149: Becoming Myself: What I Learned From the Women Who Never Became Mothers

I started this podcast back in 2020, thinking it was about grief. I was focusing on miscarriage. It was called Love and Loss. And then as my own journey evolved, as I had to accept that I was never going to have children, I realized that I had so much more to talk about than just the grief. 

 And as I worked with childless women, I began to see something deeper. Beneath the grief was this equally aching emotion – and a belief:  I am not enough.”  I am not good enough.  I am treated like a second class citizen.  I am less than the mothers.  This is not grief.  

Then I started noticing something else… My friends with kids? They felt it too. My clients in midlife? Same story. Women navigating burnout, divorce, menopause… all wondering, "Is it just me?  Why do I feel like I’m constantly hustling to be perfect, to help others, to please others – I’m always last on the list".

In this episode, you’re going to find out:

• what all this "not enoughness" is really all about
• the catalysts that shine an light on our feelings of less-than
• the deep lessons I learned from being childless (that will crack YOU open too)

I'm also going to share why I'm closing this chapter and give you a sneak peak at the amazing things that are coming next! 

Until June 12th will be your LAST CHANCE to join the Women of Worth program for childless women.  This is not a support group.  It's a guided transformation.  And one that you'll never find anywhere else.  Email me the word PROGRAM at sheri@sherijohnson.ca if you want to apply for one of the last 6 spots.

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Transcript

Welcome to this extra special podcast episode, my very last one, at least on the Awakening Worth podcast. I started this podcast back in 2020, thinking it was about grief.

I was really focusing on miscarriage, helping women who had been through that to get through that so that they could get on with their next pregnancy and feel good about it.

And that was really my story at the time that I started. And it was called Love and Loss. And then as my own journey evolved, as I had to accept that I was never going to have children, I realized that I had so much more to talk about than just the grief.

And the more that I worked with childless women, I began to see something deeper beneath the grief was this equally.

The aching emotion, and maybe more than an emotion but a belief, that I am not enough. I'm not good enough.

I'm treated like a second-class citizen. I'm less than the mothers. And that's not grief. Then I started noticing something else.

And this was really important. My friends who had kids, they felt it too. My clients who were in midlife, same story.

Women navigating burnout, divorce, menopause, all wondering, is it just me? Why do I feel like I'm constantly hustling to be perfect, to help others, to please others?

And I'm always last on the list. Sound familiar? familiar? It was definitely me in my... And in this episode, you're going to find out exactly what all this really is about.

So if you want to find out, stay tuned. Welcome back to the Awakening Worth podcast. Welcome if you are a first-time listener.

And if you're a first-time listener, actually, for anybody, actually, this is the third episode in my final wind-down series.

So if you haven't listened to episodes 147 and 148, go back and listen to those two first because they kind of go in a sequential order.

So I'm back with the third episode in this series. I announced on the first one that I'm going to be winding down the podcast, but I really want you to...

Stick around because I'm going to have some exciting news to share that I haven't announced yet at the end.

And so let's dive in. I'm going to talk about, well, so many things on this episode. So let's just dive in.

Women. Let's talk about us. So we all, most of us, I shouldn't say we all, because there are unicorns out there.

But the majority of us carry a belief that our worth is conditional. And we believe that it comes from external to us.

That, for example, it's being a mother that makes us worthy. Or maybe it's being thin that makes us worthy.

Or maybe it's having a great career that makes. That's important. Or maybe it's, I don't know, being famous that makes you valuable in this world.

Or there's so many things. We put our worth on external things. And we've been conditioned to do this. And we don't even realize it until life throws us into a moment that makes those old stories, those narratives impossible to hold.

And it gets to be too much. And that's when you crack open. That's when women come to me. When they can no longer, they start by saying, I can't live like this anymore.

I can't, I can't be triggered like this. There's got to be another way. So some examples, childlessness, of course.

This is a cat. It really, well, all of the things that I'm going to talk about lead to identity disruption.

So with the childless women, the dream ends. The role that you always thought you would play in society being a mother, the role you were told you should have being a mother, and the one that was supposed to make you worthy is no longer possible.

It's no longer happening. And so you're left wondering, well, who am I now? If I'm not a mother, then what am I?

Who am I? How am I valuable in this world? And that's why a lot of women will carry or hold on to the identity that, well, I wanted to be a mother.

At least I have that. I wanted to be a mother. So that still makes me normal. And that still makes me fit in somehow, hopefully.

And yet it doesn't. They still feel less than. Motherhood actually is another catalyst. Because what happens when you become a mother is that the moment, there's a moment when you realize you've been hustling since your kids were born to be a good mom.

Never feeling like you're really cutting it. This is why you have the super mom, the so-called quote unquote super moms out there.

The ones who are somehow able to bake the cake from scratch and go to all their kids volunteer or all the things that were their parental like volunteers are required.

Make it to all of the soccer games. Do all the things that make them that they perceive make them.

make them that that that A perfect parent, and yet they still go home feeling like they haven't done enough, feeling guilty for working too much, not spending enough time with their kids, or vice versa.

So this comes up again, even if you do have kids. It comes up when we hit menopause. Your body changes, and then suddenly society acts like you're irrelevant, like you're invisible, or maybe dated.

If you're not youthful, you're not valuable, important, you're not needed anymore. And so that makes you less worthy, makes you feel like you're less than.

Then there's other examples, like job loss. We wrap up our identities in our careers. in our jobs, in our businesses.

And so your business goes or you lose your job and suddenly you feel like I poured everything into that and I tried to do everything right, everything perfect.

I tried to please everyone and still it wasn't enough. Divorce is another example. When this starts to come up, you feel like, oh, I'm different now.

I don't fit in. I don't have a partner. Then there's retirement. You get the idea. I could give you so many examples and the commonality between all of these.

They're not just moments. They're really, I see them as transitions. They feel like endings, but really they're doorways, they're openings or opportunities into unraveling.

Everything that society taught you about what you're supposed to do and who you're supposed to be as a woman.

And I think that was one of the most important things that I learned by, by beginning my coaching business, by doing this podcast, by working with childless women.

And let me tell you more about what working with childless women taught me. It started with me sitting with my own pain back in 2017, 2018, wondering if I had anything valuable to offer, if I wasn't going to be a mother.

These were the years when my husband and I were kind of coming to the end. Of our fertility journey, grappling with, okay.

What now? Do we try adoption? Do we try IVF? What do we do? And I was really wondering what kind of impact I was going to make.

Since at 40, I still hadn't found what I felt I was meant to do in my career. And I had always sort of thought, well, okay, I'm going to find that when I become a mother.

So if that wasn't happening, then what? And slowly, what happened in my early 40s, I started asking my heart what I wanted.

And I followed the breadcrumbs. I call them breadcrumbs. It's the guidance, the little hits of intuition that I received.

What felt good? What felt aligned? And I didn't keep asking, well, what's the final result of this? What's the, what's, what's the mission?

You know, what's that purpose? I just lived day by day and did what felt aligned. And I trusted that guidance and I was led.

I was led to the right books, to the childless women who were a few steps ahead of me at the time.

People like Jody Day, like Kate Kaufman, and also to child-free women like Therese Schechter and more recently Ruby Warrington.

And they taught me a whole other aspect of not having kids. And really through all of that, so much emerged for me.

First of all, purpose and meaning. This has really evolved over the last 10 or 12 years, since I'm now 52, since I was about 40.

And it's continuing to evolve as you're going to see. And something else that emerged was me really letting go of an entire identity.

And that happened, that was an evolution also. First, it was letting go of the woman within me that always assumed that she would be a mother.

And then I had to let go of that and it became the woman who wants to be a mother, but not yet.

But trying to the woman who wanted to be a mother, but never got there to now simply a woman, maybe one who doesn't have kids, but there's no longer any kind of charge attached to that.

There's no missing identity. I could just let all of those go and just be who I am. Um, in the present instead of something I always wanted to be something else that emerged for me was, and this was so unexpected.

I really began to awaken to the conditioning that patriarchy and prenatalism had instilled in me. I always thought I was a feminist.

Like I never wanted to admit that I was one because of the negative connotations that came with that. Like the, you know, you must be a man hater if you're a feminist.

So I never really admitted it, but I still always thought that I was one, but it was only through my childless experience that I can't, that I really had to understand how patriarchy and pronatalism were affecting my beliefs, my beliefs about myself, about women, about women, about mothers.

And I really had no idea how indoctrinated I was in the patriarchy and pronatalism. was really living inside of a box that I had no idea.

And once my eyes were open to that, you cannot go back. I could not go back. And that was such a gift.

That was really, oh my gosh. Like this is shaping everything that I do now in my business, in my life, everything.

The last thing that emerged was a reclaiming. A reclaiming of my own self-worth. And don't get me wrong. And don't mistake.

Don't mistake where you are on the self-worth scale. I never thought of myself as someone who had low self-worth.

And when I talk about this, other women will say to me, well, yeah, but you don't have low self-worth.

I had confidence. I do have confidence. Through my, you know, the first 20 years of my, well, I still consider myself as having a successful career.

I have a master's in business. I achieved things. I owned a home. I was a contributing member of society.

All of those things suggest confidence, self-esteem. And yet through my childless experience, I started to realize I felt less than.

I had, go back to the last couple of episodes to find out what the signs are. Of that, that yourself.

Fathom might need a boost in certain areas of your life. Mine did. I constantly felt guilty or undeserving when I put myself first, whenever I took care of myself, when I spent money on myself.

In the last episode, number 148, I outlined the signs that your own self-worth might be suffering. And back in my 40s, I fit the bill for all of those.

People-pleasing, perfectionism, overthinking, over-caring what other people think of me. Those are all signs. And this reclaiming of my own self-worth, it means I don't, I don't, it doesn't mean I never succumb to those things anymore, but oh my gosh, I feel like a different person.

That has been among the most important work, maybe even the most important work. I've done in my entire life.

And that's the most important work I can bring into the world because it changes everything. For me, being a childless woman, it really catalyzed a true unbecoming for me.

A reclaiming of my self-worth. And it's not the kind, you know, there's a lot of people talking about this stuff on Instagram.

This was not the kind that was trendy. It was the kind that guts you. It gutted me. But then it rebuilt me.

And now. And it's the kind that will gut you and rebuild you. And the most rewarding part, I mean, it was absolutely really rewarding to feel so much better in my own body, to feel so much better myself.

But it is equally rewarding to see my listeners, my clients, my audience change just by being here. And my clients, as a result of actually doing the work, they have begun to reclaim their self-worth and also an understanding of how it impacts their entire lives.

That's actually what's even more. The deeper that I went, the more that I realized. I realized. I was I'm,ieden.

beend. beend. Thank So the more I delved into this work, I really realized that the work that I've been doing, it's not just about childlessness.

It's actually about womanhood. And that's what every one of my childless clients has said to me as they finish the woman of worth program.

They all say it to me in different words, of course, each of them, but every single one of them says, I never realized how this really isn't about childlessness.

It's not about grief. It's about my own inner value and self-worth. And I see it now impacting my entire life.

And that is the most rewarding thing for me when I see someone awaken to that. I know that they are now on a trajectory that is going to change their entire lives.

So now I want to talk about why I'm closing this chapter, because if I've had such impact and I'm so rewarded by that, why am I making a big change?

Even though my clients have had such huge transformations and my listeners are always sharing positive feedback about how this podcast has helped them.

This is my last episode, not because the work is done, but because it's expanding. So this is just the end of one chapter, but it's also the opening of another.

This podcast was really so much for the childless women around me, but the deeper message, look at go. And the one that I'm transitioning to now is that it's actually for every woman who has ever felt like she had to do more or be nicer or be more perfect in order to be worthy.

So I'm taking that message into my next project. And this one is going to be way bigger. However, I'm joining forces with my sister, my sister, Jen, Dr.

Jennifer Reimer. She's a PhD. That's the kind of doctor she is. And together, we each have our own strengths.

She's my twin sister, but we have a lot of, and we have a lot in common. Let me tell you, we look a lot alike.

You'll see that when we start posting pictures of the two of us. But we each have our own strengths and we're each bringing our own perspective to this.

She is a mother. I don't have kids. And we're going to be looking. At so many issues, so many, I don't know, societal norms and expectations and judgments and things that we can each look at from a different lens.

So we're creating something new together, something that is going to be bold. It's a place where we're going to talk about some of the things I already mentioned here, perfectionism, people pleasing.

Pronatalism, patriarchy, even capitalism, colonialism, how all of those things have shaped us as women and how we burn it all down and reclaim our own fire, which is really our own worth.

So if you are a midlife woman, a woman in your 40s or 50s. Even 60s. And you're tired of our ageist society.

You're tired of living and working inside of what is still a very masculine-driven world. And if you're tired of Western medicine, pathologizing midlife, pathologizing menopause, even if you're just tired of never having enough time for yourself, or feeling guilty when you do spend time or money or attention on yourself, this next project is for you.

It's going to be a podcast. And it's called the Midlife Rising Podcast. So you, my dear childless or child-free woman, you can be a part of this.

of of this. this. part part this. You of You have You actually never were just a listener here. You were already a part of something bigger, whether you knew it or not, because this podcast really was the beginning of a silent revolution, a sort of revolution.

And that's about to get a lot louder. The legacy of this podcast is not disappearing. We're actually going to even be talking about a lot of the same topics, just from different perspectives, because the conversations still matter.

And the legacy is also that revolution, the beginning of a movement that is now going to expand in a big way.

So. If you want to continue to be a part of that, join our podcast launch list at sherryjohnson.ca slash pod launch.

I'm going to drop that into the show notes, that link. So you can join that launch list for the Midlife Rising podcast and get early access to the episodes, to bonuses, some free trainings.

It's going to be a super exciting launch coming very soon. So join that launch list and just in signing off, I want to acknowledge you as my loyal listeners.

Some of you maybe are new, but I know you'll be back to check out some of the earlier episodes.

So please do that. But I want to acknowledge. Acknowledge you for listening. Maybe you shed some tears. Maybe you nodded along in silence.

Maybe you sent me a message. A lot of you did that. Maybe you shared it with a friend. I'm really, really grateful for that.

But this is really one of the most favorite things that I do. And it's why I can't stop podcasting.

And I wouldn't have done it if I didn't see the downloads happening. I would have quit. So every day I'd log in and see on my platform more downloads and more downloads and more listeners.

So thank you for that. I also want to affirm for you. you. Thank That you're not broken. You never were.

What you are doing by being here is breaking free. Breaking free of the things, the obstacles that are holding you back.

The bars that are really imprisoning you, those bars of patriarchy and pernatalism. Go back to some of the earlier episodes if you want to find out more about that.

And now, if you're ready to come with me, we are burning the rules that we never agreed to and becoming the women we were always meant to be on the Midlife Rising podcast.

So you can still stay in touch with me at Sheri Johnson Coaching. And you can also join that launch list to find out everything that's happening when that's happening.

And that is it. I think that's everything that I wanted to say. It's almost like I don't want to stop.

Like I want to find more to say because I don't really want this to end. And yet, and yet there's so much more coming.

So this is really bittersweet. It's cathartic, a little bit emotional. And I will sign off with that. Bye for now.

I really mean that just for now, because I'm going to see you over on the Midlife Rising.