June 2026.
Two years later, this piece needs a preface.

I am not among the ranks of those mighty souls who have survived infertility and/or child loss. However, this demographic taught me to face the reality of what is, grieve what is not, and open my whole self to what can be.

No one can teach that lesson like them. To our detriment, we rarely listen.

Pregnancy has not yet proven impossible for me, though at 40, it is no longer the obvious next chapter. For many, it remains the ultimate mark of meaning and providence for a woman. We’re raised to take motherhood for granted. I was told to just wait, keep high standards, and God would bring along the perfect man when I least expected. By the time I was in my late 20’s and still unmarried, I heard lots of “it’s never too late” and “God’s timing is perfect.”

While well-intended, one statement is false, and the other a dangerous oversimplification.

Here’s what I would tell younger Me instead: “If you want a family, actively pursue one. Move to a city with diversity and good jobs. Date around (wisely). Don’t self-isolate and make God do the rest. Get over your fear of heartbreak. Most importantly: if it doesn’t come together, your life still holds the same value, can still be full of purpose and joy.”

It can be brutal work to believe that last part.

The Childless Collective has my regard and respect forever.  Their work has helped me learn that I can swim in the open water of the unknown, the unplanned.
I can laugh at the days to come.

April 2024.
Palmetto trees are everywhere in Charleston. They spread a sunny welcome over the entrance to the Camden Room, the gorgeous event space in the heart of town. I was there for the first conference I’d ever gone to alone, unaffiliated with work or school or ministry. I knew no one there. This was just for me, a luxury but also a painful, therapeutic risk. It was the first in-person summit of The Childless Collective.

I resisted the urge to form expectations. I knew in my marrow I needed to be there, and that feeling has never been wrong.

I passed through the heavy doors into the great room, already full of attendees. I’d never seen a more striking group of people. There were adults of every shape, generation, color, and gender. I felt the glow of their collective presence on my skin.

The whole room had this in common: our answer to the question, “Do you have kids,” was a layered, complex “No.” Many of us had never publicly, much less collectively, declared this. Turns out all of us felt we needed to be there. None of us were wrong.

Two months earlier, an iron gong struck my chest awake at 2am and brought immediate clarity: I needed professional help. There was focused work to be done.

The possibility of a childless future could wait no longer. I was frozen, unable to grow in my personal or professional life until I met this head-on. The desire to heal is beyond the desire to be happy. It is a drive to be whole, to be on healthy terms with reality in whatever form it does (or does not) take.

I Googled the words “childless” and “support.” The Childless Collective was one of the first links. As I scrolled I found honesty, sanity, and even hope. Better still, this hope was that rare kind that doesn’t depend on an outcome. It just is, like sunlight.

When I saw there was a summit in Charleston two months off, I immediately knew I would be there. Thank God I went through with it.

In preparation for the conference I began the book Living the Life Unexpected by the keynote speaker of the summit, the marvelous Jody Day. She’s the founder of Gateway Women, a renowned network of childless women all over the world. The Childless Collective is under that umbrella.

Jody’s intelligence, experience, and humor are as present in her writing as they are in her voice (this Ted Talk of hers, called “The Lost Tribe of Childless Women,” is worthwhile). Her book extended a strong, reliable hand to guide me forward into the work of grief. Disenfranchised grief. Existential dread. I found the courage to examine my fears about childlessness. Week after week I read in the fetal position while deep transformation began.

One thing Jody said at the summit is key: As I age, I’m so grateful to have grief on my side.

Grief… on my side. An ally, an aide. Not just a measure of damage done, or an obstacle to recovery, but the most powerful means we have to heal. As a child I learned to fear grief as an archenemy, an adversary to outrun. It was inextricably linked with despair. To understand grief instead as a thing to embrace, lean into, even rely on? Something to trust? This is revolutionary.

It is deliverance.

All my life I’ve treated grief like vomiting: necessary to rid the body of illness, but best to avoid until all else fails. It must be gotten over with as quickly as possible, as it can cause irreparable damage. Some aspects of grief, especially related to trauma, are a vomit-like purge, an intense expulsion that leaves you an exhausted mess.

I didn’t know it could also be quiet surrender, a willingness to rest. It can be an intimate embrace of the truth, to lean forehead-to-forehead with the facts after railing against or running from them for so long. Before, I only understood grief as that which takes us to the bottom. I didn’t realize it can also be what lifts us again.

This is not to diminish the raw, gaunt journey so many of us have to stumble through. I only mean to share that, by dreading grief in all its forms to the point of avoidance, I have kept myself safe from so much life. It’s liberating to learn that I don’t have to do that anymore.

Grief can come as a transition instead of a destination. It is a powerful current, and that power rightfully frightens us. But that current can move us beyond where we fear to be stranded.

I can’t believe the new life that sprouted when I began to lean – just a little at a time – toward, rather than away from my grief. Tori McClure, a phenomenal human who rowed across the Atlantic alone, said this: “I am, after all, a woman. We don’t slay our dragons; we embrace them.” Her big dragon was Helplessness. Grief has always been one of mine.

I had no idea it could be on my side.

The mausoleum was a small rectangular room with the deceased stacked five high and fifteen down on either side. The interior was the same dusty blue I remembered. The business-like glass entrance was the only light source. I stood wedged in the heavy door like a cat who’d changed her mind halfway. To open the door even an inch created a vacuum that gave me rigor mortis.

Two rickety industrial fans in the back tried their best to cool the August heat but only blew dry dust. Old, overly formal chairs, small tables with stiff doilies, and mounds of faded fake flowers waited to serve the bereaved. Unopened notes were everywhere.

A stale, strangely Baptist cloud of emotional repression smothered me as I scooted in. Had the door not been propped open an inch – I made sure the stopper was secure – I would never have made my way to the back of the room to find her.

I’d only come there twice, but I knew how far down the room to go, which side, and how far up the wall to look. Some things stay with you.

So where was she?

I paced back and forth, looking for the little dinosaur plaque. She wasn’t there. My God, did they move her? My claustrophobia boiled into panic, but just as I turned to go, I realized: I hadn’t been there in over twenty years. When, in fact, was the last time? Was I ten? Or seven? Maybe I had only come once. There’s no denying I’m taller than we were when we were seven. I made one more scan of the wall with my eyes lowered to the bottom two rows.

There she was.

Surely they’d moved her down. I got on my haunches and touched the name, the dinosaur plaque shaped like a longneck. My little friend, my spark-plug-spirited classmate, in here with a bunch of old people. As my focus shifted to her, discomfort evaporated, and a deep shift began.

She wasn’t there.

As a child I felt we’d just left her unable to grow or move or breathe, stuck in an inexorable sleep and sealed up in a box. I still got to play outside and have Christmas and summers and McDonald’s. I got to see Jurassic Park in the theater.

While I believed the innermost part of her was beyond the clouds, where she could ask God in-person about science and dinosaurs and have endless recess, I’d seen her remains powdered and put away. Her little form was just like mine. I remember her hands the most, down to the cuticles. It was impossible to reconcile.

As kids do, I accepted this was the way of things, and buried it deep within myself. Come to find out I’d buried part of myself with her, and that part was unable to grow or move or breathe, stuck in the inexorable sleep of trauma, sealed up in a box. No wonder I’d expected things to be as far down the hall and as high above my head as they were when we were seven.

But they weren’t. I was taller.

An unexpected fellowship with her warmed in me as her absence from that vault became real to my senses. She had moved on from there long ago. So could I.

As I left the mausoleum, it was as if she took my right hand while I hoisted my rescued little-girl-self onto my hip. Together, we walked back into to the living air of summer.

For Elyn Jean Davis 🦕 Resurgam