Dear Grief Guide, I'm Grieving A Dream I Never Wanted

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

I should start by saying that this might be a sensitive topic for various reasons because it involves children and parenting,

But it's part of my grief experience after my mom's death,

And I really want to know what you think.

I never felt the desire to have kids,

Not even a little.

It's just not for me.

I believe it's the way I'm wired.

It took me many years to go public with this because it's still not very socially acceptable in my country.

Despite this,

I've started telling people that I want to remain child-free for the rest of my life.

But societal pressures aside,

One thing that has really been bugging me lately,

Even though I told my mom a few months before she died that I didn't want to ever have kids,

And she respected that and I am so grateful I told her,

I sometimes feel this enormous grief.

I can only describe it as the grief of not passing on the bits of my mom that live on in me and thereby allowing the last physical pieces of her existence to disappear.

I've read the book Motherless Daughters,

In which the author and the women she interviews describe how they could almost see their mother's presence in their own children,

And how their grief came full circle after they became parents themselves.

Reading this made me feel envious and sad,

Because I will not have that experience for myself.

I know I'm privileged to make the decision to not have kids,

Where others are child-free due to infertility,

Timing,

Or other struggles.

But I can't be the only one grieving not seeing my mom in my children,

Even if I don't want them.

I feel like I'm grieving a dream I never even wanted.

Could you offer some insights on this weird grief emotion?

Thanks.

Not undecided,

But still sad.

Hello there not undecided.

I see you.

This is a weird grief.

I think you chose the correct word for that in that this is one of the stranger letters or questions that I have ever received about grief and loss.

To this day,

I have not received anything else like this.

That does not mean it's bad or wrong or abnormal,

Because I don't know that there's anything in grief that's truly abnormal.

But this is an aspect or a component of grief that I suppose I've never thought of before.

So thank you for bringing this specific kind of grief here to Dear Grief Guide and for trusting me with this in the inbox.

I want to start answering your question with a quote that has guided a lot of my grief experience.

I believe it's from Donald Rumsfeld.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong,

Though.

But it goes something like this.

There are known knowns.

These are things that we know.

There are known unknowns.

That is to say there are things that we don't know,

But we do know that we don't know them.

But there are also unknown unknowns.

And these are things that we don't know that we don't know.

And this is a bit of like,

For lack of better phrasing,

A mindfuck to wrap your head around.

But basically,

With any situation,

There are things that you know,

These are facts,

These are information.

And then you also know that there's facts and information that you don't have yet that are going to appear at some point.

These are the known unknowns.

But then there's also a third category,

There are unknown unknowns,

There are things,

There's information,

There's knowledge,

There's experiences that you cannot anticipate,

Because you don't know that you should be anticipating them.

And I think this experience of specific grief that you're having is one of these that falls into the third category of unknown unknowns.

I am grieving a dream I never even wanted,

I didn't know that I was ever going to have to anticipate and then grieve and release this sort of emotion.

I didn't,

I didn't see that one coming.

And I'm laughing,

But but there's can be these experience and grief,

Where you find yourself mourning something that you never even knew you were ever going to be attached to.

I'll give you an example.

My mother was not really,

To my memory,

A big holiday celebrator other than Christmas,

That was her favorite,

But like Easter,

Mother's Day,

A lot of holidays where people take their mothers out on holidays,

Not really super celebrated in my family,

We would like go to church,

And then we'd go to lunch and go home.

But we did that every weekend.

So it wasn't really special.

And then when my mom died,

I moved to Chicago,

And I became a server at a restaurant up here.

And Mother's Day,

A Mother's Day buffet was just like this grand,

All out celebration and seeing women in their 20s,

With moms in their 50s,

60s,

People around my mother's age,

I was struck just like bowled over with the weight of grief that I felt and I sat back and I'm like,

Wait a minute,

I've never wanted to take my mom to a fancy Mother's Day lunch.

That's not who we are.

That's not how I was raised.

That's not anything she really ever expressed that she wanted.

And yet here I was feeling this supreme jealousy and anger and deep sadness and kind of this feeling of being othered or left out in a room full of people that all belonged to each other at a time in my life when I never expected that I did not know to anticipate or to plan for that kind of grief.

I knew Mother's Day would be hard,

Just in general as a blanket statement,

Mother's Day is going to be hard for the rest of your life.

That's a known known.

I knew that Mother's Day would be hard in different ways as I grew up and grew older.

Those are known unknowns because I couldn't predict how it would be hard.

I would just know that it would be hard,

But something was coming.

But the unknown unknown is that I felt a deep grief experience about not getting to take my mom to lunch at the place where I worked,

Where all these other beautifully dressed people were having mimosas with their mothers and daughters.

I did not know that I would grieve missing out on an experience that I'd never even had or dreamt of having.

And this is exactly what I'm hearing from you just through a different lens through this very powerful and profound lens of ancestry and DNA and the passage of self and loved ones on to another person.

I think you have so much clarity here in that,

You know,

You're like,

Kids aren't for me.

This grief isn't going to change my mind.

So it's not that you're being influenced by this grief,

Which I commend you on.

Because having a child just so you can see your parents eyes or your parents nose or your parents mannerisms in them is not a good enough reason to have children in my humble opinion.

There are many other reasons to have children.

And you can also hold so much space for yourself and make so much room for yourself and your grief for having this experience of mourning that that will never be your reality.

It's not going to be your reality because you never desired it.

And it's not going to be your reality because you don't want it now.

This grief has not changed your mind.

And you know,

Logically,

And you mentioned as well,

That you exist in a world where this gets to happen for other people.

Other people get to take their moms to lunch,

Other people get to have children that remind them of their mothers.

And they have this kind of three generations connection and maybe even more to women in their family based on their choice,

Their decision to make children to have children.

And that is something you will grieve being a bystander of for the rest of your life.

So I think in terms of any advice I can offer you not undecided,

But still sad,

Is to allow that grief to surface and allow it to be irrational and allow it to not make sense and allow it to be something you didn't plan for and allow it to not be rooted in something that feels logical or oriented for you.

I think that's really valid.

I think this is one of those unknown unknowns and grief,

We're like,

Well,

Didn't plan to grieve for that.

But I guess now I am.

And as much as you can invite humor into that or levity or lightness of well,

That wasn't on my bingo card,

But here we are.

I think that will be helpful to you moving forward.

And on a practical level,

I wonder if something like and I teach this in my online course Life After Loss Academy,

But if crafting an escape plan for moments when you're in these rooms with these other people and their children,

And they're talking about how precious it is and how wonderful it is for their kids to remind them of their parents,

Or to have all three generations in a room together,

These things that you didn't get to experience and you mourn not experiencing,

Even though you never wanted them.

I would encourage you to craft some sort of escape plan for when those emotions feel like too much.

How do you get out of there?

How do you make a graceful exit?

How do you say,

I need to protect myself in this moment,

So I'm going to leave and then I'll follow up with you later,

Or we'll hang out next week or whatever else is going to happen.

Because it is okay that your emotions around this are strong,

Again,

Even if it's something you never wanted and don't want now,

Even if it's something your mom was totally okay with.

It's not like you're disappointing her or letting her down in some way.

This is a really valid grief experience.

You are allowed to continue to have large emotions about it.

Even if there are all these ways you can logic or rationalize yourself out of it.

I hope this is helpful.

I know in the book Motherless Daughters,

Hope Edelman,

Who I interviewed for another podcast that I did called Coming Back,

She's written two,

Several,

More than two wonderful books called,

Her famous ones are Motherless Daughters and another one I love is called The Aftergrief.

But you might actually pick up her second book,

The Aftergrief.

It's about what she refers to as the long arc of loss.

And so it goes beyond the first year or two of life after loss and goes into loss for a lifetime,

Coping with grief for a lifetime,

Which is very much also what we talk about in Life After Loss Academy.

But the sense that your grief comes with you and there will be new things to grieve,

Whether you anticipate them like birthdays and anniversaries and milestones,

Whether you know they're coming,

But you didn't know necessarily what form they would take,

Such as what's going to happen on a wedding day or when you graduate or buy a house or get this new job.

And then also grieving and coping with the things that you didn't anticipate coming,

That are coming anyway.

She has a really lovely structure in her book The Aftergrief for that.

So if you have access to a bookstore or a library near you,

That's one of my all time favorite books for the years beyond the first few of grief for the five years and the decades after devastating loss.

She has a lot more stories,

A lot more research,

And it's really just a lovely book to pick up.

So yes,

Those two things for you.

Those three things for you.

Allow this unknown unknown to be okay with you as much as possible.

Allow this kind of grief,

Even though it's grief over something you never wanted to bring its bags full of emotions to your feet,

Be willing to unpack them with grief and honor them and validate them and say this is real.

Even though it doesn't feel rational,

Or even though it doesn't feel warranted,

Or even though it doesn't feel like it should be that big of a deal.

If it's a big deal for you grief,

We can allow it to be a big deal for both of us.

Craft an escape plan for these moments when it does get overwhelming,

Because I sense if you're around a lot of people with children that this will come up as you grow with them as you grow up with them and their children.

And also pick up a copy of The Aftergrief,

Hope Edelman's book.

I hope it will be a nourishing and grounding and validating companion for you on this journey.

There is so much wisdom in her book Motherless Daughters,

There is even more in The Aftergrief.

I am wishing you so much love and so much luck in knowing that there will be more unknown unknowns.

And I'm hoping you can use this call as sort of a grounding or a foundation for reckoning with all of those unexpected grief waves as they arise in the future.