Courtney:
I'm a 44 year old photographer. I made my living for the last 10 years taking people to different countries to photograph, acting as tour leader and photography instructor. Currently Sherrill and I are traveling around the world photographing sacred places.

I was married in 1970 at the age of 26, and had very much fallen into the conventional patterns of expecting to have a large family and settle down. I was going to school at the time doing graduate work, and we post-poned having our first child. We thought it was because of the financial pressures of school and feeling that it wasn't the right time to begin. At a deeper level I think we both knew that not only were we not meant to have children, but we weren't meant to stay together. During the last three years we were together we realized at a more conscious level that we weren't going to be having kids. The decision was nothing philosophical, just a feeling that developed gradually. After five years, the marriage dissolved without any children.

At that time I reassessed a lot of things for myself, just what I wanted out of life. I bought a little house outside of Saskatoon, which was my home, and moved out there in a blinding snowstorm. I became sort of a vagabond, spending long hours out with my camera on the prairie. I did ten years on the one book, Prairie Light. My family in a very literal sense through that ten year period was my dog Sasha and my extended family of friends that I became close to through craft fairs. These people were artisans and stained glass makers. I became very close with some of them through the activity of making things and creating things even though we weren't in a common craft. There was a sense of a community of people who were expressing our own spirituality through our art.

We began to spend Christmases together, because we began to feel that each of us were loners who didn't have a very close family to spend time with. Important occasions like one of our birthdays or Christmas would be times when we would get together to do something a little bit special and celebrate in honor of the fact that we chose to include each other as family. Christmas morning and important occasions like that we chose not to have gifts, but to share ourselves, to make each other the gifts of our presence. It became for a number of years a ritual. We were all Librans; we had birthdays within days of each other. So we would have one huge birthday celebration. That was almost as important as Christmas, this one great birthday party.

Quite apart from my experiences with that extended family, which in many ways did satisfy my needs for belonging, I also have identified very strongly my need to be with children. That was another thing I needed to work out, particularly as I began to travel more, take people on tours, teach and do slide shows and seminars. I felt this great affinity for children, particularly for very young ones who had not yet acquired a self-consciousness, who were young enough to experience the world in a carefree joyous way. That was what I was trying to do for myself.

When you are an adult with a camera in your hand you are given a lot of the same freedom one has as a child. You can crawl around in the bushes, and stare at bugs, and put your nose right down to the ground. And that's exactly what happens when there are a couple of kids on the floor. It gives you the liberty to get down there and play. The only other way that I have managed to find that freedom is to be totally into my own "childness" when I am doing my slide show. In a sense I am an entertainer to show the world that they can be children again, and therefore that gives me license as a entertainer to be something other than totally adult, totally responsible, totally intelligent.

With the photography, the travel, slide shows and tours, I have identified one of my roles as helping people to be children, and having that reinforced by students on the trips saying, "You really helped me be a little girl again, or be a little boy again. That is what I love about you." That has also given me the freedom to love myself.

If I say, "You don't mind if I get down on the floor and play with the kids a while," there's a certain hesitation, a certain embarrassment, because when you come into a new family, you think you should be spending time with the parents first because they are the ones who invited you to the home. For instance when I met Sherrill and she took me home to her biological family for the first time, I think I said, "hi, hi, hi" to the adults in the room, which were her brother, sister-in-law, and her mother, and after the five seconds of greeting, I was on the floor with the two kids. That was an immediate warming up. In a nonverbal way, I told Sherrill's family more about me by relating to their children than if I had sat there and explained what I did with my latest book...acted grown-up.

There is a supreme joy that I get out of relating to kids on their level. We become children together. Because I'm on the road a lot, it has become important that I learn to make those connections very quickly. My higher self puts out energy that attracts kids. My real mission is just to show people the joy of living. I'm so delighted with what I am doing, that it can't help but be infectious. Maybe it is by keeping in touch with young children that we can keep our own spontaneity.

As to not having one of my own, there are regrets. There are times when it's a yearning. I see a child and I think "My God!" I've said to Sherrill a half a dozen times in the short time we've known each other, "I think this one we'll just pick up and take home with us." I said it jokingly to a couple in Calgary not too long ago, and the parents got together and did a meditation that night. They came to us the next morning and said, "Yes, you may take our little seven year old girl with you on your trip around the world if this is what you feel you must do." That really put us to the test! It made me think about whether I truly mean these things when I say them. There is something in me that yearns a little. But when you mix that with the realities of the world, it makes far more sense, as a balanced compromise, to pick up the children as I go and make those connections quickly rather that dragging one around the world with me.

Sherrill:
In listening to what Courtney has just said, what comes to me is how much I have not allowed myself to be a child. When I think back on my own childhood, I have very few memories. I don't remember playing and being playful. It's probably one of the reasons we are together. I'm relearning how to be that way. When I look back on how my life has been, I guess my family life has been much the same as Courtney's, in not establishing very close relationships with my parents and siblings. I'm probably closer to them now than I was some years ago. My brother is 44, and my sister is 40. I'm 42. They both have young children. It is the children who are bringing us closer together, helping us understand our whole family network and what it means.

I have had many girlfriends who had a great sense of desperation; they had to have a child. They needed to complete themselves by having a child. I never felt that way. But still, even though I knew intellectually I didn't want to have a child, emotionally I felt guilty about it, thinking maybe there was something missing, or I was avoiding something. Even now when I am around my nieces and nephews, occasionally I feel, "Wouldn't it just be delightful to have one of these little ones around." Yet always what comes out of that is that it feels more like a burden and work than it would be a joy.

Looking back, I realize that I have tended to keep my distance from a family unit. I worked for many years in nursing. I would do a lot of shift work, so I would not be around at the normal times, weekends off, and family dinners and so forth. I think I spent all those years avoiding that whole family constellation. If I hadn't run from this I think I would have integrated more quickly what it is to be part of a family. I am just now starting to feel, through the children, a different level of communication with my family.

I always had a lot of freedom, ie. not having "heavy duty" expectations put on me by my parents. But even when I was a kid, I was not very good at allowing myself to be cared for. I was too busy playing the parent, being the responsible one. My father was ill for many years, my mother took care of him, and I always felt I was taking care of them both. All my work, the various aspects of counseling and psychiatry, involved looking after people. I was always very good at that. Even when I worked in business, it was service oriented, "taking care of the client." That can become a defense. And now I realize through my relationship with Courtney, and with my biological family relationship, I am allowing myself to take those other roles.

What has released me from the guilt about not having children is giving myself permission to be different. I am recognizing through my experiences with friends and family that have children, that as much as I enjoy kids, I don't feel that this is what I want. I'm also starting to feel more a part of a bigger family through them. In recognizing that I do have a greater purpose of some sort, I can fulfill those maternal needs or desires in a larger way. It is sometimes still hard to break those patterns of being the caregiver, instead of allowing myself to receive.

Courtney:
When I travel, meeting new families in each city and establishing a relationship with these kids, I find that labels become important. I've noticed this when I visit families that struggle with what to call me. They don't know if they should call me by my first name, or if they should call me Uncle Courtney, or what. So sometimes we have a little talk about that...just what am I? I like it very much when the decision is made by all involved, that yes, I am Uncle Courtney, because a special significance has been attached to affirming that we have a special relationship. I am not there just as a friend visiting the family. We have a bond, and it is the same kind of bond that one can have with their own biological nephews and nieces, and it feels very good. In one family I am very close to in Vancouver the kids had a discussion with the parents in my absence and I was told about it later. "What are we going to call this guy? He is really neat to play with. He doesn't feel like 'uncle,' that feels kinda phony, and we don't like 'Courtney' because then it sounds like he is your friend, Mom, and we don't want to call him 'Mr. Milne' because it is too formal." So they ended up deciding that it was "Courtney" but it's Courtney, our friend, not Courtney, Mom's friend. They said what he really feels like is not an uncle at all because we want to play with him as another friend, not an adult up there who is "uncle." So I am their older brother.

Sherrill's and my work involves a lot of travel for extended periods of time. There isn't a sense that we can come out into the world and then come home. "Home" redefines itself when you travel for an extended period. Because I don't have a large biological family to return to, I must find my home as I travel. Because I am redefining "home", it is easier to reach out as we travel, because we know that whatever we are going to get in the way of intimacy with people is going to be on the road. No going home to something better. Connections are everywhere and they're what we make of them from day to day. We put the emphasis on making things happen in a way in which we're going to go away feeling good. It's the daily actuality of establishing an emotional bond. We feel, "Wow, these people feel like part of my great big family." Individuals, no matter what race or sex or age they happen to be, may become my family.

I feel, too, that as quickly as I make my family of friends, I must be willing to leave them. Every time I hug someone and say, "You are really special," that doesn't mean I am going to follow up with a postcard or even a Christmas card. It is simply an acknowledgement that they are part of my family, my brotherhood. People come and go into my life and probably will go as easily as they come. But each one is very special for the moments that we share.

To follow this analogy of travel I think there is a lesson to be learned, "Don't take on too much baggage." The relationships we make can simply be in the moment and for the beauty of it. We don't have to put these people in our suitcases and take them with us, because then there is a burden on our shoulders that we have to be responsible, we have to keep in touch with these people. No, people are there as our extended family, just to share the jewels of the moment and be that. Maybe in so doing, we are acting as models for each other to say, "Hey,this is wonderful; we can share these things without this feeling of ongoing commitment," and that may be the reason some of us choose not to have families, because we know our real mission does involve a volatility. It means we have got to fly tomorrow, and we are going to be gone. It is important for us to have the freedom of a child rather than the responsibility of diapers.

Sherrill:
So much of having biological children is involved in having roles, expectations and obligations that we must be a certain way, and we must do things because we are brothers and sisters or whatever. What I would like to experience in being part of this larger family is not avoiding responsibilities and obligations to each other, but making them different, much more freeing. Without demands. They are much more creative, because they allow us "to fly" ourselves, individually and in formation at times. A lot of parents have expectations of how children should be. That's where unhappiness comes in. Expectation doesn't allow personal growth in children or in parents.

At times I think, my God, what are Courtney and I trying to do? How could we imagine we are so profound as to provide something to the world that is of great importance? But I think there will be something that will come out of our work for many people, and for ourselves. The creative part is both in giving to others and also in creating ourselves to be the best possible people that we can be in the way we need to be.

Back to the Table of Contents
Back to the main Childlessness Transformed page