Help! I Never Got to Achieve My Ultimate Life Goal. I’m Doomed to Feel Bad About It Forever.

This is Prudie Phones a Friend, a feature where Jenée Desmond-Harris calls a few experts for their advice to a letter writer. Submit questions to Prudence here.

From a very young age, I couldn’t wait to start having babies. Being a mother was my ultimate goal in life. But unfortunately, I was never able to conceive. I’m 56 now and still feel extreme envy when anyone in my orbit becomes pregnant. I’m always happy for them, but I’m worried I’ll feel bad forever. Will my envy and pain ever end? How can I cope?

—Am I Doomed to Hurt Forever?

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Dear Am I Doomed,

I chose this letter to respond to about a month ago, planning to use insight from a therapist specializing in infertility in my response. But I reached out to about 10 and heard back from only one, who let me know that she was “too busy to volunteer,” which I respect (and which made me laugh a little because I don’t normally think of speaking to a journalist as volunteering, but that’s actually an accurate description. It’s a wonder so many people talk to the media for free!)

Anyway, in the end, it worked out. I spoke to Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock, executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, who is not a therapist, but a woman who can relate to your experience because she’s lived it. In our conversation, she not only validated your feelings but also shared the choices she made that have given her some relief from the grief of infertility and helped her live a full life. She’s living proof that no, you do not have to feel bad forever.

I thought her responses were so wise that I chose to include them in full instead of pulling out a few quotes. Below is a transcript of our exchange, edited and condensed for clarity. I really hope it’s helpful to you.

Jenée Desmond-Harris: Tell me a little bit about how your experience is like the letter writer’s.

Dr. Angie-Marie Hancock: It was always important to me that I wait to have children with the right person. I didn’t find who I thought that was until I was 37, and we had two miscarriages that contributed to our divorce because I was really seeking children more than a marriage with him, which turned him off from having children more generally.

By the time I got married again, no fertility doctor would harvest my eggs (I was 45), so I had to give up on the idea of ever being pregnant or a biological mother during that phase of my life. These (like doctors refusing to work with you on certain parts of the process due to your age) are the things you don’t anticipate earlier in your life.

JDH: This letter writer mentioned experiencing envy when other people are pregnant. Is that something you can relate to?

AH: I experienced envy many times. My former sister-in-law had seven children, and when she got pregnant with number seven, I clearly remember feeling like, “Damn, she’s got seven and I can’t pay someone to even have one of my own!”

I ended up spending over $50,000 to try to get pregnant with husband number two through any means necessary (egg donor, etc.), but our marriage wasn’t stable enough for a child either.

JDH: Is there anything that’s helped you to manage the difficult feelings about this whole experience?

AH: What helped me happened many years later: I had to have a conversation with myself about whether I wanted to be pregnant or whether I wanted to be a mother.

It took several years to really integrate something that I was told after the first miscarriage. My first mother-in-law told me the following sentence that I’ll never forget: “Once you’ve spent a spring and a summer with a baby, that baby is yours no matter who had them.”

It allowed me to realize I didn’t care about being pregnant; I wanted to be a mother. And that expanded my options beyond the physical need to be pregnant myself.

JDH: How have you managed any difficult feelings about your experience?

AH: I have done all the things—therapy, prayer, talking to my sister, who dealt with the same kind of envy in her journey. I’ve also realized how much of my desire for children wasn’t just about me wanting kids; it was about wanting to bond with others in my family. I wanted to raise a kid who knew my late father. I wanted to share the experience with my sisters or co-workers I otherwise had nothing in common with.

I realized that I didn’t need to be pregnant to bond over parenthood, and as I’ve gotten further away from my own parenting experience (I was a foster mom for five years, and now I’m the forever mom who is on standby as he lives with his biological dad), I realize I don’t need the commonality of that experience to bond with people. There are many who have that experience, and I’m fortunate to have nieces I love more than anything.

JDH: In your initial message to me, offering to share your experience with this letter writer, you mentioned that “some grief that must be lived with.” Could you say more about that?

AH: The choices I made when I was in my 20s and 30s to wait until I was in love with someone to have a child were the right choices, but it cost me the opportunity to have children “the easy/cost-effective” way.

I don’t regret those choices, but I will sometimes look at parents in their 30s or 40s with kids and think about having missed that relationship—of taking trips with them, or going to their plays and games, and attending their events. The grief of missing out on that experience, now that I’ve decided not to become a full-time, permanent mother, is something I live with. The writer won’t have the experience of being in her 20s or 30s ever again, so her parenting experience will be different no matter what choices she makes, and living with the consequences of those choices, even if they were the right ones, can cause some feelings of grief.

JDH: Is there another way of looking at the situation that perhaps the letter writer has not considered?

AH: I think the most important thing is to really think about the distinction between being pregnant and being a mother. Which is the most important to them? There are so many wonderful ways to be a mother/parent these days.

Or is this [the desire for children] a way for the writer to fit into societal or family norms? Childfree people are still a relative anomaly, even though the numbers grow annually. So if this is really about envy of a more “normal” or “traditional” life, then they really can achieve some semblance of that without pursuing other means of parenting.

I became a foster mom for five years, and I have another friend who did foster to adopt. Yes, I was never pregnant, and both of our kids were older, but my mother-in-law’s words were true: We were their mothers in all senses of the word. Was it easy? Nope. Did my family treat my kid the same as the biological babies? Nope. But they tried, and so did I, to make him as much a part of the family as they could, and I would have continued to fight for that because he deserved it just as much as my nieces did.

JDH: What would you say to this person if you were speaking to her as a friend and offering her comfort or guidance?

AH: I would be so empathetic with the envy component, but also really call into question what grief must be lived with and what grief does not have to be lived with (i.e., they can make a different choice).

My partner and I are friends with another couple, and we mostly do things as couples together. We don’t usually get together one on one in any of the various combinations of the four of us. Recently, “Chris,” the male half of that couple, told us he’s always wanted an open relationship and that he’s gotten “Jane’s” permission. He’s been actively pursuing sex outside their relationship and was enthusiastic about these new encounters. We were polite and supportive, but it didn’t seem as if there were any real ground rules or definitions or as if things had been thought through…