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So the Motherhood thing is not happening. Now what?
Teresa Karpinska for Nude Notes: “Motherhood isn’t happening – on making peace, and making other plans”
Words by Teresa Karpinska
Over the years, I've made a lot of things happen for myself, and I didn't see why this would be any different. I remember Charlotte (SATC season 3, episode 7) talking about how she would approach her husband-hunting with the same methodical, goal-oriented mindset she used at work. I think I thought I could do the same with motherhood
This piece is a follow-up to something I wrote a while back, when it became clear that Sweden didn't have the answers I came looking for. Stockholm virtually ran out of gynaecologists, and as I went door to door, clinic to clinic, I was repeatedly told what the endometriosis experts had been telling me for years. With a uterus that is 75 per cent endometrial goop, half an ovary, and my savings badly hurt from the failed egg freezing attempts whilst living abroad, there is no more "the odds aren't in your favour, but it could still happen." Alas, fast forward a few months, and I am discovering new layers to making peace with the fact that biological children of my own are off the proverbial table.
The grey zone between childfree and childless
I thought a sequel might be worth sharing, because somewhere between the women who have longed for motherhood since girlhood and the ones who announce their childfree lives like a manifesto, I am in a grey zone, and it is surprisingly crowded here. The following read is unfiltered, raw, and at times probably ugly, and you might not like me by the end of it. That's okay, though; I don't particularly like myself either when I am navigating the darker parts of this journey. I am learning that this niche type of grief – the longing for something you didn't know you wanted until it was too late – is rather complex. I can only describe it as a cocktail of mourning, guilt, embarrassment, and the most confusing of them all, the missing of the child that I will never get to meet.
The particular grief of not becoming a mother
Doing what any self-respecting woman in an emotionally fragile state would do at two in the morning – I recently went looking for my people online. Like-destined women were not hard to find. I say "like-destined" rather than "like-minded" because my mind is not to blame here. My ovaries, however, should have come with a Klarna return policy. Reddit threads, TikTok comment sections, Facebook groups I scrutinised but didn't join because Gen Z has indoctrinated me to see FB as a gathering of "old people" - all of them were quietly full of women existing in the same grey zone. Women of different ages and different circumstances all had one thing in common, namely the specific, exhausting guilt of wondering whether you wanted children badly enough. Whether better, earlier, or less selfish choices would have changed the outcome. Whether the whole thing was, at some fundamental level, our own fault?
The response to my first piece was the kind that made digital vulnerability feel like it was all worth it. Online vulnerability offers a fleeting sense of comfort, but it is a bit of a minefield. You are constantly calibrating whether what you share is "too much", and if you say too little, you might as well have said nothing at all. I was a little shy when writing my first article, so I asked a fellow Vogue writer for feedback on one of my earlier drafts. She said that if she didn't feel like bawling her eyes out when she was done reading it, it was just a waste of digital real estate, but I didn't want my pain to be mistaken for performance. Then there is the inevitable risk of attracting schadenfreude, which we have normalised as the price of "putting yourself out there". As someone wise once said, if you entered a room filled with other people's problems, you would quickly realise that you want to leave with the problems you walked in with. The online love surrounding my first article felt warm and fuzzy, but when the novelty of online connections wore off, and there was no more dopamine to be mined, I actually had to sit with my feelings.
”My ovaries, however, should have come with a Klarna return policy.”
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Rewriting the script for a life well lived, just not the one I may have planned
I am learning that being childless requires a level of long-term thinking I have always been terrible at. Children are not just a relationship or a lifestyle choice but the nominal infrastructure of the life that follows. Sure, you might still thrive in other areas, but they pave the way ahead, with you merely orbiting around them. Without them, you are handed a tabula rasa and told to fill it with meaning. The sadness comes in waves, and the strangest things trigger it. There is no schedule, no pre-tremors and no way to brace for impact.Looking at my mother is a big one. She would have made an exceptional grandmother, and I feel guilty for not making her one. She has never uttered a word about it, for which I am very grateful. I hope we will be able to speak about it one day, but for now I appreciate her tactfulness more than I can say. Then there is the other grief, a quieter, more self-indulgent one: I am mourning the idea of a mini me. I know this might sound really narcissistic, but I genuinely think that my hypothetical daughter would have been a cool little person. I know that she would have been funny. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and the tree, in this case, is hilarious.
For a while, I rebelled against recycling, which in Sweden is essentially a moral failing. But at the depth of all that life coach-prescribed sitting with my pain, I simply could not locate the motivation. My bloodline ends with me, so who exactly was I sorting plastics from organics for?
The Swedes have a word for a state of being when your misery has overstayed its welcome. "Offerkoftan" – the victim cardigan – is something you pull on when you are feeling acutely sorry for yourself and when you are so committed to your own suffering that you've made it cosy. I did not just have the cardigan. I had an entire offergarderob.I stopped buying nice things for myself for a while. The logic, if you could call it that, was this: with no daughter to inherit my Jil Sander collectables, the thought of strangers eventually rifling through my closets felt unbearable.
The question nobody says out loud, who will look after me when I’m old
One of the hardest parts is being asked: 'But aren't you afraid you won't have anyone to look after you when you get old?' It is hard to answer, because, of course, I am. I just hate being reminded of it. So, in a way, I am walking proof that children are no guarantee of golden days. I think the loneliness of having distant children might be more painful than the loneliness of having none at all. I know the latter sounds lonelier. I'm not convinced it is.
The anger that comes with infertility
A few days after one of my many endometriosis surgeries, still moving carefully and probably running on adrenaline and strong painkillers, I got into a heated argument on a tram with a woman who felt I should give up my seat for her and her stroller. I am painfully aware of how that reads. What I think I meant was that since she already had the one thing I cannot have, I wasn't giving her my chair too.
In my search for community, I stumbled upon something I hadn't been looking for. The internet is brimming with anonymous testimonials of women sharing their regret over having children, and it is a heavy read. The woman who reads them aloud on TikTok sometimes has to pause mid-sentence under the weight of what she is reading. I unfollow the account periodically when my empathy reserves are running low. Still, I always come back, because the melancholy of women who made the opposite choice and arrived at their own version of the same darkness is strangely soothing.
I still cry. I cry in public, I cry in private, I cry to friends and to kind strangers who made the mistake of asking the wrong question at the wrong moment. My position is that if you ask a grown woman why she doesn't have children, you have automatically signed up for the consequences. If my tears are uncomfortable to you, tough luck – unfortunately, I will not be internalising your lack of tact. Swedes, to their enormous credit, rarely ask. The social contract here includes an unspoken agreement not to poke at things that don't concern you. When I lived abroad, it was a different story. The question came regularly, cheerfully, as if it were small talk.
I watch my friends who have children, and sometimes a thought creeps in that I am not proud of: perhaps the reason motherhood wasn't on the cards for me is that I am simply too selfish for it. Would I have been able to give it all up – the freedom, the autonomy, the ability to uproot myself at short notice?
Or – and this is the question that unsettles me more – do children automatically make you selfless? I help my 80-year-old neighbour with his laundry every week without being asked. I know, on some level, what that tells me about myself. But it is much easier to hide behind 'I'm probably not mother material anyway' than to sit with the more complicated truth: that I might have been and will never find out.
Why we need to talk more openly about childlessness
Is there a selfishness to writing this? Absolutely. I am under no illusion that these essays are, in part, an elaborate and well-formatted way of processing my own mess out loud, but I do believe, from the bottom of my slightly battered little heart, that naming things matters. That putting the uglier emotions into words and releasing them into the world has a value beyond the personal. There is healing in the quiet relief of reading something and thinking, "Oh, so it's not just me."
If someone reads this in the middle of their own bad night and feels marginally less alone, then my oversharing was all worth it. And if nobody does, well – I have my therapy, my recycling, and my colour-coordinated Jil Sander wardrobe to attend to.
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