Wow! Thank you for sharing this throwback, Cheryl. It hit me in the heart, (in the best way), as my husband and I are delicately navigating our first holiday season as bereaved parents. Since losing our seven-year-old son in January, we sold our home in Colorado and moved to the PNW on a grief-stricken, get-us-the-fuck-outta-here whim. We're lost together—everything is currently upside down—but we keep coming back to "what is." I'm going to keep your advice to "Undecided" close to my heart as we eventually find our bearings in how to move forward in life, whilst honoring our little Leo. Thank you and happy holidays to you and your fam! <3
Though I still have family technically-- a brother and a mom who are still living-- I've never had the sort of family that made returning home for the holidays joyful, or even vaguely attractive. Our love for each other was too fraught and tended towards anger and violence, which would be inevitably followed by gaslighting. Growing up that way wasn't without its usefulness, however. It taught me to pay attention to systems and dynamics, to always try to attend to why people are the way they are, the complicated reasons they do the things they do. It's also made me grateful for family whenever I get a chance to enjoy it. Both my chosen family and other people's.
I went to my honey's family for Thanksgiving this year. It was the first time I'd met his parents, and the first time they'd had all three of their children, plus everyone's significant others and also some of the grandchildren in the same place at the same time for years and years. It was exactly the kind of extended family holiday that I don't get and have sometimes mourned the absence of deeply. At the same time, though I won't say that any of them take their family for granted, it was clear that they'd never thought deeply about what they have or why they interact the way they do. Everything was just an unreflected-upon given.
In a conversation with the two sons and their parents about the family dynamics and my partner's younger sister's periodic crankiness about the proceedings I offered that maybe she's put off, since she lives near their parents all the time, at having her golden big brothers show up and suck all of the air out of the room. Maybe, like younger siblings everywhere, she's just trying to grasp at some feeling of power, some sense of agency in the face of personalities that feel overwhelming to her. It was like they'd never thought there might be a why to how she is or who she is. They'd never tried to place themselves inside her reality to find some greater understanding or empathy. They love her, but they've also in some ways dismissed her as "just being difficult."
I didn't get the kind of extended family who happily gathers together at the holidays, and I was so glad to be able to borrow one for this last weekend. But I did get a more thoughtful, reflective, and empathetic eye, which I wouldn't trade at this point in order to have a different family than the one I have. Every single path has its tragedies and gifts, whether chosen or received by chance.
Beautiful. Loved this especially: ‘Growing up that way wasn't without its usefulness, however. It taught me to pay attention to systems and dynamics, to always try to attend to why people are the way they are, the complicated reasons they do the things they do. It's also made me grateful for family whenever I get a chance to enjoy it. Both my chosen family and other people's.’ Yes!! 🔥❤️🫰
I love the concept of a "sister life." I find it really comforting, rather than framing it as regrets of roads not traveled, to think about a twin sister making different decisions than I did. Thank you for this.
I turn 67 next week. 8 years ago I married a wonderful man who just happened to have MS. Making the decision to marry him was one of my sister life decisions. His MS seemed fairly mild at the time, but the neurologist’s warning rang in my ears…”It’s going to catch up with you someday, Jon. It always does.” And he was right, the MS has caught up with Jon, and, as his wife, now caregiver, with me as well. Our life now is nothing like I imagined it would be, and I grieve what could have been. And right beside that grief sits a feeling I never could have anticipated. Honor. I feel honored to be of sound mind and sound body to be able to care for him as the MS progresses. I feel honored to be with him during this difficult leg of the journey. I feel grateful that he doesn’t have to travel this way alone. I did not see that coming.
My experience with sister lives is the obvious, that you cannot know what you have gained until the choice is made and you live the life of one or the other. I think there will be more decision points along the way. All the way, actually. I’ll try to remember that either way I go, I can only connect the dots from the other side of the decision.
Thank you, Cheryl. It’s that your stories, your writing voice, calls me in to reflect and apply whatever it is you talk about to my own life. I am grateful.
Goodness, even contemplating completely different future-life decisions than whether or not to have a baby (I already have them), this is so relevant and helpful and beautiful and sad, at once. A perfect post thanksgiving read. These words: “We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours.” Wonderful.
I love this- “Our web gets to be a wide and loose and multi-colored one, woven with beloved friends around the world who are our chosen family.”
And thank you for sharing the throwback letter- it connected so many blank spots I didn’t even know I had. It offers the fullness of a thought process that people may not know how to navigate otherwise. Beautiful, thank you 🙏🏼
My experience exactly. Having a child was the most frightening decision to make and the most viscerally right decision I ever made in my life. The life I have had has been infinitely more satisfying with him than it would have been without him. We dragged him all over the world with us, which, I believe has made him a more empathetic and kind human.
This is always a relevant reminder and an excellent way to make decisions. It is especially great when finding oneself in a different place than expected or planned, it’s less exhausting than trying to think there is only one way and instead to think would I feel I was missing out. Thinking of it as I navigate life with a college freshman living on the other coast who is wondering if moving closer to home is a good idea or enduring and growing or maybe there will be chances to do both? Thank you.
I have read your essay response on the ghost ships again and again over the years. I get something new each time I read it for different stages in my life. I thought deeply about it as I got married, as we bought a house instead of traveling to Italy, as we considered having a child, and decided against doing it again (it broke me in so many ways that I didn’t want to ruin my one daughter’s early childhood with her mother falling apart). Thank you for reviving it, it’s such a beautiful piece.
I’ve read your “Ghost Ship” piece before, and somehow it appears now in my feed when I find myself at a similar crossroads as Undecided.
Except I decided years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet.
I decided to start a family with my first husband (my high-school sweetheart) in 2010, once we’d both turned 30 and felt more or less like adults. We tried once (literally one time). I waltzed around for two weeks absolutely certain I was pregnant. I journaled to my baby every day, ate all the right things and avoided all the wrong things. I sat on the floor in my parents’ living room, secretly overjoyed to think that in a year they’d have a grandbaby wriggling around on that floor.
That night, at their house, I got my period.
Life got busy and my husband and I decided to wait another year, but in the meantime our marriage strained and broke and I found myself divorced at 33.
I remember watching the young families at the 4th of July parade that summer - handsome dads with toddlers on their shoulders, glowing moms wrapped in baby slings - with a profound ache in my heart that I’d lost my chance to be a mom, and that I’d never find love again.
That fall I read Wild, as I was sifting through the rubble of my divorce and embarking on my own wilderness soul-searching that would lead me to hike 750 miles of the Appalachian Trail and peak-bag the hundred highest mountains in New England, twice. Your words were my medicine and your truth was my beacon to carry on in search of my own Bridge of the Gods, the place I could return to one day and have my happy ending.
When I was 37, a miracle happened and I reconnected with a childhood crush who would become my second husband. In our first month of dating I told him I wanted a family and couldn’t wait much longer. But he was ambivalent, so we waited three more years.
By the time he was ready, it was too late.
We’ve endured three traumatic miscarriages in the past two years, and the last one caused uterine scarring that may make it impossible to ever get pregnant again.
Three months shy of my 43rd birthday, we’ve finally been cleared for one last try. The doctor says my egg quality isn’t good enough for IVF, so our only option is IUI (a glorified turkey-baster), with single-digit odds of success.
The thing is that in the six months of grief and uncertainty since our last miscarriage, my brain started doing the work of letting go. After years spent planning my annual calendar around a possible pregnancy, I finally started making long-term plans for ME again. For months I’ve been scheming an epic winter road trip from New England to Mexico’s Baja that was supposed to start this week. The car is packed and the calendar is clear. At least it was until my missing period made an appearance, prompting a new round of blood work and ultrasounds and procedures scheduled for the coming month.
Should I stay or should I go?
This question haunts me now. I was finally adjusting to the idea of the life I might have without kids - the one of travel and adventure and writing and inspiration. I was finally moving through the pain of loss.
To stay and try again is to crack open the door to that other magical life of snuggles and shoulder-rides and 4th-of-July parades. But it also opens the window for the cold winds of uncertainty and heartache and loss to come blowing in again.
I just listened to your Dear Sugars podcast episode on Moms Who Hate Motherhood, and I secretly worry that after all this anguish on the road to parenthood, I might find myself regretting it. It struck a chord that both of the women who wrote in had endured years of fertility struggles to start their family, only to find that motherhood made them miserable. These fears shadow the glimmer of hope that the fertility process brings.
I have a choice now, but I don’t. The only choice in my control would be to choose the adventure and give up on having a biological child, but what kind of choice is that if I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering “what if” and feeling that pang of grief every time I see a baby?
And yet, choosing parenthood isn’t as simple as it was for Undecided. I don’t get to just make the choice and then it happens. I don’t get to have sex and get a positive pregnancy test and start joyfully decorating the nursery. So far, every time I’ve chosen parenthood, it hasn’t chosen me. It’s like getting jilted at the altar of motherhood.
So what happens, Dear Sugar, when a choice is not a choice?
Perhaps the answer lies in the photo you shared: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I can see my fertility journey through to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that may be. It won’t be long now either way. I can choose to face it, and I may or may not get the desired outcome, but I will at least forestall the regret of giving up too soon.
Then, as you artfully shared, we can “hold the beauty of what is while also bearing the weight of our sorrow limbs that ache for what might have been.”
Thank you for your words to guide me through the storm.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this throwback, Cheryl. It hit me in the heart, (in the best way), as my husband and I are delicately navigating our first holiday season as bereaved parents. Since losing our seven-year-old son in January, we sold our home in Colorado and moved to the PNW on a grief-stricken, get-us-the-fuck-outta-here whim. We're lost together—everything is currently upside down—but we keep coming back to "what is." I'm going to keep your advice to "Undecided" close to my heart as we eventually find our bearings in how to move forward in life, whilst honoring our little Leo. Thank you and happy holidays to you and your fam! <3
I'm so sorry for your loss, Lewann. I'm sending you my love as you move forward while honoring your sweet Leo.
Thank you! 🙏🥰
Wow. ❤️❤️❤️🔥
Though I still have family technically-- a brother and a mom who are still living-- I've never had the sort of family that made returning home for the holidays joyful, or even vaguely attractive. Our love for each other was too fraught and tended towards anger and violence, which would be inevitably followed by gaslighting. Growing up that way wasn't without its usefulness, however. It taught me to pay attention to systems and dynamics, to always try to attend to why people are the way they are, the complicated reasons they do the things they do. It's also made me grateful for family whenever I get a chance to enjoy it. Both my chosen family and other people's.
I went to my honey's family for Thanksgiving this year. It was the first time I'd met his parents, and the first time they'd had all three of their children, plus everyone's significant others and also some of the grandchildren in the same place at the same time for years and years. It was exactly the kind of extended family holiday that I don't get and have sometimes mourned the absence of deeply. At the same time, though I won't say that any of them take their family for granted, it was clear that they'd never thought deeply about what they have or why they interact the way they do. Everything was just an unreflected-upon given.
In a conversation with the two sons and their parents about the family dynamics and my partner's younger sister's periodic crankiness about the proceedings I offered that maybe she's put off, since she lives near their parents all the time, at having her golden big brothers show up and suck all of the air out of the room. Maybe, like younger siblings everywhere, she's just trying to grasp at some feeling of power, some sense of agency in the face of personalities that feel overwhelming to her. It was like they'd never thought there might be a why to how she is or who she is. They'd never tried to place themselves inside her reality to find some greater understanding or empathy. They love her, but they've also in some ways dismissed her as "just being difficult."
I didn't get the kind of extended family who happily gathers together at the holidays, and I was so glad to be able to borrow one for this last weekend. But I did get a more thoughtful, reflective, and empathetic eye, which I wouldn't trade at this point in order to have a different family than the one I have. Every single path has its tragedies and gifts, whether chosen or received by chance.
Beautiful. Loved this especially: ‘Growing up that way wasn't without its usefulness, however. It taught me to pay attention to systems and dynamics, to always try to attend to why people are the way they are, the complicated reasons they do the things they do. It's also made me grateful for family whenever I get a chance to enjoy it. Both my chosen family and other people's.’ Yes!! 🔥❤️🫰
I love the concept of a "sister life." I find it really comforting, rather than framing it as regrets of roads not traveled, to think about a twin sister making different decisions than I did. Thank you for this.
🔥🔥
I turn 67 next week. 8 years ago I married a wonderful man who just happened to have MS. Making the decision to marry him was one of my sister life decisions. His MS seemed fairly mild at the time, but the neurologist’s warning rang in my ears…”It’s going to catch up with you someday, Jon. It always does.” And he was right, the MS has caught up with Jon, and, as his wife, now caregiver, with me as well. Our life now is nothing like I imagined it would be, and I grieve what could have been. And right beside that grief sits a feeling I never could have anticipated. Honor. I feel honored to be of sound mind and sound body to be able to care for him as the MS progresses. I feel honored to be with him during this difficult leg of the journey. I feel grateful that he doesn’t have to travel this way alone. I did not see that coming.
My experience with sister lives is the obvious, that you cannot know what you have gained until the choice is made and you live the life of one or the other. I think there will be more decision points along the way. All the way, actually. I’ll try to remember that either way I go, I can only connect the dots from the other side of the decision.
What beautiful words. Thank you for sharing them here, Stacey.
Thank you, Cheryl. It’s that your stories, your writing voice, calls me in to reflect and apply whatever it is you talk about to my own life. I am grateful.
Mmm. Beautiful. ❤️❤️
This is the most beautiful, sensible response to the child-question that I've heard. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart!
Goodness, even contemplating completely different future-life decisions than whether or not to have a baby (I already have them), this is so relevant and helpful and beautiful and sad, at once. A perfect post thanksgiving read. These words: “We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours.” Wonderful.
❤️❤️🔥
I love this- “Our web gets to be a wide and loose and multi-colored one, woven with beloved friends around the world who are our chosen family.”
And thank you for sharing the throwback letter- it connected so many blank spots I didn’t even know I had. It offers the fullness of a thought process that people may not know how to navigate otherwise. Beautiful, thank you 🙏🏼
🔥❤️
"It was the ghost ship that didn't carry us." : )
My experience exactly. Having a child was the most frightening decision to make and the most viscerally right decision I ever made in my life. The life I have had has been infinitely more satisfying with him than it would have been without him. We dragged him all over the world with us, which, I believe has made him a more empathetic and kind human.
🫰🫰
I love the process of the huge sheet of white paper. It's very cerebral, but at the end, you know what you FEEL. What a mystery!!!
This is always a relevant reminder and an excellent way to make decisions. It is especially great when finding oneself in a different place than expected or planned, it’s less exhausting than trying to think there is only one way and instead to think would I feel I was missing out. Thinking of it as I navigate life with a college freshman living on the other coast who is wondering if moving closer to home is a good idea or enduring and growing or maybe there will be chances to do both? Thank you.
I have read your essay response on the ghost ships again and again over the years. I get something new each time I read it for different stages in my life. I thought deeply about it as I got married, as we bought a house instead of traveling to Italy, as we considered having a child, and decided against doing it again (it broke me in so many ways that I didn’t want to ruin my one daughter’s early childhood with her mother falling apart). Thank you for reviving it, it’s such a beautiful piece.
One of my all time favorite essays and a clarion call to people at every stage of their sister lives. 💕💕Wishing you the warmest holidays, Cheryl.
This hits home in so many ways ❤️❤️
Listen to “ The Mother” song by Brandi Carlile.
Dear Sugar,
I’ve read your “Ghost Ship” piece before, and somehow it appears now in my feed when I find myself at a similar crossroads as Undecided.
Except I decided years ago, and it hasn’t happened yet.
I decided to start a family with my first husband (my high-school sweetheart) in 2010, once we’d both turned 30 and felt more or less like adults. We tried once (literally one time). I waltzed around for two weeks absolutely certain I was pregnant. I journaled to my baby every day, ate all the right things and avoided all the wrong things. I sat on the floor in my parents’ living room, secretly overjoyed to think that in a year they’d have a grandbaby wriggling around on that floor.
That night, at their house, I got my period.
Life got busy and my husband and I decided to wait another year, but in the meantime our marriage strained and broke and I found myself divorced at 33.
I remember watching the young families at the 4th of July parade that summer - handsome dads with toddlers on their shoulders, glowing moms wrapped in baby slings - with a profound ache in my heart that I’d lost my chance to be a mom, and that I’d never find love again.
That fall I read Wild, as I was sifting through the rubble of my divorce and embarking on my own wilderness soul-searching that would lead me to hike 750 miles of the Appalachian Trail and peak-bag the hundred highest mountains in New England, twice. Your words were my medicine and your truth was my beacon to carry on in search of my own Bridge of the Gods, the place I could return to one day and have my happy ending.
When I was 37, a miracle happened and I reconnected with a childhood crush who would become my second husband. In our first month of dating I told him I wanted a family and couldn’t wait much longer. But he was ambivalent, so we waited three more years.
By the time he was ready, it was too late.
We’ve endured three traumatic miscarriages in the past two years, and the last one caused uterine scarring that may make it impossible to ever get pregnant again.
Three months shy of my 43rd birthday, we’ve finally been cleared for one last try. The doctor says my egg quality isn’t good enough for IVF, so our only option is IUI (a glorified turkey-baster), with single-digit odds of success.
The thing is that in the six months of grief and uncertainty since our last miscarriage, my brain started doing the work of letting go. After years spent planning my annual calendar around a possible pregnancy, I finally started making long-term plans for ME again. For months I’ve been scheming an epic winter road trip from New England to Mexico’s Baja that was supposed to start this week. The car is packed and the calendar is clear. At least it was until my missing period made an appearance, prompting a new round of blood work and ultrasounds and procedures scheduled for the coming month.
Should I stay or should I go?
This question haunts me now. I was finally adjusting to the idea of the life I might have without kids - the one of travel and adventure and writing and inspiration. I was finally moving through the pain of loss.
To stay and try again is to crack open the door to that other magical life of snuggles and shoulder-rides and 4th-of-July parades. But it also opens the window for the cold winds of uncertainty and heartache and loss to come blowing in again.
I just listened to your Dear Sugars podcast episode on Moms Who Hate Motherhood, and I secretly worry that after all this anguish on the road to parenthood, I might find myself regretting it. It struck a chord that both of the women who wrote in had endured years of fertility struggles to start their family, only to find that motherhood made them miserable. These fears shadow the glimmer of hope that the fertility process brings.
I have a choice now, but I don’t. The only choice in my control would be to choose the adventure and give up on having a biological child, but what kind of choice is that if I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering “what if” and feeling that pang of grief every time I see a baby?
And yet, choosing parenthood isn’t as simple as it was for Undecided. I don’t get to just make the choice and then it happens. I don’t get to have sex and get a positive pregnancy test and start joyfully decorating the nursery. So far, every time I’ve chosen parenthood, it hasn’t chosen me. It’s like getting jilted at the altar of motherhood.
So what happens, Dear Sugar, when a choice is not a choice?
Perhaps the answer lies in the photo you shared: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
I can see my fertility journey through to its inevitable conclusion, whatever that may be. It won’t be long now either way. I can choose to face it, and I may or may not get the desired outcome, but I will at least forestall the regret of giving up too soon.
Then, as you artfully shared, we can “hold the beauty of what is while also bearing the weight of our sorrow limbs that ache for what might have been.”
Thank you for your words to guide me through the storm.
xoxo Jilted