No Children? No Problem.
This wasn’t always my attitude. In 2002, when my husband and I were 25, we were living in the UK. We’d been married for two years and were in the process of moving from a rented one-bedroom flat to a little rented two-bedroom starter home. We both had jobs; Phil working on supporting corporate banking networks and I as a temporary clerical contractor for British Telecom. If God wanted us to have children, we weren’t going to try to prevent it from happening. We were trusting God. We both wanted children, and we trusted they would happen in God’s good time.
Destined for children
When I was a kid, I thought I was destined to be surrounded by children. I started babysitting when I was just seven years old. This was back in the 80’s, it was a different world. When I was 9, I was actually babysitting for a 10-year old a couple doors down. I avidly read The Babysitters’ Club by Ann M. Martin. My sister and I even tried to replicate the club’s business model. I counted once that I think I babysat over 100 different children by the time I was in college.
And, during all those years, I was going to be a teacher when I grew up. I took every opportunity to practice, too. I tutored a little girl with speech therapy needs, I taught Sunday school and helped with Vacation Bible School. I worked as an assistant at a local pre-school. I built my reading library, I created kid’s craft kits, I think I even started practicing writing lesson plans.
And I remember the exact moment when my defined career path came to a crashing dead end. It was Christmas 1994. I had just turned 18. I’d made the Dean’s List at the end of the first semester of my freshman year of college, including Education 101. I was at our church’s Children’s Christmas Eve service watching the kids fidgeting in the front row of pews during the service and straining to hear them recite their words. God put an extremely clear and well-formed thought in my head: “There is no way you can become a teacher. If you do, you will end up in prison because you won’t be able to manage the discipline issues.”
I went back to school for my second semester the next month and changed my major from education to business. Instead of dealing with children’s discipline issues, I was destined to manage unruly adults in the corporate world (I just didn’t know that yet).
Even Phil had started down a path of caring for children during his education, studying child development and health and social care for his BTEC and GNVQ qualifications.
The short road of fertility treatment
Back to the early 2000’s and there were a couple of times when I was late and thought maybe, just maybe – but alas, ultimately negative. At some point, around 2006, we visited the doctor to start the process of looking into our fertility, but by that time, our lives were very busy with work. Starting the “hurry up and wait” process of fertility and hormone testing and treatment wasn’t a priority compared to the exciting and stressful pressures of our work projects.
Perhaps adoption was our path to children?
In 2009, we started the journey of becoming adoptive parents through our local council. We went step by step with our assigned social worker and got to the final interview stage, gung-ho and feeling God was leading us through. I’ll never forget how angry I was when irrational roadblocks came out of nowhere. We were suddenly given two pieces of feedback that pushed our application from active to “deferred.”
First, I was told that because I was technically “morbidly obese” they would not be comfortable placing a child with me since I might die young from a “preventable” condition which would traumatize the adopted child. (I’m still here, age 50. Still fat, but otherwise healthy. A child born in 2009 would be at least 17 by now and would still have both a mother and father.)
Second, we were told that we had not done enough during the application process to prove that we were actively trying to work with children from difficult or deprived backgrounds. (My argument was that we were saving our holiday time so that we could spend it on our own child and their development needs. We’d also asked for suggestions and introductions to relevant programs but our social worker instead urged us to research and find opportunities ourselves; difficult when we were both working full-time.)
Additionally, the social worker supervisor (who had had limited contact with us through the process), felt that we were selfish by requiring the social worker to travel to our home for all of her visits, rather than coming to her office for some of the appointments. Ridiculous, frankly because our social worker never actually suggested that as an option. I assumed she wanted to see our home environment over time.
It was shortly after that final meeting that I realized the reason so many adoptive parent applications are “deferred.” It’s not because the parents decide to pull out or pause the process. It’s because the assessment is too subjective and the potential families simply can’t meet the unwritten criteria. Frankly, we were an affluent, Christian, white couple and were not practicing any of the on-trend, alternative lifestyles in fashion at the time. In short, we perceived that we weren’t the type of parents the department was looking for.
The long road to accepting God’s alternative
We were angry. We were devastated. We grieved. It took me a long time not to be jealous of other people who were able to get pregnant and have beautiful babies. Or worse, to harshly judge the Asian colleague at work who was not only approved as an adoptive parent, but who actually handed projects over to me because he was going on extended parental leave because a child had been placed with he and his wife.
We were 34 by then and continued to leave our hopes and dreams of having children in God’s hands. If we were meant to have children then by some way, he would put them in our path. I prayed that God would grant me, like Abraham and Sarah, a child in our old age.
Fast forward to 2024 and I heard an interesting news report on BBC Radio 4. The NHS had issued a warning that men using sodium valproate, a drug used to control epileptic seizures, should use contraception because of the risk of birth defects. Phil has been on the drug since he was 14. Our primary care physician, who knew about Phil’s medications, never mentioned anything about his medicines being a possible factor when we visited to start the process of looking at our fertility. And we never actively made the connection, either.
We would have loved to have had children but, for whatever reason, God decided that it was not meant to be for us. Occasionally, I still wonder if, in some miraculous way, God has a child in store for us in our old age. But I don’t pray for that anymore.
Instead, I look at my life and recognize that so many wonderful experiences would not have been possible had we had a child. And I thank God for giving us the alternative blessings that we’ve been given.
For starters, I strongly suspect that we would not be “retired” and living with and looking after my father in his elder years; we wouldn’t have had the financial freedom to do so.
I’m not sure if we’d be living in the States at all; it would have depended on the skills and capabilities of our child. If they’d had developmental needs or biological parents with visitation rights, we’d have probably stayed in the UK to receive that support.
We wouldn’t have been able to travel back and forth between the UK and the US throughout our working life; children would have been in school and we would have struggled to afford the multiple visits per year – inevitably one or other of the grandparents would have felt left out.
We wouldn’t have been able to engage in our own hobbies; we’d be focused on our child’s development and their interests and skills.
And God only knows all of the other twists and turns in our life journey that would have been different had we been blessed with a child.
And embracing those alternatives
There are very few children in our extended circle of friends and family. One of Phil’s brothers has a son so we do have a nephew. Unfortunately, he is non-verbal and lives mainly with his mother, so we only have a limited relationship with him when we visit the UK.
Beyond that, we have several god-sons. We pray for them regularly, but they are all adults now and we have not maintained relationships with them over the years. They all live in different states or countries.
I sometimes wonder why God chose for us not to have children. Why we didn’t feel the overwhelming desire to do absolutely anything it would take to get pregnant or to adopt and why we didn’t persevere to do those things. And I assume God’s plan was simply that we wouldn’t be pulled and tested in those things. I sometimes feel a bit guilty when I hear about the harrowing lengths some families have gone through to conceive or adopt a child. Was I lazy, or did I fail to identify and pursue paths God wanted me to take?
God is clear that we are all part of the body of Christ and as part of the body, we don’t all function the same way. (1 Corinthians 12) We don’t all have the same gifts. I’m comforted by that and I trust that God has and will continue to use me as he needs, and ultimately, if we had been meant to have a child, he would have made that path clear for us.
As I think about how we’re now looking after my father, living with him and assisting him as he needs it, I pray and trust that God will provide someone to give Phil and I similar support when and if the time comes that we need it as we age. And when I think about the legacy of Christian leadership and stewardship that I’d have wanted to pass down to our children, I direct my longing for legacy into opportunities that I am given to demonstrate and practice those skills with the people around me. I hope and trust that my legacy will be passed down in its own way. I’m leaving money to charities and institutions that embody the principles I’d like to perpetuate. I’m leaving my words in online articles and writings that may be of help in ways I can’t imagine right now. And we’re focusing our skills on helping those around us who themselves are raising the world’s future generations.
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