MIND MOVES: With so much focus on the trials and tribulations of parenting, it is easy to forget that there are so many couples who would give anything to have their own children.
These are the one in six Irish couples who spend years battling with infertility and with infertility treatment, many of whom at some point learn to live without their own children in their lives.
Couples without children suffer an invisible grief that runs too deep to share with those who may never ever have considered the possibility of childlessness. Infertility spans a range of psychological issues in its relationship to bereavement, loss, mourning, isolation and social exclusion. It is a process with a range of stages: the first the realisation that pregnancy is not the automatic event anticipated with the alarm that realisation brings.
Couples who encounter infertility often endure the classic "any news yet?" euphemisms. Much worse are crass aspersions cast, as if sexuality and fertility are the same. Incredibly some men describe humiliating innuendo of impotence while successful women have been accused of choosing career advancement above motherhood.
A second stage of suffering occurs when friends have children. Think what grief there is for women visiting girlfriends in hospital with their new babies, followed by the unavailability of friends as they get caught up in new, child-centred lives with new friends amongst other mothers? Even when couples retain their friendships, social occasions can be dominated by discussion of children, thereby excluding them from the club of parenthood.
But many couples say that the medical intervention stage is the worst. During this distressing and undignified period, private life, personal relationships and physical body are invaded, followed by the roller coaster of hope and hopes dashed. Artificial constraints on the relationship may turn intimacy into an expensive timed technique within which love can be lost in the quest for conception.
Worse, in times past, medical visits often found women in waiting rooms with pregnant women or mothers with new babies attending their postnatal checkups. But the sadness men and women feel is often for each other. Men are acutely conscious of what motherhood means to a women. Women grieve the deprivation of fatherhood suffered by men. Inevitably one partner feels at fault.
And in the final stage of the infertility journey, as couples recognise that they may never have their own biological children, the issue of adoption may emerge. Too exhausted for yet another long haul emotional process intruding into their married lives, it may become too late to be a parent.
Some couples differ about adoption, which can divide them at an already vulnerable time. Others agree it is not for them. Still others experience joyful adoptive parenting discovering that parenthood is less about biology and more about the reciprocity of love in cherishing and rearing another human life.
But for those who continue to be childless, new courage is required to adapt to life without children: a task rendered difficult because of the plethora of annual societal events around parenthood: most poignant being Mother's Day, Father's Day and Christmas.
Those who are part of large families encounter child centred celebrations: nieces and nephews' birthdays, religious ceremonies, exams, debs, graduations: the litany of events in extended family life plus the erroneous belief that couples without children have endless time to assist family and ageing parents more than their siblings with children.
The childless "only child" may exchange this plethora of events for other losses. It is sad to be the last man or woman in a family line. The extent of this loss will depend on the culture, the nature of the family business or the importance of the family name.
Infertility is a specific couples experience. But for some couples without children motherhood may have been both given and denied: one partner may be tortured by the memory of a past baby "surrendered", or women who survived cancer, whose saved embryos did not survive, or women who suffered stillbirth or miscarriages to the point of being unable to go through that loss one more time. The future too holds practical worries about which partner dies first.
Womanhood is not confined to motherhood, not is manhood defined by begetting. Yet couples without children are often special in the knowledge they hold about how sacred the capacity for life-giving is. Frequently they present a model of marriage, of love and togetherness that is unique because of their shared journey, the persistence of their mutual support and their amazing kindness to others.
Few reading these words will not have, amongst their friends, at least one such couple, who gave from a well of love, denied expression in parenting, support to other people from that source. And many childhoods have been graced by the memory of the fun, generosity and the presence of those couples who had attention to give when nobody else seemed to care.
• Marie Murray is Director of Psychology at St Vincent's Hospital Fairview.
For further information contact www.infertilityireland.ie LoCall 1890 647 444. Box No 131,Togher, Cork.