The Eternal Guest Room

Sometimes it feels like there’s this big club that we’re just not invited to. Even though I know it’s not true, it honestly feels like everyone else has children.

Several months ago I ran into my next-door neighbor only to get a surprise announcement and hear her bemoaning the poor timing of #3. Shortly after that I walked outside to see two yard signs in the diagonal neighbors’ yard: one said “It’s a girl” and the other “It’s a boy.” I met the across-the-street neighbors sometime later and the subject of kids came up. After telling her that we’d been in the process of trying for several years, she of course felt the need to tell me that their son had been conceived in the first month of trying.

It’s like an endless assault.

The neighbors congregate and chat on the sidewalk and I have no reason to join them. I’ve tried in the past but I’m out of place without kids running around. We have nothing in common.

In the past 24 hours I’ve gotten 2 emails from the church list telling me that yet another happy couple has had their wonderful, perfect, healthy baby. I can’t bring myself to go to church; it’s too devastating and isolating. Over the years I’ve felt more and more that the church (in general) is 100% focused on families and the rest of us are left out in the cold.

I’m surrounded by people with kids, people who don’t want kids, and people who plan on having kids someday.

I feel broken in the midst of them.

Not only do I feel shut out of the “moms’ club”, I feel like I’m losing touch with the “girls’ club” as well. It’s this basic, given thing, having children. You decide you want it or you don’t. And either choice is fine.  But I’ve lost the ability to make that decision, and I don’t fit in on either side, and the gap is enormous in my heart.

I feel most alone when I’m in a group. But after removing myself from almost every group situation, I don’t feel any less alone. I don’t know what to do.