Why I Chose to Give Up Hoping for a Family — and Why I’m Happier for It

Sometimes, hope has an expiration date

A few weeks ago, my brother and I helped our mother decorate her Christmas tree. As we made our way through this laborious, but fun holiday task, my mother unwrapped an ornament that she said looked familiar to her. “Didn’t you used to have one like this?”

“That was mine,” I said. “Remember, I asked you if you wanted it last year and you said yes?”

“But this was for your family,” she said. “You were going to have a themed tree for your kids. Why would you give this away?”

I quickly became frustrated, though tried not to show it. Over the past three years, I’ve been cleaning out my house, getting rid of all the stuff I’ve hauled around with me for the family I’d planned on having. There were boxes and boxes of my old baby blankets and books, family heirlooms, and holiday decorations. It was a beautiful “hope chest” of sorts that I’d been collecting since the age of 18.

But by the time I was 45, it was causing me nothing but pain. It felt like a dead weight I’d been carrying around for my entire adult life and frankly, I was ready for a lighter journey.

I reminded my mother of this and she immediately became prickly. “I don’t understand why you have to be so extreme. You’re not dead yet. You might still become a mother. You don’t have to wallow in your sadness and throw everything away. You could choose to be positive and hold on to hope.”

I’ve heard this a million times from the women in my life. But only those who are mothers. After all these years, I don’t have it in me to defend myself anymore, so I simply said, “If you can’t see the well-rounded person in front of you who is seeking to build an exciting future for herself and only see a sad woman who gave up hope, then I don’t have anything more to say about this.”

I think we overdo it on hope. I suppose that’s a controversial thing to say, but there are times in my life when I feel like we have moved so far beyond hope that holding on to it starts to creep into the territory of the absurd.

For me, becoming a mother is one of those areas.

I don’t think there was ever a time in my life when I didn’t assume I’d grow up and have babies. Every single adult woman in my life was a mother. I didn’t even know it was an option to not have kids, or that some women might end up childless by circumstance.

I thought motherhood was inevitable for all women.

Despite the total lack of agency with which I dove into this dream, I was incredibly excited about it. I babied my dolls so hard, I actually cried after I left one on the sofa when my family drove to my grandfather’s cabin for a weekend in the mountains. I was genuinely terrified that she would feel alone and scared all by herself in the house, and I felt like a failure that I’d brought her diaper bag…but not her.

My twenties were a time of deep chaos that I wouldn’t have survived had it not been for two guiding lights: my dream of becoming a writer and my dream of becoming a mother. No matter how bad my last boyfriend had been (and it was always bad), I consoled myself with the reasonable (but untrue) belief that every bad relationship brought me closer to a healthy one.

My thirties were equally tumultuous, though in a different way. It was my last chance — my last decade of “easy” fertility. And I’d hitched my wagon to a younger partner who constantly changed his mind about parenthood — and even about our relationship. I held myself to sky-high expectations, since I was the older partner and felt I needed to model patience and respect for other people’s boundaries. And if you know my story, those expectations did not serve me well.

My forties brought a special child into my life for a year and a half before circumstances took him away from me. And at one point, I found myself diving into a relationship with a man who had two young children and said he was excited to fold me into his family, only to discover the whole relationship had been a ruse.

Eventually, hope starts to wear on you. Eventually, hope starts to feel like a burden. Eventually, hope downright hurts.

Life takes us all down various paths, and at each fork in the road, we all have to make decisions. We each have such different experiences, but that is one we share. When we get to that crossroads, regardless of what happened before or what we hoped might happen, we have to figure out which way to go.

As a woman who has never had the opportunity to realize her dream of motherhood the way she wanted, I’ve found myself at a lot of those crossroads. Should I go it alone? Adopt? Surrogacy? IVF with a donor?

These are incredibly difficult questions to ask as a single woman with a severely restricted income. There are no right answers here — only what works best for us. And, though most people on the outside don’t factor this in: what is accessible to us.

My choice, born from financial limitations and my knowledge of myself, has been to let life play itself out. To not intervene. There’s nothing moral or profound about this decision. It is simply one that feels right to me, and is the only option in my financial circumstances.

For a long, long time, I hoped there was still a chance life would take me down the path I’d longed to travel. Perhaps I would meet someone and still be able to have a baby. Or, at the very least, maybe he or she would have kids already and I’d get to try my hand at step-motherhood. There are so many parents in the world, surely I’d find myself with some semblance of the family I had dreamed of.

But it never happened. I couldn’t be more surprised to have been given such a deep desire for motherhood, and to be so naturally maternal, only to have been born into a life where motherhood was never going to happen. It seems like there was an error code when I was being created. Some kind of glitch in the system, perhaps?

Nevertheless, it is what it is. And when I got to 45 and realized my fertility was likely not in a place where it might be safe to have a baby, I had some serious reality to face.

I didn’t decide to get rid of all the things I’d been saving for my future children because I felt hopeless. Hope honestly had nothing to do with it.

As I said, there’s a point where hope becomes a burden. An absurdity. The idea of using up half the precious space in my garage just to store all these items for children that do not exist and children that I am too old now to birth, myself, felt insane.

It was a choice born from pure practicality. Did I want to keep stepping around this stuff every time I walk into my garage? Do I need to see it day after day, reminding me of a life I wanted but do not have? Do I really need to pack this stuff up and move it with me to the next house I end up in?

Eventually, a new question emerged: How long am I going to carry this stuff around with me and let it take up space in my life?

And suddenly, somewhere on the other side of 45, I realized I was done. I realized my dream of being a young mother of children of my own was long over. And, more importantly, would never happen. I might become a mother someday, but never the way I dreamed it would happen.

I’m a firm believer that we have to face reality. And that was mine. My dream had died somewhere in my early forties. It was over and there was no getting around that.

The idea of holding on to hope felt exhausting. Hope felt like an anchor that had been dropped somewhere in my past. Like it was too heavy to allow me to move forward.

And despite my grief and disappointment, I wanted that: to move forward. I wanted to know what other joys and fulfillment my life might hold. And what specific joys I might be able to access as a woman with no children.

And that’s when I knew it was time to get rid of it. All of it.

Fast-forward to December 2023 when my mother found herself looking at the ornament I’d passed on to her that I had hoped to give to my children someday. Fast-forward to a season that is often all about family and legacy, nostalgia and tradition.

I have spent the past year trying to release myself from all of that. Yes, it is sometimes hard and painful, but ultimately, I feel liberated.

My life is no less challenging than the next person’s, but I have different challenges. Keeping small human beings alive is not one of them.

I’m experimenting with doing what I want. I’ve spent a lot of time solo hiking and solo traveling. Life seems to be choosing an experience of solitude for me, but thankfully, I like being alone and I enjoy my own company.

I am looking to the future with a fresh set of eyes and am excited to see what waits for me.

Yet I still find that the people in my life are uncomfortable with my choices. They believe I have given up hope. I have given up on my dreams. I’m wallowing in self-pity and misery. I’m choosing to actively destroy what I’d spent my whole life waiting for.

I don’t think they will ever understand.

Hope isn’t always helpful. I’m not even sure it’s always healthy.

None of them seem to understand that unwrapping those ornaments that I’d bought for my future children every year had begun to feel horrible. Every Christmas, I was confronted with the ghosts of a family holiday I had never been able to experience, one that, at my age, will never come to pass in the way I had dreamed it.

Why would I want to relive my grief and disappointment over and over again? Why would I want these things in my home, to always remind me of a life that never came to be?

I think it took immense courage for me to face reality and come to the decision to let go of the dream of becoming a mother. I think it was brave to let go of hope and instead, find gratitude in what I have today and what I might create for tomorrow.

Admittedly, I will always grieve this. Not becoming a mother when that was something you deeply wanted is no different a grief than any other death. It is a “forever loss” that will cycle back in waves of sorrow at the most unexpected moments. And I can feel it and move on. This grief is part of who I am, yet it also doesn’t have to define me.

Our culture will never understand this — especially as it pertains to women in my situation. Our grief will always been seen as our failure. Failure to make something happen. Failure to hold on to hope. Failure to not “be positive.”

My choice to give away what I’d saved for my children will, likewise, be seen as a failure. Every instance where I have chosen to move on from hope will, to the outside world, define me as someone who “gave up.”

They don’t understand that I am learning how to love the life I do have. To put more energy into today’s circumstances than yesterday’s dream. To be mindful that hope sometimes has an expiration date.

It’s unlikely that the average person will see my choice to give up hope as an act of hope. But that’s how I see it. And I suspect my tomorrows will be better because of it.

© Y.L. Wolfe 2023

Y.L. Wolfe is a gender-curious, solosexual, perimenopausal, childless crone-in-training, exploring these experiences through writing, photography, and art. You can find more of her work at yaelwolfe.com. If you love her writing, leave her a tip over at Ko-fi.

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