When You Can't Be a Mother
For many people, raising a child is the ultimate goal. However, some women want to be mothers but are unable to be. This might be due to biological or environmental reasons. In these instances, an emotional pain similar to mourning occurs.
When this happens, your ability to choose and move toward the life you desire and the dreams you want to fulfill disappears. What should you do? Keep trying? Give up? How can you process it all?
The difficulty of motherhood in modern times
It’s indisputable that being a mother is a role that’s changed in recent times, as has our conception of family and education. Added to this is a way of life that, at times, is extremely difficult to reconcile with work and family.
It’s especially problematic for those who’d like to spend the first few years of their child’s life focused on their upbringing. Therefore, doubts often arise when taking the step to become a mother, since there are no guarantees of being able to enjoy a child’s first years.
There are also single-parent families, who have to go through the whole process without the help of another responsible adult.
Furthermore, those people who are open to adopting often find the process complicated. Indeed, adoption processes are long, expensive, and sometimes require prospective parents to make long trips. For this reason, many people opt for in vitro treatments instead of giving a home to a child who doesn’t have one.
How to face these difficulties
If motherhood has always been a dream for you, the impossibility of realizing it can lead to an emotional wound that lasts a lifetime. It’s important that you know how to accept reality, even if it’s painful, and to focus efforts on reorienting your life, instead of continuing to fight and suffer over the impossible.
Of course, this is no easy path. You need to make a series of changes involving introspection, self-care, and, if necessary, the help of a professional psychologist. Here are some useful tips.
1. Focus on your day to day
You must stay active and not neglect your daily activities. This will help you not to dwell on the idea that becoming a mother is complicated or impossible for you. Also, by continuing with your daily tasks, you won’t lose your most common reinforcers.
2. Share your burden of not being able to be a mother
When you have people around you who love and support you, remember that they’re there to make your life less painful. Enjoy their presence and let yourself be taken care of. Your pain is yours alone, but it never hurts to have someone to help you cope.
3. Don’t stop being intimate with your partner
If both you and your partner wanted children, you may have spent part (or all) of your relationship trying to get pregnant. Make sure that the reality of not being able to do so doesn’t make you neglect the relationship with your partner.
4. Focus on your pain and then leave it behind
As we mentioned earlier, accepting an unwanted reality, such as a life without children, is necessary, but hard. Part of the recovery process consists of focusing on the emotional pain, analyzing it, and facing it in order to leave it behind.
Feelings of guilt and thoughts of inferiority or anxiety are part of this emotional framework. Nevertheless, they shouldn’t become entrenched.
5. Plan your future
The task of accepting certain limitations of the present involves beginning to reorient the future. If you reserved a really important space for your child, it’s perfectly normal to feel that everything is falling apart.
A good exercise to overcome it is to visualize a timeline in which you advance in other goals in your life.
The importance of professional help
The inability to have children can be a burden that requires professional intervention. This is not so much because of the situation itself, but everything that it causes, such as anxiety disorders or depression.
Therefore, if you think the situation of not being able to be a mother is weighing heavily on you, don’t hesitate to book a psychological consultation. Accepting reality doesn’t mean resignation. It gives you the courage to deal with what hurts you. Furthermore, you don’t have to do it alone.
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
- Abajo-Llama, S., Bermant, C., Cuadrada-Majó, C., Galaman, C., & Soto-Bermant, L. (2016). Ser madre hoy: abordaje multidisciplinar de la maternidad desde una perspectiva de género. MUSAS. Revista de Investigación en Mujer, Salud y Sociedad, 1(2), 20-34.
- Jiménez Lagares, I. (2003). Ser madre sin pareja: circunstancias y vivencias de la maternidad en solitario. Portularia: Revista de Trabajo Social, 3, 161-178.
- DePaulo, B (2021). The Psychology of Feeling Sad About Not Having Children. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/living-single/202106/the-psychology-feeling-sad-about-not-having-children
- Vasquez, A (2020). 9 Ways to Handle Never Being a Parent, But Not By Choice. Cake. https://www.joincake.com/blog/coping-with-never-being-a-parent/