Stuck In The Middle With You
A Look At What Might Be Keeping You Stuck In Indecision
If you have already thought about this dilemma to death and feel truly stuck, this one’s for you. What I’ve learned over the years is that we’re never really stuck. We always have options… we just may not like them, which is why we feel stuck. In most cases, holding out for a new preferred option to magically appear isn’t a good use of our energy. It’s fighting reality, and as Byron Katie says, “When you argue with reality, you lose, but only 100% of the time.”
Here’s the reality: You have collected as much information as you can and it’s not likely to change. There won’t be a magic thing somebody tells you that all of a sudden makes this a no brainer. If you’re holding out for that, let me be the one to tell you… it’s not coming. There’s a finite amount of things you can know before choosing and just as many more that you simply can’t know until after you do. So at some point, there’s nothing left to do but choose. So why can’t you just choose then?
Master life coach Christine Hassler always asks her clients what benefit they’re getting from holding onto something they want to release. The client always says, “I’m not getting any benefit.” And Christine will say something like, “Oh, of course you are. You wouldn’t be doing it unless it was benefiting you in some way.” Then they realize the “benefit” they might be getting is something like “feeling superior” or “feeling in control”, etc. So what’s the benefit of holding onto being stuck? We clearly want the torment of being stuck to end and to move into decision. So, let’s ask ourselves, “Why am I holding onto being stuck? Is it possible that part of me wants to stay stuck? What’s the benefit to me in remaining stuck?” Here are some possible answers…
Avoiding Grief
Grief was a frequent topic in my conversations with friends who became moms. While they all agreed you really do feel this new love you couldn’t imagine and that they’re happy with their decision, the grief you experience for the loss of your previous life and the version of yourself that you were (especially in the first two years) is very real. I remember one friend saying, “There’s going to be grief either way, it’s just a matter of which grief you want to live with.” Fun.
I realized that I was avoiding choosing because the moment I did, I’d have to start living with the grief of what I didn’t choose. If I decided to move forward with having a baby, I was going to have to let go of my life and identity as I know it right now and certain freedoms I enjoy and value. And if I chose to remain child-free, I was going to have to let go of any dreams or visions I’ve carried with me of motherhood. (The ghost ship that didn’t carry us.) Either way, there is grief, and by not choosing, I was trying to avoid starting the grieving process.
Obviously nobody wants to feel grief. We think we’re avoiding it by avoiding the decision, but instead we’ve just traded the pain of grief with the torment of indecision. If this resonates, it could be time to get resources in place for yourself to begin processing any grief that’s coming up. I’m not an expert on grief but I’ve experienced it, I’ve talked about it in therapy, and I’ve journaled through it. Working with grief tends to lower its intensity and the frequency it pops up. Doing work in this area has been very fruitful for me.
Fear of Regret
There’s a reason I chose the name Mother of a Dilemma. To me, it’s the mother of ALL dilemmas. If you chop off all your hair and hate it, you can grow it back out. If you change your mind after moving, you can always move back. And even if you change your mind after getting married, you can get divorced if you want. Very few choices on this planet are truly permanent. Parenthood is one of them. This dials up the heat and adds a lot of pressure. The stakes feel high like there’s no room for error.
Maybe you’ve doom scrolled through the Regretful Parents subreddit reading the horror stories of people who became parents and wish they hadn’t, or maybe you saw hospice nurses talking on Tik Tok about how the most common regret their patients speak of is not having children. I’ve gone down both rabbit holes and do not recommend either. I thought it would give me clarity, but it didn’t. Instead it intensified my fear and anxiety.
The minute we decide, we’re at risk of making the wrong move, so we keep ourselves safely stuck to avoid making the wrong choice. Well, what if you make the wrong choice? You won’t, because you can’t. There is no right or wrong choice. “But it doesn’t fucking feel that way, Valerie!” Trust me, I know. Both are good options and our job is to choose one and make it great. To lean into all the reasons we chose what we chose and be all in on it… the good, the bad and the ugly… and to not spend our energy looking back.
Life coach Goli Kalkhoran says, “Regret is a choice”. The more that I think about it, I think she’s absolutely right. We do our best to gather all the information we can and then we have to just make a decision. Sometimes down the road with the advantage of hindsight, we might think “Maybe I should have chosen differently.” That’s normal. We are human after all. Our job is to remind ourselves of the well thought out reasons for our choice and then to “have our own back” as Goli says. We made the best decision we could with what we knew at the time. Regret is essentially just a thought and we have the power to choose different thoughts.
People Pleasing / Expectations From Others
Some of us subconsciously know which way we lean, but the pressure from partners, parents, friends and society makes it unclear on the surface to our conscious minds. When our parents become bloodthirsty for grandchildren at some point, the pressure and eagerness to make them happy can muddy our “No”. When our friends, siblings and cousins all start popping out babies, we can start to wonder if we should be doing the same. When our partner is enjoying the child-free life, we may try to push down our “Yes” to not make waves. Or maybe “No” just feels wrong or not allowed after being programmed for decades since birth by society that the right thing to do is to get married and have kids when you grow up. Society also promised us affordable housing and high paying jobs after college and most of us feel short changed on that, so maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about what society thinks. Bitch is cray.
We may keep ourselves stuck to avoid making a decision that somebody else doesn’t like and to avoid their emotional reaction. We don’t want anyone to feel disappointed. We don’t want to rob anyone of a certain experience. And we don’t want to experience how disappointing them will make us feel. It’s amazing that we’d rather contort ourselves into miserable pretzels than just accept and allow others to have their own emotions about something. While it’s always good to be considerate of others, this is still your life. You’re the one who has to live it. They’re allowed to have feelings about it. That’s OK. This topic is really bigger than the scope of this post so we’ll definitely revisit it later.
Each of us comes to this dilemma with such different circumstances, wiring, programming, childhoods, etc. Deciding what’s best for yourself and getting unstuck is a job for your intuition. You know deep down what the answer is. Your inner voice might be getting drowned out by someone or something else right now. Meditation, journaling or therapy may help you bring it to the surface so you can hear it.
When you’re ready, listen to your own voice and make a choice. Have your own back. Remember the reasons for your choice. Embrace the grief. And if you still can’t pull the trigger, then maybe you’re just not ready yet, and you can choose to take more time. But you won’t be stuck. You’ll be choosing to reassess in 6 months, a year, whatever. Choosing to be a “no for now” is a choice too. There are a few exercises you can try as well to really “try on” each choice that we’ll talk about later.
But eventually at some point, if you don’t choose, life is going to choose for you (biologically anyhow). I always pictured myself sitting at this fork in the road being stuck about which path to walk down. Just safely standing there as long as I want until I choose a direction and start walking. Now, it feels more like driving on a highway. The exit for having a biological child is fast approaching, and you have to decide if you’re going to get over to the right lane and take it or keep cruising in the left lane. Once you pass the exit, it’s gone… And in this weird analogy your car is I guess stuck on cruise control, you don’t have brakes, and you can’t take a different exit ahead and loop back around. But you get what I’m saying, right? There is a finite amount of time to avoid the decision if you want to have a say in it.
For some, the idea of life choosing for you may be a relief! Kind of takes you out of the hot seat, doesn’t it? If you lean more in favor of “No” and feel mostly at peace with it, you may feel relieved when the clock runs out so that you no longer feel the pressure to keep contemplating “Yes”. For those that feel more open to “Yes”, you might decide that removing birth control and rolling the dice is a relief. If it happens, cool, and if it doesn’t, all good. Biology will decide for you. To me this is essentially choosing “Yes” because you’re saying you’re on board with that if it happens. But for some, there is a subtle distinction of not trying to make it happen and not seeking out IVF, other interventions or adoption if it doesn’t. Whatever works for you!
There may be dozens of other reasons you could feel stuck on this decision. I’d love to hear which reasons keep you up at night. Or again, maybe you don’t quite feel stuck about this at the moment. Maybe you think you want to become a parent but you’re currently single and you’re dealing with that dilemma. Maybe you’re in your 20’s and you know you have a ton of time so you’re just slowly wrapping your head around it all knowing you can punt this to your 30’s. Maybe you feel mostly sure you don’t want kids, but there’s just a tiny bit of you that’s like “Wait, I’m sure, right?”. There are so many other perspectives here (I see you!) that we’ll get to in time. And if you want to share with me any specific angles of this topic that you’re focused on, I’d be happy to cover them in the future! Just drop me a line.
Valerie