In the introduction to this book I spoke briefly of my own journey in relation to childlessness. Here I will go into more detail with the hope that pieces of my personal path might serve as sign posts or stepping stones for other people along the way. I have learned a great deal from hearing of people's own personal experiences and share mine in that spirit.

I remember when I was young, probably in grade school, thinking I would be married by the time I was 17. I'd be married and have kids, but it wasn't something I had great feelings about; it was just how it was going to be. Coming from a very traditional family, that was what one did. I never enjoyed babysitting particularly. I'm the youngest child of two, and I was never around young children. My mother always said that she never really liked children, but your own are okay. Sometimes she'd say, "Your own are sort of okay."

There wasn't a very positive attitude toward children surrounding me when I was growing up. I didn't spend much time thinking what it was going to be like having children. It never occurred to me very much. It was not part of my imagination or my fantasy life, not when I was young or anywhere along the way.

I got a double message from my mother: Taking care of children is not all that wonderful, but you'd better do it to carry on the family line. I come from a real New England matriarchy. For 35 years she had a big Thanksgiving celebration and her mother had done it before that, and her grandmother had done it on the family farm before that. There was a strong line of New England women with unspoken pressure to carry on the traditions. I never felt any pressure from my father to have children. We never discussed it. He was happy with all the things I did...the Ph.D., the books.

My father's mother died around 1950. She lived with us when I was really little. Shortly before she died, my mother's parents moved into their house two houses up the road. When I was little it was Grandmother English who helped care for me, and when I was older it was Grandpa and Grandma James. My grandfather had retired before I was born. I knew him as an old man who was a cabinetmaker. I could play in his shop, and he'd give me a hammer and nails and some wood. My grandmother grew flower and vegetable gardens, and I got paid to mow their lawn. It was very nice having them there. They would take care of me when my parents wanted to go away. They'd come and stay in our house, or I'd go up and stay in their house. So there was always some larger family around while I was growing up.

I went directly from college into graduate school. All the way through to a Ph.D. in physics. I got my Ph.D. in 1970 when I was 28. Children weren't really a question during that time, except I would go home on vacation and my mother would say, "Well, when are you going to get your Ph.D.?" Because it was a long process. It took four and a half years. And then she would follow that with,"Well, when are you going to find a man?" She didn't ask about children particularly.

The two questions would come out in such a bundle. It was clear to me that what I was doing at the time was working on my Ph.D. That was my main priority. I never really had the usual relationships. For a long time I felt bad about that. Time was going by, and I kept thinking, "Now I am as old as my mother was when she got married. Now I am as old as my mother was when she had my older brother. Now I am as old as my mother was when I was born." Watching all those things going by, sometimes I felt that maybe I was going to miss something. For me the two most difficult aspects of coming to terms with being childless were releasing the desire to experience pregnancy and give birth and dealing with my mother's hopes for grandchildren. I didn't want to feel like I was disappointing my mother.

Regrets also come up with seeing some friends with grown up children and the delightful relationships they have, though there are some difficult ones that I don't envy at all. Another regret is that some of the fun things, like playing in nature, that my mother passed on to me, I may or may not pass on to other people. But actually I'm finding ways of sharing that with people, through my photography and some of the shamanic and ceremonial work in nature that I've been doing. I've been watching the things that used to be regrets turn into opportunities. I have even gotten some of my mother's antiques and and am sharing them with people here in California. That's fun. Pulling out fancy old dishes for a big Christmas dinner, and seeing people really being happy and thanking me for it. I am doing what I learned in a totally unexpected context, in an extended family, rather than in biological family.

After I got my Ph.D., I was in Berkeley at Lawrence Laboratory working on a particle physics experiment. The woman who I was sharing a house with knew about a communal meditation center. Around that time, actually through my work in physics, I was becoming interested in Chinese philosophy and Zen. This was before Fritjof Capra and the Tao of Physics, but I followed that path on my own. I had been reading Alan Watts. The idea of going to a place that did meditation appealed to me. So we went, and I met Gia-fu Feng, a Chinese man who was 23 years older than me. He was sort of an aged Chinese hippie, and there was some attraction between us which I cannot understand and cannot rationalize. I ended up informally married to him. Alan Watts did a Buddhist wedding ceremony after we had been living together for six months.

When we moved to Colorado I was aware of playing out the expected roles. My parents had bought an old house and fixed it up, and in Colorado we bought an old house and fixed it up, and we had many people living there who were sort of like children. It was a combination of a meditation center and communal situation. I think I ran through, in sort of a strange way, all the things that were expected of me. They weren't really what I wanted to do, and by 1974 I was out of that relationship. I was in it for four years. We didn't have children; what we had were two books, the translation of the Tao Te Ching which I illustrated with my photographs, and a sequel to that which was Chuang Tsu. It seemed like a karmic thing. We needed to get together to do those two books. Just as a man and a woman are sometimes drawn together because there are children who want to come through, we were drawn together because there were these books that were ripe to happen. It was right around the time that Nixon went to China. Things Chinese were opening up. Gia-fu was a Confucian Chinese, and I was a somewhat conservative Yankee girl. An east/west bridge was created, not always with a great deal of understanding of it. In that relationship, all the creative energy went to the books.

The actual possibility of having a child never came up, though once in a while I would think that if we had a child it would be half Chinese. I wondered what it would look like. There was never any real desire for either of us to have a child. We didn't talk about it. In providing a home, and taking care of people sometimes I got a lot of projections of negative mother from people that lived there. I had to deal with a lot of that, but I really enjoyed fixing up the house, organizing things and being in the mountains. There were very delightful aspects as well as difficulties.

After that relationship I lived at Esalen for a year. That was a time when I dove off the edge and let fly and was unbalanced for a while. A lot of emotional things were emerging which finally took form a few years later in the work that I did on caesarean birth. It started out as part of my own inner journey, and then around 1977 I realized that I was working on something that could be of benefit to a great many people, and began to have two tracks going, continuing my own journey, and learning how to share it. It resulted in my book Different Doorway and in giving workshops and presentations at psychology conferences and at some of Stan Grof's training groups and workshops, giving the caesarean perspec-tive on the perinatal realm of the consciousness. Recently one of the people who was in his training group came to me. She was a therapist, and was excited because it really created a breakthrough with one of her clients when they realized that it was relevant that her client was a non-labor caesarean born person. Some of the things she had heard me talk about were absolutely right for this person. This person read my book and responded, "Yes, I thought I was a misfit, but this is what was really going on." It gives me great joy when I get feedback like that. At the start of my inner journey I'd felt so crazy . I, too, felt like a misfit, but through exploring that, I came to something that I have given birth to that is nourishing people. It's really a joy.

I've not been in relationships very much, and one of the frameworks which was helpful for me was hearing that a person who is in training in a shamanic apprenticeship is celibate for five years while they are going through the deep inner processes. I wasn't in a shamanic apprenticeship, but clearly there was an inner process going on. So I gave myself permission to have five years of celibacy. It gave me a context from another culture that supported what my intuition told me was right, even though it didn't fit socially. It was a real gift to myself to release judgements like, "There's something wrong with me because I am not in a relationship."

I wouldn't have been able to do what I did if I had had a child or even a husband. Especially the caesarean work required that I be nonfunctional at times, spending a day staring into space, waiting for something to emerge, sometimes feeling very depressed, diving into the darkness and not paying attention to anything external. Obviously I could not have done that if I had small children. I would have been a depressed housewife fighting it off, being neither here or there. I would not have been able to let myself go. I also needed freedom with my photography work, both time to work in the dark room and the freedom to go off and wander in the woods by myself.

I don't think my being childless is a question when people meet me because I have so many other kinds of children and they are so obvious, my books and various projects. I don't feel questioned. I went through a phase, though, of degrading myself with "I just have all these substitutes. It's not the real thing." I think it was more an internal judgement from having grown up in the conventional nuclear family. All the people around were either mothers or fathers or children. My own judgements about not fitting into society "properly" and about childlessness hindered me more than anything external after a certain point. But now I am reasonably in what I am, so it isn't so much a question of what I am not. That's the whole thingeven the word "childless" focuses on what we are not. This is another part of my own healing journey, that shift from what is not to what is.

Another one of my major educational experiences was the two and a half years I spent living with a family. There was a couple who had lived with us in Colorado, and then had gone their own way. I moved in with them in the fall of 1978 and lived there for two and a half years. When I moved in they had one young child, and by the time I moved out they had three. So I was present at two home births, did a lot of childcare, changed a lot of diapers, and learned how to pick up a sleeping child and put it in its bed without waking it up. I had a lot of delightful times. I was the one who taught both of the older girls how navigate the stairs. That was a lot of fun. During that time I really saw myself as one of the aunts of the world. It became clear to me that I enjoyed a certain amount of being with children, but I did not want the day to day contact of having one of my own. It became really clear. Living there satisfied the positive part, but it also clarified the "No."

I think up until the time when I really accessed my own inner child and my birth memory, I really distanced myself from people with children. Since then I have enjoyed being around people with children. At first, being around children activated feelings in me that I was uncomfortable with, and then when I had befriended my inner child it was no longer threatening to be around children. My own birth memory began to surface in 1974, when I was at Esalen. By the time I moved in with the family, I was clearly happy to be around children.

The time of living with the family came to an end because I was feeling drained. I was a built in babysitter, and I needed more freedom, I needed my own space more. As the family got bigger it became "the family" and "me," and the balance was not as good as it had been. It was hard for me to have anyone over for dinner with three little kids running around. I was forty when I moved out. That experience made it clear to me what my limits were in my relationships with children. I got over some of my fears that I didn't know how to handle children. I realized that I actually was good with children. And I also realized that I didn't want to do it full time. There were just too many other things that I wanted to do, that I felt called to do.

I have several other families with whom I am "Aunt Jane." Recently, I spent the night with some friends who have twins that are two and a half, and it was a delight being there. For a long time my brother didn't have any children either. He and his wife were married for ten years and dealing with infertility problems. Then two and a half years ago, they adopted twins. So I'm Aunt Jane there, too.

Last winter when I visited my mother, she asked me, "Do you ever wish you had children?" I said, "No, and I know that hasn't been okay with you." She said actually it is okay, "People are different." Around that time I had more fully accepted childlessness, and it was nice to have that acceptance mirrored to me by my mother. It is interesting to me that the idea for this book hatched only after I really accepted childlessness. Dominie and I were talking about how so many of us, alone and without support, have gone through this tranformation of accepting the childless lifestyle. Not just accepting childlessness with a sense of resignation, but embracing it. And not only embracing childlessness, but actually finding different ways to express the qualities of parenting -supporting and caring and challenging, all the things that parents do.

Accepting and transforming childlessness has been a process. The knowing started as kind of an intellectual acceptance, then it sank down into my heart with emotional acceptance, and finally came down into my belly, and I knew deep in my body that there were going to be no physical children coming through. In a way, the deep knowing is a great relief. There is no longer any guilt, and the creativity, the generative energies, are really fully available to go in other directions and to parent in other ways.

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