be true, but this is something that one of my potential clients talked about recently.

So that's number three is that other losses might seem tougher than if you had kids. Number four identity. I have talked about this one before on the podcast, but I want to delve into this one a little bit because it is something that maybe you haven't thought about.

Identity is the identity that you thought you'd have. So becoming a mother, the mother identity is something that you thought you would have.

And so there's definitely the loss of that. But then there's also the, the fact that you, you have adopted the identity of someone who wanted kids.

And this was an identity that I held onto for a long time. It's accepting the identity of a child free woman that is actually the next step.

It's letting go of the identity of someone who wanted kids. Maybe, maybe, this is a tougher one to explain.

So I did talk about this on another podcast episode that I can't actually remember what the number is, but I will link that up in the show notes if you want to find out more about this identity of someone who wanted kids.

We do, we do need to let go of this in order to accept the identity of a child free person.

If you want to feel free and fully embrace your life, you have to let go of that. identity so that you can create your best life as someone who is, who doesn't have kids.

And when you do begin to let go of that, anytime you shift an identity or change your identity, there will be or there might be grief there.

There's grief around any change. It's really hard to feel it's really hard not to feel a sense of loss around a change in identity.

So even if you think about I use this example sometimes because my husband was a very strong athlete as he was growing up and then he lost the use of his likes.

He had a spinal cord injury and it could no longer play the sports that he was so good at.

And so the loss of the athlete identity for him came with a lot of a real sense of loss.

So that's another example for you in case that one didn't make sense. So that's the identity. So not even letting go of the or yes, you need to let go of the identity of being a mother, but you also need to let go of the identity of being someone who wanted kids.

If you're over identifying with that, the loss of that or letting go of that might come with some grief.

Number five purpose. So I have lots of clients who talk about wanting to feel more purposeful and the ceiling of emptiness around not knowing what their purpose is.

But what I haven't really talked about that much is that we can really be conditioned to believe that with children, raising children, having children is automatically going to give you purpose.

And if you were someone who came with this notion or really embraced this notion as something that's really deeply ingrained, then changing, again, that word change comes with loss, comes with a feeling of loss.

So that change and purpose can really feel like a loss of purpose. It feels like there's an emptiness, there's maybe just this wide-open future that you don't know how to fill, and there's grief around that.

And even while you were pursuing parenthood, you might have been living out that purpose. So, just the pursuit of parenthood can feel like the beginning of that purpose, and especially, or not especially, but maybe if you were someone who did carry a pregnancy and weren't able to fulfill that, you had miscarriage or a field like IVF or, you you were still carrying for an embryo or fetus, even if that embryo didn't become implanted, there is still that purpose within that that you feel in terms of carrying and nurturing that embryo.

So that is purpose, and so you may have lost that purpose when you lost that embryo, or when your IVF journey came to an end and you had to decide what to do with any embryos that were still living, if you lost that pregnancy, or even if you just

who are pursuing parenthood in whatever way through it might even have been through searching for a partner. So that purpose was there and now that shifting changing of that purpose might feel like a loss.

The sixth one, legacy. I've talked about this before but what I haven't talked about is kind of a piece of it.

So I've talked about not leaving your name, like wanting to leave your name, wanting to have somebody to remember you, wanting to have someone to carry on a family business.

All of those are, I see them as sort of ego-driven, this need to be remembered because when you're not here it actually, it doesn't matter when you leave this bird.

But when you are on earth, it's your ego that wants that. However, there's also a lot more that comes.

There's a lot more legacy that comes with having children. You assume, and they may or may not do this, but we assume that they will carry on our family traditions, our family stories, the stories of our ancestors even.

And that doesn't, that's not carried on if you don't have children. It may not be carried on even if you do, because those children may choose not to carry on those things.

They may choose not to ask you questions about your ancestors or your lineage. So there's never a guarantee, but if it's a definite no that that's not going to happen, then you may grieve the end of your lineage, the end of those stories.

those traditions, the things that you had started yourself. So that's what I mean by legacy here. The end of those things you might grieve.

The last one was sort of a... This is sort of something that I haven't talked a lot about actually.

And that is potential. You may loss or mourn the loss of the potential that you saw in yourself as a mother.

The growth that you might have experienced, the person that you might have become through that experience. And you might see that as ending.

So there might be grief there in just this loss of potential or the end of what you believe is your potential.

And I want to say that that potential can actually be realized in many other ways. Children can sometimes be our biggest teachers, but those teachers if you are not parent, those teachers are going to show up in other ways.

And you will grow and realize your potential if you want to in there's an infinite number of ways. In fact, I even wonder whether we as childless women have even more of an opportunity to realize our potential and not because we get more time in the workplace or we have more potential within our careers.

think that's something that is a big misconception. What I mean is that finding ourselves in this position can really be a catalyst for personal growth if you see it that way, because if you truly want a

happy and fulfilled and purposeful future, you have to heal. And parents can be so distracted from that, especially when their kids are young, not to say that there are not parents who go through personal growth, spiritual growth, of course they do.

But sometimes I wonder whether there's an opportunity for us, we're handed this huge thing that we have to heal through.

And so we can look at it as a catalyst for personal growth, for realizing our potential. So I want to leave you with that, I'm going to do a quick recap.

So the seven, the seven different things that we might grieve. As women without kids are changing relationships, friends, friends,

maybe family as well, our relationships change as others go on to have kids as they go on to find partners, all of that.

two, the relationship with your mother, maybe it's with your father, maybe it's with both, the change relationship that you thought you might have as a result of having kids, you know, having a relationship with your parents as a grandparents of your children.

You might grieve that. Number three, other losses might seem tougher, things like divorce, things like separation from a partner, the fear of the death of a partner, all of the pet, there's all kinds of things that I mentioned in that one.

So that's number three. Number four, the loss of your identity, not just the motherhood identity, but also the identity that you adopted as someone who wanted kids.

And then there's number five, which is your purpose. you might feel a loss around that. Number six, legacy. So the, the loss or the end of your lineage, the stories or traditions.

And then the last one was the loss or a feeling that you might have lost potential, the potential that you saw in yourself as a mother.

So as I said before, that identifying what exactly it is that you might be grieving is a really important step to healing from it.

And this is the first step. So if you are someone who wants to find out the next steps, now that you have a better idea of what you might be grieving, you might be wondering how do I process all of this?

Because as I said earlier, it doesn't just go away. Notice that I call this pillar. I called it growing through grief, not growing.

around grief. I have heard others in the grief space talk about needing to grow around your grief and I don't believe that.

I believe that you can actually complete your grief that you can come to a place of peace and if you want the next steps to doing that I would invite you to join my next free focus group where I will share my entire framework with you and you can do that once again at Sherry Johnson dot CA slash focus group so head over there and find out when the next one is and thanks for pressing play today if you had an aha moment or you found some value here today please help others to do the same by pressing the follow button or subscribe or the rate and review button and and yeah please do that so that others can also find out what

exactly as that they're grieving on this journey as women without kids. Thanks for listening. Bye for now.